James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
What you don’t realize can hurt you.
Humor and Moral Equivocality.
Burton Weltman
The Story: A schlemiel, a schlimazel and a hero for his times.
The hero of this story is ridiculously pathetic. A complete schlemiel and also a complete schlimazel. A schlemiel has been defined as a guy who invariably spills the soup. A schlimazel is the guy on whom the soup is invariably spilled. The hero of this story is both a schlemiel and a schlimazel and more. He invariably spills the soup and spills it on himself, but he also spills it on others around him. That makes him a danger not merely to himself but to others as well.
That doesn’t bother our hero. He doesn’t care about what he is doing to others, only about himself. Chronically feeling sorry for himself, he feels put upon by everyone and everything around him. And he is. But it is his own doing. Because he is foolish, clumsy, inattentive, and incompetent at almost everything he does. And he is not merely inept, he is almost fatally inept and fatally irresponsible.
In this story, for example, the hero does a lot of driving around in his car. And does it badly. He is a terrible and reckless driver. The story opens with him speeding dangerously too fast down a highway and not paying attention to how fast he is going. Then, despite having a green light, he idles his car at a standstill while daydreaming in the middle of traffic. Then he drives the wrong way against oncoming traffic up a ramp into a parking garage. All the while, he is thinking only about himself and not about what he is doing or what the consequences of his careless driving might be to others.
His attention is focused, instead, on his daydreams. Beset by feelings of inadequacy and oppression, the man seeks to escape his miserable reality through daydreaming about a heroic alternative life. And so, the man goes about in a daze of daydreaming which, perforce, distracts him from what he is doing. Being distracted in this way, of course, exacerbates his ineptitude which, not surprisingly, provokes criticism from those around him. He is henpecked by his wife, harassed by his colleagues, berated by a policeman, belittled by a garage attendant, and mocked by a woman in the street. Needless to say, being criticized in this way increases his feelings of inadequacy and oppression which, in consequence, provokes more daydreaming. And so on…
The man lives in a vicious cycle of misfeasance, miscommunication and misery that he tries to escape through day dreaming, which just restarts the cycle. But the problem with our hero is not merely that he daydreams when he should be paying attention to what he is doing, it is also that the content of the daydreams and their potential consequences are highly problematical. His daydreams are not ordinary wish-fulfilment fantasies. This man is dreaming his life away with death-wish fantasies, all the while driving around recklessly.
In his first daydream, he imagines that he is risking almost certain death by taking off in a hydroplane in the midst of a catastrophic storm, meanwhile he is actually driving dangerously too fast. Then he dreams that he is on trial for his life as an assassin on a capital murder charge. Then that he is a bomber pilot on a suicide mission. And, finally, that he is a prisoner facing a firing squad, on which ominous note the story ends.
In sum, what we have here is the story of a man who is feeling oppressed and depressed, dreaming about ways of killing himself, and behaving dangerously in life-threatening ways. All in all, this seems like the plot of a pretty grim story. Could be, maybe should be, but isn’t.
This is a basic plot summary of James Thurber’s short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (hereafter Mitty). First published in 1939, it is one of the most celebrated comic stories in the literature and the most anthologized short story ever. As told by Thurber, it is a roller coaster of wry humor. A real joy to read. But how can this be? How can such a grim plot be so funny? What is the secret of this story?
The Secret to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
This essay is about the underside of the humor of James Thurber and particularly Mitty. Thurber was one of the most heralded comic writers of the mid-twentieth century, and his short stories and cartoons are still highly regarded and widely read today.
This focus of this essay is on what I think are the underlying meanings and messages of Mitty, and the ways and means that Thurber turns what seemingly should be a grim melodrama into a comic masterpiece. And the reasons he does this. Mitty is masterfully crafted. It is only some six pages long, a paragon of concision. More laughs per paragraph than most stories have in a page. Analyses of the story, including this one, are invariably much longer. As in a work of poetry, there is much to think and say about almost everything in the story.
Including the message of the story. It is a commonplace that stories have messages. Whether they are explicit or implicit, and whether or not readers consciously recognize them, stories exude messages. In the case of Mitty, what I see as the messages of the story do not seem to be generally recognized by readers. Mitty is superficially very humorous and most readers seem never to get past its surface humor to what I think are its unhumorous underpinnings.
