Faulkner at the Movies: Lucas Burch/Joe Brown/Joe E. Brown

Abstract

Faulkner at the Movies: Lucas Burch/Joe Brown/Joe E. Brown Karl F. Zender The purpose of this note is to identify and comment on a motion-picture-related joke in the second chapter of William Faulkner’s Light in August. The joke, an allusion to the film comedian Joe E. Brown, occurs midway through the conversation between Byron Bunch and Lena Grove in which Byron, already in love with Lena, “though he does not yet know it” (Faulkner 55), inadvertently reveals that her runaway betrayer, Lucas Burch, has taken on the assumed name of Joe Brown. When Lena asks whether Joe Christmas’s “partner [is] named Joe too,” Byron responds with sidelong but telling skepticism: Yes, ma’am. Joe Brown. But I reckon that may be his right name. Because when you think of a fellow named Joe Brown, you think of a bigmouthed fellow that’s always laughing and talking loud. And so I reckon that is his right name, even if Joe Brown does seem a little kind of too quick and too easy for a natural name, somehow. But I reckon it is his, all right. Because if he drew time on his mouth, he would be owning this here mill right this minute. (54) There are several reasons for believing that there is an allusion to Joe E. Brown here, and for seeing in the allusion somewhat more significance than it might at first appear to possess. For most current-day movie goers, Brown is familiar, if at all, for his role as Osgood Fielding III, the character enamored of Daphne, the character played by Jack Lemmon, in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959). But in the early 1930s, at a time overlapping with the writing of Light in August, Brown was emerging as one of the most popular film comedians. Beginning at the age of ten as a member of a team of traveling acrobats, then progressing through work in circuses, burlesque, vaudeville, and Broadway and touring company stage shows, Brown arrived in Hollywood in the late 1920s already an accomplished and successful comedian. In 1929, after a few minor roles and a couple of films in which he was miscast as a tragedian, Brown signed a contract with Warner Brothers, a studio [End Page 241] fending off bankruptcy by pioneering the emerging technologies of color and sound. With Warner Brothers, Brown transferred to his film work a previously developed comic persona that emphasized the extraordinary width of his mouth and a variety of vocal mannerisms suitable to roles as a “smart-aleck athlete,” a “fast-talking young playboy[],” and “someone mistaken for a champion athlete” (Gehring 64, 55, 46). Between 1929 and 1932, Brown was extraordinarily active, appearing in three or more films each year.1 Whether Faulkner ever saw a movie featuring Joe E. Brown is, so far as I can determine, not known. But he would have had several opportunities to do so, and he could have become aware of what an early critic called Brown’s “crater mouth” even without attending one of his films. For the entirety of 1929, 1930, and most of 1931, Faulkner resided in Oxford, writing and attempting to publish Sanctuary and numerous short stories. On August 17, 1931, he began writing Light in August, completing the manuscript on February 19, 1932 (Gresset 28–32). A review of ads in the Oxford Eagle for the Lyric, Oxford’s sole movie theater at that time, shows that at least five of Brown’s movies played there during this period, with ads appearing for On with the Show! (April 12, 1930), Song of the West (April 26, 1930), The Lottery Bride (January 4, 1931), Going Wild (January 6, 1931 and January 10, 1931), and Local Boy Makes Good (February 16, 1932). The ads for all but the first of these movies feature Brown, at times above the title, and the one for Going Wild on January 10, 1931 identifies him as “Big Mouth Brown.” Also, had Faulkner happened to walk by the theater, the posters outside could have made him aware of Brown’s unusual physiognomy, for they almost invariably featured caricatures exaggerating the width...