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In prose pieces or plays, the best element in Jean Kerr's humor is that it often bridges traditionally alien settings, brings the muddy-carpeted world of school lunches and commuter trains into incon gruous collision with the slick panoplies of Manhattan. It works in both direc tions. Writing about a third-grade play at a Larchmont school, she notes certain uneven spots that "could have been cleaned up if they had taken the show to New Rochelle for a couple of weeks." Conversely, one of the biggest laughs in Mary, Mary comes when the movie actor prepares to take the heroine out on the town, stifles her ex-husband's objections by asking: "Should my mother have called your mother?"
Sometimes a little too cute—Walter is the children's "alternate sponsor"—Jean Kerr is also overly fond of using the language of television commercials. But she is wary of puns and uses them with care—"Idle roomers beget idle rumors"—preferring to play on people rather than words. For she is a devastating parodist, whether in a single line about "The Confessions of St. Augustine, as told to Gerold Frank," or in the full-sized parodies of Vladimir Nabokov ("To watch Lolita sit at the kitchen table and play jacks was to know what Aristotle meant by pity and terror"), or null Sagan: that timeless moment when the bored geriatric lover gets out of the bored hoyden's bed and hops up and down to get his circulation going. And like all humorists, she thrives on embellishment, taking small facts and inflating them into outrageous acts of hyperbole. When one of her boys came home with a dead horseshoe crab, she put it down the Dispose-All in fact, but in print she claimed it had been stored in the Bendix and washed with a load of sheets. "You take the thing, touch it up, improve it," she says, "and turn it the way you want it to go."
She has, to a great extent, done just that with her own life.
Childhood by Rockwell. Now 37, Jean Kerr was once Bridget Jean Collins of Scranton, Pa., the first of four children of a construction foreman who had emigrated from Ireland to find a career in the New World so that he could send back to County Cork for his sweetheart, Kitty O'Neill. Kitty, second cousin of Playwright Eugene O'Neill, is better known to readers of The Snake Has All the Lines as "My Wild Irish Mother," a woman with an unquenchable sense of humor. "After all the money I've sunk in bronchitis," she said recently, "if I die of anything else, I'll shoot myself." For years she called her daughter "Biddy Jean," until a nun at Scranton's Marywood Seminary put a stop to it on the ground that the term biddy was an insult to Irish womanhood.
Spelunkers of the writer's mind will find no dark pockets in Jean Kerr's memories of her girlhood. Norman Rockwell might have painted it, showing an oversize white clapboard house with a wide front porch, through the window an upright piano, an upright father singing in his rich baritone, an energetic mother doing the spring cleaning for the second time that day, and beside the house a tall elm tree with a tall young girl high in its branches eating an apple and reading a book.