In the mainstream view, Walter Mitty, the hero of the story, is a man “who escapes into fantasy because he is befuddled and beset by a world he neither created nor understands.”[1] In this sympathetic and generally empathetic view, the thoughts and actions of Mitty are seen as harmless and cute. The story is a whimsical tale of heroic escapism, with Mitty as an existential hero who refuses to conform, at least imaginatively, to dull existence in a bourgeois society. And, in this view, readers are supposed to identify with Mitty and root for him as the hero of his obsessive daydreaming.
Mitty is recognized in this view as a flawed hero, but a hero nonetheless. In justifying Mitty’s daydreaming, commentators point to the oppressiveness of his social situation. He is a loser in a competitive society, and he is repeatedly made painfully aware of it. Some psychologically oriented commentators point to the precariousness of Mitty’s psyche and claim that he has developed a schizoid personality. Mitty is, they say, a man so wrapped up in daydreams that he has become dissociated from real life tasks and real life relationships [2] “Maladaptive daydreaming” one commentator calls it,[3] Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder another claims.[4] In any case, whatever the social and psychological origins of his daydreaming, commentators almost invariably empathize with Mitty and admire his daydreaming as a means of escape from a stifling existence.
Escape can be a good thing when you are trapped, but many Mitty admirers go further than this and claim that “Mitty is up to something more than mere escapism.” According to them, Mitty is a creative artist who is imagining new and better worlds. “His daydreams are miniature works of art,” they contend, and “miniature masterpieces of the mind.” Mitty, these commentators insist, is “a creative genius.” And as an imaginative artist, Mitty represents what they see as Thurber’s main message in the story: “that imagination can be the highest form of grace” and that it is what gives meaning to life.[5] In sum, Mitty may be a schlemiel, a shemozzle and a schizoid but, they conclude, he is living a better life in his fantasies than most people are living in reality.
I don’t agree. I think this lighthearted interpretation of Mitty is a too shallow reading of the story and a misreading of the underlying messages that it conveys, even to unsuspecting readers, maybe especially to unsuspecting readers. Mitty is, I think, a dark tale at which we readers laugh at our moral peril, even though we cannot help laughing because the story is so funny.
Beneath the surface humor of Mitty, I think that the story has an amoral, antisocial, unfunny underpinning, and it is not something you would think people would or should laugh at. Once you get past the ironic bon homie of the narrator and the inimitable wit of Thurber, and you examine the thoughts and actions of Mitty, I think you find an irresponsible, antisocial egotist who is neither harmless nor cute, and for whom we should not root.
And this immoral, or at best amoral, underpinning has, I think, an effect on readers, whether or not they recognize it. Even as we are laughing at the story, I think we are left with a sour and somewhat cynical feeling about the world and about ourselves. Covering Mitty’s malfeasance with good humor has the effect of desensitizing us to Mitty’s bad behavior, and encourages in us a callousness about what he and his behavior portend. We are morally compromised in rooting for Mitty and, moreover, I think that is what Thurber intended. I think that Thurber was playing with his readers in Mitty, playing us for fools and making us complicit with his own misanthropy.
A Misanthrope in Genial Clothing.
James Thurber was not a nice man and he knew it. He was widely regarded as a mean and misogynistic misanthrope. Even by his friends. A self-described curmudgeon, he justified his uncivil demeanor and rude behavior with the excuse that comic writers are chronically insecure and constantly under extreme pressure to be funny. The moral, in his view, was that if you want humorous stories, you have to put up with obnoxious writers. [6]
Thurber’s sour attitude reflected his dour life. Thurber had a difficult childhood followed by a difficult adulthood. He lost an eye when he was seven and gradually went blind in the other eye as an adult. He had a dominating mother and an unhappy marriage. He was a drinker and a notoriously mean drunk. He was regularly taken to task and made fun of by family, friends and foes because he was hapless at almost everything, except writing and drawing. So, he spent his life writing and drawing, and taking out his frustrations and bitterness in print. [7]
In what seems like reality anticipating a Thurber story, Thurber was denied graduation from Ohio State University despite completing all of the academic requirements because as a half-blind person he could not take ROTC and as a male student he could not graduate without having taken ROTC. This sort of outrage was typical of his life and contributed to his moroseness and misanthropy. Filled with rage against the universe, Thurber translated his anger into cynicism, his cynicism into sarcasm, and his sarcasm into satirical humor.[8]
The conventional view of Thurber is to portray him as a genial satirist who conquered his own ill humor with good-humored stories. Dealing with the funny side of everyday life, Thurber’s characters are bumblers who are incapable of dealing with the ordinary problems of the world. They “look like they are survivors” who are barely getting by “in a world they can’t comprehend.”[9] In fact, I think they look a lot like Thurber but without the anger.
