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Electric Shocks. There is a good deal of Jean Kerr in Mary, Mary, a play that one critic described as "five characters releasing an author." The characters inhabit an unashamedly prefabricated plot (about a divorced couple who, of course, get together again), but it is full of humor and insight. All situation comedy is clockwork; what matters is who makes the clock. Like Jean Kerr, the heroine is a compulsive wisecracker: years ago, when her husband made his first tentative pass, she told him, "Let's not start something we can't finish in a taxi on 44th Street." Like Jean Kerr, another character is a fast shuffler of cliches: his recent de parture from Hollywood, explains the aging matinee idol, was an example of "the sinking ship leaving the rats." Like Jean Kerr, a third character is full of electric shock: "A lawyer," he says, "is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, any more than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table."
But Jean Kerr's play is much more than a catalogue of one-line gags. The best laughs of Mary, Mary arise from character and substance; simple lines that are meaningless out of context ricochet around the stage and find their targets unerringly beyond the footlights. She knows how to trim her themes in light blue; but her humor is always basically decent—and universal. The man in Mary, Mary was, after all, married to the woman whose shoulder he sometimes tapped at 11p.m. saying: "Are you in the mood tonight? Because if you're not, I'm going to take a sleeping pill."
Alien Settings. From Piltdown man to Perelman, the history of humor is overwhelmingly male, and only a few representative female names present themselves for comparison with Jean Kerr. The most celebrated is Dorothy Parker, essentially a short-story writer whose glib acidities at and near the Algonquin Round Table gave her a legendary reputation. At the other, soft-boiled end of the world was the late Betty (The Egg and 1 Mac-Donald, an authentic primitive. Jean Kerr will probably never be quite up to Parker (for one thing, she is not cruel nor, perhaps, as deep), and she will never stoop to suffer from the "poultricidal tendencies" of MacDonald. She is nearer, but not completely in, the no man's land—and Everywoman's country—of such writers as Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Cornelia Otis Skinner (Nuts in May), Sally Benson (Junior Miss) and Phyllis Mc-Ginley, a Larchmont neighbor and close friend, whose light verse parallels, to some extent, the everyday materials of Jean Kerr's prose.-But Phyllis McGinley is a deeper, more sentient writer to whom humor is seldom an end in itself.
The humorist actually most closely akin to Jean Kerr, at her best, is Robert Benchley. As writers, they share the same gently shrugging quality that utterly preludes malice, the same preoccupation with the bizarre edges of the commonplace, the same disarming penchant for self-deprecation, as when the ample Mrs. Kerr compares herself to "a large bran muffin" or Benchley calls himself "Sweet Old Bob, or sometimes just the initials."