Wit at the Round Table: Was It, Er, Um, Square?

Seventy-five years ago this month -- no one knows the precise date -- the feast of wit known as the Algonquin Round Table got under way.

Time has only heightened its allure. Throughout June, the Algonquin Hotel has been celebrating the patrons whose lunchtime gatherings made the hotel a byword for wit and sophistication. It has even renamed one of its rooms the Round Table Suite and filled it with Round Table memorabilia. "Mrs. Parker," a film about Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, set in the Round Table milieu, will reach movie screens in the fall. And in late August, Parker will be canonized with a spiffy Modern Library edition of her poems and stories.

For three-quarters of a century, legends of the fabulous lunchtime conversation spun by the likes of Benchley, Parker, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly and Heywood Broun have fizzed like tiny Champagne bubbles, intoxicating the public mind. The talk, as one of Alexander Woollcott's biographers put it, was "brisk and airy and sprinkled with bons mots."

There's just one problem. The historical record, and the less than enthralled commentary of many Round Table contemporaries, suggests a scandalous thought: The Round Table really wasn't all that funny.

The members were. No one would argue that Parker's stories, Benchley's sketches and movie shorts, Kaufman and Connelly's plays and movie scripts were not grade-A American humor. But the Round Table itself was a different matter.

"I spent a good deal of time researching this, and my sense is that it wasn't funny at all," said James R. Gaines, the managing editor of Time magazine and the author of "Wit's End," a history of the Round Table. "It was very competitive, which made it sort of unfunny. I certainly would not have wanted to have lunch with them."

Even in the group's heyday, the 1920's, critics complained that the Round Tablers showed a flair for self-promotion, back scratching and log rolling that dwarfed the combined literary talent of the group. The hilarity seemed a little forced, the jokes more than a bit calculated.

One occasional visitor to the Round Table said that it took him five lunches to steer the conversation to primitive man, thereby allowing him to launch a "smartie." Alas, it has not survived.

Alan Rudolph, the director and screenwriter of "Mrs. Parker" and a fan of the group, does concede that some members used cheat sheets for their one-liners, and that Broun would bring his son to feed him straight lines.

How funny was it? There's room for serious doubt. After all, this was the group that originally called itself the Luigi Board, after their waiter, and whose evening poker club was called the Young Men's Upper West Side Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club.

In a sprightly moment, someone asked Franklin P. Adams to use "meretricious" in a sentence. Adams, whose popular newspaper column "The Conning Tower" puffed the Round Table incessantly, was quick to reply, but "Meretricious and a Happy New Year" is not exactly Oscar Wilde caliber.

H. L. Mencken, who often stayed at the Algonquin, called the group "literati of the third, fourth and fifth rate." He loathed them.

"He thought that they were silly and not true wits and more interested in publicity than in serious artistic accomplishment," said Jonathan Yardley, the editor of Mencken's "My Life as Author and Editor." "And he was right."

Mencken's judgment seems mild compared to George S. Kaufman's dismissal of the group, and he was a member. He called them "a motley and nondescript bunch of people who wanted to eat lunch, and that's about all."

Edmund Wilson also found Benchley, Parker and company less than scintillating. Unfortunately for them he recorded some choice specimens of Round Table humor, which, he noted sourly, seemed devoted to awful near-puns. Connelly's play "Honduras" was panned as "the big Hondurance contest." Parker delighted the group by bending the name Hiawatha into "Hiawatha nice girl until I met you." Let's Look at the Record

Wilson, of course, disapproved of the group. But even admirers provide pretty damning evidence. "The Algonquin Wits," a kind of Round Table joke book published in 1968, makes very depressing reading. It's unlikely that anyone who labors through its 176 pages will run the risk of actually laughing out loud.

A cold examination of the record shows that the famous Round Table gems tend to fall into two categories: written rather than spoken lines, and quips whose provenance seems shaky at best.

It has never been clear whether Benchley or Woollcott, if anyone, said, "I've got to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." According to legend, Claire Booth Luce said to Parker, as the two prepared to enter a door, "age before beauty." As she swept by, Parker was supposed to have replied, "Pearls before swine."

Luce denied that the encounter ever took place, and John Keats, a Parker biographer, agreed that the zinger, like other trademark Round Table jokes, probably originated well outside the confines of the Algonquin Hotel and became attached to a member of the group because it seemed like the sort of thing that a Round Tabler might say.

There was one subject, however, that did inspire something like real humor, with malice aforethought, among the members of the circle, and that was the Round Table itself.

"I interviewed Marc Connelly, and he got off a couple of good lines," said Mr. Gaines. "I asked if he remembered when the Round Table finally ended, and he said it would be like remembering falling asleep."