Thurber’s work is not without controversy. Critics complain that Thurber’s stories and cartoons are misogynistic, and that they invariably portray women as bullies and men as milquetoasts. Thurber’s supporters counterclaim that you have to approach his work with a sense of humor that his critics apparently lack. His supporters acknowledge that in real life Thurber did generally hate women and felt that modern women emasculated men, but these supporters insist that Thurber’s work did not reflect these prejudices.
To the contrary, his apologists claim, Thurber “undermines sexism through comic irony.” Thurber successfully sublimated his anger into humor and dissipated it thereby. He turned his unhappy private life into happy public comedy. While admitting that Thurber was a sexist and a misanthrope, they claim that his work is neither sexist nor misanthropic.[10]
I don’t agree. In the persons of Mitty’s nagging wife, the rude woman in the street, and other minor female characters in the story, misogyny and misanthropy pervade Mitty, as they do in many of Thurber’s other works, albeit in clever comic disguise. That Thurber was cleverly able to cover his rage with comic converse does not diminish the anger and scorn that underlay the humor. And it is anger and scorn that are directed not only at his stories’ characters but at us readers as well.
Comedy isn’t always fun even if it’s funny.
A professor is pontificating in front of a classroom of thirty bored students. Striding back and forth as he speaks, the professor is puffing a pipe (this is before there were “No Smoking” rules), with one hand on the bowl of the pipe and his other hand in the side pocket of his sport jacket (this is when there was still an informal dress code for professors) in which he had stored a book of matches. In the midst of the professor’s peroration, a student in the front row of the class (this is when students still sat in rows) spots some smoke emanating from the professor’s pocket.
Oblivious to the commotion that is building in the classroom as more and more students become aware of the conflagration that is building inside his jacket pocket, the professor plods on with his lecture. Until, suddenly, he cries out, strips off the jacket, throws it to the floor, and stomps on it until the fire is out. Then he calmly hangs the jacket on the back of a chair, gives an embarrassed half-smile to the students, almost all of whom were laughing uproariously, and plods on with the lecture.
This scene is a prime example of humor. Like much humor, it is based on the discomfiture of others whom we think deserve it. In this case, it is the pompous professor who is made to look foolish. It is a scene which I personally witnessed and in which I participated as one of the laughing students, thankful for a break in the tedium of the class. It was also before I became a professor myself and could empathize with the pathetic professor.
Comedy can be cruel. It often is. Thurber’s comedy in particular. In much of Thurber’s comedy, someone is paying the price in discomfiture for the laughter that readers enjoy. The key questions are at whose expense is the laughter and to what effect is the humor.
Every story starts with a status quo situation that is disrupted by a problem. The story then tells how people deal with the problem. Depending on the type of story, be it, for example, melodrama, tragedy or comedy, the problem and its solutions will take on different forms.
Melodrama generally takes the form of Good versus Evil and Good Guys versus Bad Guys. In melodrama, the problem is generally created by the bad actions of bad people, and the solution is to defeat and/or eliminate the bad people.[11]
Tragedy can be described as too much of a good thing leading to a bad result. In tragedy, a character generally pursues a too narrow end too far until it all falls down. The character’s “tragic flaw” is hubris and/or a lack of perspective, failing to see things in a broader context.[12]
Comedy can be described as a story of wisdom versus folly and wise people versus fools.[13] In comedy, the problem is created by someone acting from stupidity or ignorance, or what has been called “the intervention of fools.”[14] The solution is generally some sort of educational process in which the wise teach and/or gain control of the fools. Comedy usually promotes a hierarchical view of the world in which the fools need to be wised-up by the wise people.
