Bennett Cerf
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Image:BennettCerf1.jpg Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 - August 27, 1971) was a publisher and co-founder of Random House, also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game show What's My Line?.
Biography
Bennett Cerf was born and brought up in New York City, where he attended the same public school as Richard Rodgers and Richard Simon. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1919 and his Litt.B. in 1920 from its School of Journalism. On graduating, he worked briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, and for some time in a Wall Street brokerage, before becoming vice president of the Boni and Liveright publishing house.
In 1925 Cerf and his friend Donald Klopfer bought the rights from Boni and Liveright to the Modern Library and went into business for themselves. They made the series quite successful and in 1927 they started to publish general trade books selected "at random." Thus began their formidable publishing business, Random House. It used as its logo a charming little house drawn by Cerf's friend Rockwell Kent.
Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with writers such as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others among the greatest writers of the day, who supported Random House just as Random House supported them. He published Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Even though he disagreed with her philosophy vehemently, they became lifelong friends.
In 1934, Cerf won a landmark court case against government censorship, and published James Joyce's unabridged Ulysses for the first time in the United States. Critical reviews of the book were pasted into a special copy, which was duly imported and seized by U.S. Customs. Cerf later presented the book to Columbia University.
In the early 1950s, while maintaining a Manhattan residence, Cerf managed to acquire inexpensively an estate at Mount Kisco, New York, which became his country home for the rest of his life. Cerf was married in 1936 to actress Sylvia Sidney, but the couple soon divorced. He was married to former child star Phyllis Fraser, a cousin of Ginger Rogers from September 17, 1940 until his death. They had two sons, Christopher Cerf and Jonathan Cerf.
In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what has since become known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop". This groundbreaking compilation of jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit is the essense of Bennett Cerf and his humor. Breathtakingly hilarious, the urbane and folksy humor within this compilation profoundly impacted American society, and was to change the course of comedy itself.
A rumor exists that in 1960 Cerf bet Dr. Seuss $50 that he could not write an entire book using only fifty words. The result was supposedly Green Eggs and Ham. There is an associated rumor that Cerf never paid Seuss the $50.
Cerf began appearing weekly on What's My Line? in 1951 and continued until the show's CBS network end in 1967. One of that game show's highlights was the running gag of Cerf's crafty repartee with the show's moderator John Charles Daly. Typical of Cerf's humor was his story of an unfortunate cannibal girl who couldn't make it to the show because "her modder ate her." Daly and the audience would groan happily at such word play.
Cerf continued to appear occasionally on the Viacom syndicated version with Arlene Francis until his death.
The cable/satellite network GSN (formerly Game Show Network) airs Cerf's CBS What's My Line? episodes daily in the early morning hours.
Bibliography
- Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles.