Book Review: Nods and Becks

Title: Nods and Becks

Author: Franklin P. Adams

Date: 1944

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

ISBN: none

Length: 242 pages

Quote: “What worried us the first day of school was how everybody but us in the room appeared to know the words and music of these songs. Was the world, we thought, frightened to dizziness, like that? Was everybody to know more than we? And that, Dr. Freud, is a fear we never have been able to overwhelm.”

Thus Adams accounts for his long career as a news writer and trivia expert, star of a radio quiz show called “Information Please.” 

Although this book contains some fun facts, it’s not as rich a source of trivia as might be hoped. It’s a souvenir collection, containing several tidbits of fact, opinion, and whimsy from F.P.A.’s humor column “The Conning Tower.” ("F.P.A." was his newspaper byline, and when he printed books with his full name on them his readership were motivated to buy them by seeing the initials in parentheses beside the name.) It includes a whimsical (yes, whimsical) obituary for a fellow humorist, reminding readers that Adams’ generation were of necessity more comfortable with the thought of human mortality than ours is.

It’s also a period piece, containing a comic speech called “Women Can’t Play Poker” (specifying “in my club”) that addressed women in an adult audience as “girls,” and dialect jokes that poke fun at dialect jokes by deliberately mixing up the dialects parodied, and sympathetic comments on smoking, and other offenses against modern taste. The position of this web site is that we need to preserve more of the books that contained these things. As Adams says on page 64, “Students and professors of journalism should study the differences between the ethics, or at any rate the common practices, of forty years ago and those of today.”

So here is Adams, growing old gracefully in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. He was loved by many of his contemporaries, and several printings of his book were made. I think it looks best in the format “in compliance with the government’s regulations for conserving paper.”

That format allows him to skip from subject to subject with just a row of asterisks between the pieces, which appear in no order and skip back and forth among twenty-five years of columns, newspaper and magazine “fillers,” speeches, and full-length articles. On pages 14-15 are printed a reminiscence abut “Information Please,” a quatrain about boredom, a sonnet about talkative children, a short rant about clichés, and an aphorism defining an optimist and a pessimist. On pages 52-53 we get a definition of middle age, a couplet about taxes, the beginning of a song parody about a tax on maple syrup, a reflection on interest in one’s work, a gloomy rhyme called “Valentine,” a wisecrack about anti-intellectualism, a search for the origin of the phrase “New Deal,” and a search for the origin of the phrase “Say it ain’t true, Joe.” Pages 190-191 contain reflections on writers’ pay, signs of winter, newspapers that have ceased to exist, a retort to a phrase in one of President Hoover’s speeches, puns on the names of colleges, and thoughts on job hopping. I suspect Adams would have enjoyed compiling Link Logs.

The more you’ve read of other books from this historical era, the more you’ll chortle. Some of Adams’ jokes are just plain funny; some are funny if you catch their references. Like Will Rogers’ comedy, Adams’ may be best shared with a grandparent, but sometimes readers would have to smile if they didn’t recognize a single celebrity name.

Well, I enjoy this book...but I was greatly blessed. Early in life I discovered F.P.A.’s short pieces in older relatives’ old books, and instead of being told, “Ooohhh, don’t read that, it was before your time, here, quick, read something you already know all about,” I could ask, “Who was Secretary Ickes?” and be told all that my relatives remembered, and share the joke with them. So I was able to laugh at lots of things that were, technically, before my time, from “Pogo” back through F.P.A. and several of the friends and colleagues mentioned in this book. This blessing expanded: I learned to look things up, and became able to laugh at Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.

If you, too, appreciate a lighthearted look at the news items of a bygone time, you’ll enjoy Nods and Becks. It’s clean, subtle, generally polite humor. Adams didn’t preach to his contemporaries, “You don’t need outdated stereotypes of other demographic groups to make a story funny,” and he probably couldn’t even have imagined the need to preach to today’s so-called comedians, “You don’t need vulgar words and gross-out content to make a story funny.” When you have real comedic talent (like Dave Barry, or like either Scott or Douglas Adams) you can just be funny without those things.

F.P.A. is probably best remembered for a rather glib reworking of a traditional rhyme, “‘Tobacco is a filthy weed.’ (I like it.) ‘It satisfies no natural need.’ (I like it.)...”, which is not reprinted in Nods and Becks. Perhaps he and his editor thought he deserved to be remembered by a comment on Socialist Realism:

“Let us then be down-and-outers,

Knowing we can’t fight our fate;

All defeatists and misdoubters,

Learn to belabor and to hate.”

Or perhaps by the things he learned by writing for newspapers: “That many newspaper men ought not to be in the business...That the best and the best-paid reporters don’t get paid half of what I think they deserve...That anthracite is a noun, and only a noun.”

Although this review will appear online in the morning, I am writing it late in the evening, and while that little black-and-white movie of How a Young Reporter (as Might Be Played by Charlie Chaplin) Learned That Anthracite Is Only Ever a Noun is playing in my mind, I think I’ll turn in. Comedy is a delightful way to relax before bed.

Nods and Becks was popular in its day and has not reached collectors' prices as outrageous as might have been expected; lots of copies are still floating around. Send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment, to order this book as part of a package to which you can add three more books of similar size, including some by living authors whom we can encourage by sending percentages of the payment.