In understanding a comedy, it is important to identify who are the wise and who are the fools. Authors have many different options as to whom they will elevate as the wise and whom they denigrate as the fools. And it may sometimes be difficult for us readers to see who is what, and sometimes to the joke is on us. Depending on the nature of the story, wisdom could come, for example, from wise characters in the story who wise-up fools in the story, or from a wise narrator of the story who shows us readers the foolishness of characters in the story, or from a wise narrator who shows us readers our own foolishness.
In turn, the fools could be characters in the story who are wised-up or at least shown-up by other characters who are wise, or the fools could be characters in the story who are shown-up by a wise narrator, or the narrator could be a fool (a so-called unreliable narrator) who is shown-up by events in the story that we readers can see but that the narrator doesn’t comprehend, or the fools could be we readers even if we don’t know it.
In some cases, the wise person could be the invisible author who makes fools of everyone connected to the story, including the characters in the story, the narrator of the story, and us readers of the story. I think that Mitty is this last kind of story, as are many of Thurber’s other stories.
In Mitty, there are layers of foolishness. There is the foolishness of Mitty that is ironically described by the narrator, who is wise to Mitty’s idiocy and makes us readers aware of it. But there is also, I believe, the foolishness of the narrator who seems to think that Mitty’s reckless actions and death-wish fantasies are harmless and cute. But reckless driving and suicidal thinking are not harmless or cute, and the narrator is a fool to seemingly think so.
Finally, there is our foolishness as readers to the extent that we go along with the narrator’s misguided affection and support for the irresponsible and egotistical Mitty, and accept the narrator’s light-hearted description of Mitty’s dangerous thoughts and actions. We are fools if we have eyes to see it, but we are caught in Thurber’s moral trap whether we see it or not. It is hard not to laugh at Mitty and it would be hard-hearted not to feel some sympathy for him.
So, we laugh our way headlong into the morally equivocal position that Thurber has prepared for us. In sympathetically laughing with the narrator at the pathetic Mitty, we become complicit in Mitty’s dangerous driving and death-wish daydreams.[15] We are, in effect, condoning and even fostering his dangerous behavior and thoughts when we should be thinking about ways to get his driver’s license suspended and get him into counseling or psychotherapy. Thurber has manipulated us into compromising our moral values for the sake of a good laugh, and he has, thereby, essentially made fools of us.
You can’t tell a book by its cover story.
Mocking his main characters, his narrators and his readers, and manipulating us into a morally compromised misanthropy, is a Thurber stock-in-trade and is characteristic of many of his stories. As another example, In the Catbird Seat (hereafter Catbird), which was first published in 1942, is another of Thurber’s most famous comic stories. It is even morally more equivocal than Mitty, though you would not know it from the conventional commentary on the story.
A catbird is an aggressive bird that likes to interlope on other birds, smash their eggs, and wreck their nests. “The catbird seat” was a phrase used by Red Barber, a well-known mid-twentieth century baseball radio announcer, to denote when a team had the other team at its mercy. Thurber’s story describes the way an employee deals with a troublesome new boss who is threatening to play the role of a catbird.
In the story, a new manager is appointed as the head of a business bureaucracy. The new manager is a woman, and she likes to quote Red Barber and refer to being in the catbird seat. She also threatens to play catbird in the office by wreaking havoc on long-established practices of the bureaucracy, and upending long-time comfortable routines of the bureaucrats.
The hero of the story is Mr. Martin, a mild-mannered middle-level bureaucrat, who cannot stand having his routines disrupted. So, he decides to kill the new manager in order to safeguard his customary ways. He devises a very devious plan to murder her and is in the last stages of implementing it, moments from striking her down, when he discovers that, by unlucky chance, he does not have at hand a weapon with which to clobber her.
Thwarted and having to retreat and regroup, Mr. Martin comes up with a clever way to get the manageress fired. He concocts a story that disparages her in the eyes of the owner of the business and, convinced by the story, the owner fires the lady. In the end, she is removed from the scene without having to be murdered, and the hero of the story gets to plod on as usual. To which we readers are led to applaud.
This is, I think, a very devious story. At least as devious in its effect on us as the story that Mr. Martin invented to get the manageress fired. In the course of the story, we readers are manipulated into disliking the new manager – she is obnoxious as well as overbearing – and sympathizing with the hero’s desire to get rid of her. We are ambivalent about his plan to murder her, but we are brought along by the humor of the story and the ironic tone of the narrator. In the end, we are happy for him that he has succeeded in getting rid of her and that he is able to live happily ever after. All’s well that ends well.
