<strong>The</strong> Parody’sthe ThingcofounderHenry Beard ’63has made a namefor himselfmaking fun ofjust abouteverything.By Sarah Albee18 <strong>Taft</strong> Bulletin Spring 2008
Sitting in the hushed, clubby restaurant on the 22ndfloor of the Yale Club on a chilly day, Henry Beardscans the menu with a practiced eye. His voice issoft-spoken, his affect self-effacing, his mannerspolite and reserved. With his tweed jacket, glasses and neatlytrimmed gray beard, you might think him a professor, or a psychotherapist,perhaps even a lawyer on a dress-down Friday.In outward appearance, manner and general outlook, inshort, Henry Beard doesn’t appear to be much of a crack-up.But then he’ll utter a low-voiced comment that reduceshis listener to helpless laughter.Beard has authored or co-authored more than 40 humorbooks, many of which have spent weeks on the New YorkAndy Borowitz. Beard admits the screenplays “went nowhere.”“Writing well-respected, if unproduced screenplaysstruck me as an ideal profession,” Beard says. “I made a lot ofmoney. But I just wasn’t comfortable with producers tellingme what to do. You know, ‘It’s great, Henry. Now just changethe mom to a dad, the dog to a dolphin and the love scenes tocar chases.’”Beard admits that going back to regular book-publishingcontracts was an adjustment. “You have a look at your contractand find yourself saying, ‘Hey! <strong>The</strong>re are four zerosmissing here!’”Beard also favors the tougher humor genre. It’s a truthuniversally acknowledged in show business that it’s harder“Follow your dreams…except for the one whereyou show up at work naked.”Times best-seller list. His list of books includes Latin forAll Occasions, <strong>The</strong> Official Politically Correct Dictionary andHandbook, Poetry for Cats, French Cats Don’t Get Fat and dictionarieson fishing, cooking, sailing, skiing and golf.Beard’s specialty is parody. But you get the feeling hecan write something funny about virtually any subject, andin any comic genre, and that the words roll effortlessly offof his pen. His medium is strictly print. He has a knack forincongruities, for generating jokes that are based on a collisionof unlikely contexts. But he shines at wordplay—inhis best-selling book, Murphy’s Laws of Golf, for example,he defines a sand trap as “a deep depression filled with sandfilled with golfers in a deep depression.”Better on paperFor a brief time a number of years ago, Beard did make an attemptat writing screenplays, collaborating with the writer/humoristto make people laugh than to make them cry. And it’s evenharder to make people laugh when there are no visual propsto cue them about what’s funny. Performing comedians havethe benefit of inflection, pauses and timing—and sometimes,shamefully, laugh tracks. <strong>The</strong> written word on the page, onthe other hand, has nothing to support it.But even without the benefit of visual props, Beard’sbooks make you laugh until milk comes out your nose.Part of Beard’s comic genius lies in his ability to take thebanal and introduce the unexpected, to turn clichés on theirheads. “Follow your dreams,” he writes, “except for the onewhere you show up at work naked.” A bumper sticker in hisbook, Latin for All Occasions, reads: SI HUNC TITULUMCURRULEM LEGERE POTES, ET LIBERALITEREDUCATUS ES ET NIMIUM PROPRE ME SEQUERIS,which translates as “If you can read this bumper sticker, youare both very well educated and much too close.” <strong>The</strong> title<strong>The</strong> Fine Print: a partial collection of Beard humor• Bored of the Rings:A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien’sthe Lord of the Rings(with Douglas C. Kenney, 1969)• Sailing (with Roy McKie, 1981)• Gardening(with Roy McKie, 1982)• Dodosaurs: <strong>The</strong> DinosaursThat Didn’t Make It(with Rick Meyerowitz, 1983)• Ship’s Log(with Roy McKie, 1983)• Fishing: An Angler’s Dictionary(with Roy McKie, 1983)• Miss Piggy’s Treasury ofArt Masterpieces from theKermitage Collection (1984)• Cooking: A Cook’s Dictionary(with Roy McKie, 1985)• <strong>The</strong> Pentagon Catalog:Ordinary Products atExtraordinary Prices(with Christopher Cerf, 1986)• Golfing: A Duffer’s Dictionary(with Roy McKie, 1987)• <strong>The</strong> No Sweat Aptitude Test(NSAT) (1988)• A Dictionary of Silly WordsAbout Growing Up: Writtenfor Parents Who NeverUnderstand Anything Anyway(with Roy McKie, 1988)• Skiing: A Skier’s Dictionary(with Roy McKie, 1989)• Latin for All Occasions:Lingua Latina OccasionibusOmnibus (1990)<strong>Taft</strong> Bulletin Spring 2008 19
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