Rethurberations

LANTERNS AND LANCES (215 pp.)--James Thurber--Harper ($3.95).

TONGUE TWISTER: We supply wristwatches for witchwatchers watching witches Washington wishes watched.

RIDDLE : What English word contains all five vowels in order? The answer is probably facetious.

PUN : More fun than a barrel of money.

PALINDROMES: A man, a plan, a canal, Panama; Piel's lager on red rum did murder no regal sleep.

At 66, James Thurber has become (he should excuse the expression) a senior humorist, but in this lively collection of recent rethurberations in The New Yorker and other magazines, he shows no evidence of age--except perhaps an amiable trace of second adolescence. He wages the war between the sexes as briskly as ever ("Woman's place is in the wrong"), heartily belabors "the child-overwhelmed culture," trenchantly elucidates the principle of "negative cheerfulness" ("One statistician not long ago tried to cheer us all with his estimate that only 18 million people, not 50 million, would be killed here in a nuclear war"). He bristles with useless information ("Curmudgeon seems to derive from the French coeur me-chant") and daffy definitions. At one point he supplies a graceful homemade nursery rhyme:

Half a mile from Haverstraw there lived a halfwit fellow, Half his house was brick and red, and half was wood and yellow; Half the town knew half his name but only half could spell it. If you will sit for half an hour, I've half a mind to tell it.

Like most of The New Yorker's laughing boys, Thurber can be insufferably chatty ("This may not give you the creeps but it gives me the creeps"), and he suffers from the peculiar delusion that anything written about a cocktail party is bound to be funny. He also lapses frequently into college humor (speaking of nervous ailments: "Have you heard of the roofer who got shingles from Sears, Roebuck?"), and sesquipedalian prose ("Amidst verbal wonders and linguistic portents the stultification of English was caused by the decapitation of words as well as by unwonted lengthening"). But at his best he is a very funny man. Readers will be well advised to hold their sides and beware of that first fine careless rupture.

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