But, wait a minute. This guy was a would-be murderer who was only foiled by chance at the last minute in his murderous plans. We readers have effectively been entrapped by Thurber into rooting for a calculating cold-blooded killer who would have killed rather than be inconvenienced. That puts us in a morally equivocal position, to say the least, and Thurber has essentially made fools of us.
Apologists for Thurber argue that most humor is based around the mistakes and misdeeds of sympathetic characters. But it’s one thing to laugh at the innocent bumbling and bungling of a Charlie Chaplin or my former college professor, or at the relatively harmless shams and scams of Groucho Marx. It’s a very different thing to laugh at the negligent manslaughter threatened by Mitty’s reckless driving or the attempted first-degree murder of Mr. Martin.
Lawyers often make a distinction between malum prohibitum and malum in se, that is, between things that are bad because the law says they are and things that are bad in and of themselves, no matter what the law. Malum prohibitum deals mainly with harm to property, with property rights and property wrongs. Malum in se deals mainly with harm to persons. In most comedies, such as those by the Marx Brothers, the misdeeds are malum prohibitum and no one is really harmed or in serious danger. In Mitty and Catbird, the misdeeds are malum in se, and serious harm is imminent. Yet we laugh and empathize with the miscreants.
The Amoral of the Story.
I don’t know if this essay has a moral or what it might be. Other than to be aware that comedy can be cruel and that we should be mindful of what we find funny. Much of the humor that comes our way today incorporates a lot of malum in se at which we are led by the storyteller to laugh and even sympathize. This kind of callous comedy can possibly be more deleterious to our moral health than even the ubiquitous stories, movies, and TV programs that outright celebrate gangsters and other killers. Bad as these stories are, comedies in which murder is played for laughs can be even morally more desensitizing.
Given the current state of the mass media and popular culture, it is hard to avoid stories that seductively celebrate violence. But I think it is important to try to be aware of the ways in which we are being manipulated so that we can try to guard against their deleterious effects. It is important for us to recognize what it is that we are laughing at and why, otherwise, as the old saying has it, the last laugh might be on us. If anyone has a better solution to this problem, it would be great to hear about it.
BW 7/23
[1] “Thurber.” Encyclopedia Britannica.” Accessed 6/14/2023.
[2] C.M. Weaver et al. “Behavioral, Interpersonal, and Cognitive Patterns.” Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. 2012.
[3] Kevin Dickinson. “The Secret Life of Maladaptive Daydreaming.” Big Think. 1/21/21.
[4] “Psychoanalysis of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Prezi. 10/17/2013.
[5] Danny Heitman. “James Thurber Lost Most of His Eyesight to a Tragic Childhood Accident.” Humanities. Vol 36, No 1. January/February 2015.
[6] Brian St Pierre. “James Thurber’s Comic Brilliance Masked His Dark Side.” SFGATE 12/17/1995.
[7] Danny Heitman. “James Thurber Lost Most of His Eyesight to a Tragic Childhood Accident.” Humanities. Vol 36, No 1. January/February 2015.
[8] Brian St Pierre. “James Thurber’s Comic Brilliance Masked His Dark Side.” SFGATE 12/17/1995.
[9] Peter Tonguette. “The not-so-secret life of James Thurber.” The Christian Science Monitor. 7/11/2019.
[10] Andrew Jorgensen. “James Thurber’s Little Man and the Battle of the Sexes: The Humor of Gender and Conflict.” Brigham Young University Scholars Archive. 8/1/2006.
[11] Kenneth Burke. Attitudes toward History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, 34.
[12] Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954, pp. 35, 173.
[13] Aristotle. Poetics. New York: Hill and Wang. 1961, p.59.
[14] Burke, 1961, p.41.
[15] Note that in the story, Mitty is driving fifty-five miles per hour on what is seemingly an inner-city freeway of some sort. That may not seem fast to us but the speed limit on a roadway of this sort during the 1930’s when the story was written was normally around forty-five miles per hour. When Mitty’s wife complains that he is going too fast and that he usually goes only forty-five miles per hour, she was seemingly just telling him to obey the law.
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