Humouring "The Greats" (Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody - Will Cuppy)

Member Name: Going To California

Product:	Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody - Will Cuppy
Date:	23/01/01 (69 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The historical accuracy is 100% correct. Humour. Re-readability. The drawings by Will Steig are also funny

Disadvantages: Cuppy died long-before he ever finished the book, ad so we may have been deprived of much much more.

Historians are, stereotypically at least, no-nonsense sorts who enjoy their profession with little extravagance and humour, but with plenty of seriousness. It is an image we have all been raised on; the ancient school master dusting his biographies of the Imperial Roman forefathers over an open fire-side at Oxford's premier college. Thankfully, for the sake of enthusiasts as well as for the idea of history itself, stereotypes are broken.

Will Cuppy's brilliant historical and satirical collection of short biographies, "The Decline And Fall Of Practically Everybody", is a welcome breath of fresh air to the usual library of historical reference works, managing to combine both historical-accuracy with intelligent satirical humour. In his book, Cuppy exposes the human-elements of some of history's most high profile (and some lower-profile) luminaries.

Cuppy's humour is mostly intelligent and subtle, there are few jokes that jump-out of the book as one might find in common humour books. His history is deadly accurate, coming from a huge bibliography of works read by Cuppy in the preparation for this collection. His humour is rewarding if you spot it, and even more rewarding when you shouldn't really pay much notice. I would find it impossible to write an extensive and illuminative opinion without leaving at least some quotes from the book, so here are a few of the histo-comical highlights from his work:

SOME FAVOURITES:

On Henry VIII: "He has been much criticized for beheading two of his wives. (He beheaded only two out of six, or thirty-three and a third percent. That's not a bad average, considering)."

On The Emperor Nero: "...he cut his throat on June 9, AD68, the anniversary of his first wife's murder. Well, none of us are perfect".

On Grand Duke Peter: "Peter was not techincally an idiot, but he had a touch of it"

On Ancient Egypt
: "They believed that the sun went sailing around the Egypt all day on a boat, and that a pig ate the moon every two weeks. (This was called the wisdom of the Ancients".

On Alexander The Great: "He is known as Alexander The Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time". "In no time at all Alexander had killed Medes, Persians, Pisidians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, and miscellaneous Mesopotamians...Galatians...a few Armenians...Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, and some rare Uxians. ("He boldly proclaimed the brotherhood of man" F.A.Wright)".

I will stop myself from listing any more examples of Cuppy's distinctive humour because those readers who do not know their history may find these "jokes" not very funny at all, and so may be tempted to turn off. For me, Alexander The Great is the best of Cuppy's short biographies because of how he presents the stupid opinion of another historian F.A.Wright (an example of which is above). This is just one example of Cuppy's deadly satirical skills combined with his historical knowledge to best effect.

Although published in 1949, Cuppy's "The Decline And Fall of Practically Everybody" remains a popular book. It spent several weeks at Number 1 in America when it was released, just after Cuppy's death. I wish he had included some others like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Napoleon Bonaparte...but his time on this earth did not permit such additions.

The greatest strength of Cuppy's book is how it picks away at history's legends and exposes them as the human ancestors of ours that they really are; "foolish, fallible". By the end of the book you realise that these great figures of history may be revered in the history books, but beneath the venir of the biographers quill they are just people, all as stupid as ourselves.

I cannot recommend
this book enough, both for the historical enthusiast and for the general reader. It is available on www.amazon.co.uk for about £11.99 and, although more expensive, is a much finer combination of history and comedy than is the more well-known "1066 And All That" by Yeatman. Cuppy is one of the most under-rated humourist/writers of the last generation, and "The Decline And Fall Of Practically Everybody" is his finest moment.

THOSE HISTORICAL FIGURES IN THE BOOK: Cheops, Hatshepsut, Pericles, Alexander The Great, Hannibal, Cleopatra, Nero, Attila The Hun, Charlemagne, Lady Godiva, Lucrezia Borgia, Philip The Sap, Louis XIV, Madame Du Barry, Peter The Great, Catherine The Great, Frederick The Great, William The Conqueror, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, George III, Leif The Lucky, Christopher Colombus, Montezuma, Miles Stanish, Captain John Smith, and countless references to others.

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