Bennett Cerf

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Bennett Cerf
File:Bennettcerf.jpg Bennett Cerf photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932
Occupation	Humorist Publisher
Spouse(s)	Sylvia Sidney (1935-1936; divorced) Phyllis Fraser (1940-1971; his death)
Children	Christopher Cerf, Jonathan Cerf

Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was a publisher and co-founder of Random House. Cerf was 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 in a Jewish family of Alsatian and German descent. His father, Gustave Cerf, was a lithographer; and his mother, Frederika Wise, was an heiress to a tobacco-distribution fortune.

Cerf attended Townsend Harris High School, the same public school as composer Richard Rodgers, publisher Richard Simon, and playwright Howard Dietz; and he spent his teenage years at 790 Riverside Drive, an apartment building in Washington Heights that was home to two other friends who became prominent as adults, Howard Dietz and the Hearst newspapers financial editor Merryle Rukeyser. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University (1919) and his Litt.B. (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 & Liveright publishing house.

In 1925, Cerf formed a partnership with his friend Donald Klopfer. The two bought the rights to the Modern Library from Boni & Liveright and went into business for themselves. They made the series quite successful and, in 1927, commenced to publish general trade books they had selected "at random." Thus began their publishing business, which in time they named Random House. It used as its logo a little house drawn by Cerf's friend Rockwell Kent.

Cerf's talent in building and maintaining relationships brought contracts with such writers as William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, James Michener, Truman Capote, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and others. He published Atlas Shrugged, written by Ayn Rand. Even though he vehemently disagreed with her philosophy of Objectivism, they became life-long friends.

In 1933, Cerf won United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 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 1944, Cerf published the first of his collection of joke books, Try and Stop Me, with illustrations by Carl Rose. A second book, Shake Well Before Using, was published in 1949.

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. A Mount Kisco street (Cerf Lane) off of Croton Avenue bears his name. Cerf married actress Sylvia Sidney on October 1, 1935; but the couple divorced on April 9, 1936. He was married to former Hollywood actress Phyllis Fraser, a cousin of Ginger Rogers, from September 17, 1940, until his death. They had two sons, Christopher and Jonathan.

In 1959, Maco Magazine Corporation published what has since become known as "The Cream of the Master's Crop," a compilation of Cerf's jokes, gags, stories, puns, and wit.

Prior to 1951, Cerf was an occasional panelist on the NBC game show, Who Said That?, in which celebrites try to determine the speaker of quotations taken from recent news reports.

In 1951, Cerf began appearing weekly on What's My Line? and continued until the show ended its run on CBS in 1967. Cerf continued to appear occasionally until his death on the Viacom syndicated version of What's My Line?, along with Arlene Francis. Cerf was known as "Bennett Snerf" in a Sesame Street puppet parody of What's My Line?. During his time on What's My Line?, Cerf received an honorary degree from the University of Puget Sound.

Late in life, he was the subject of an exposé written by Jessica Mitford and published in the June 1970 issue of Atlantic Monthly, denouncing the business practices of the Famous Writers School, which Cerf had founded.

Cerf was portrayed in the film Infamous (2006) by Peter Bogdanovich. S.J. Perelman's feuilleton "No Dearth of Mirth, Fill Out the Coupon" describes Perelman's fictionalized encounter with a jokebook publisher named Barnaby Chirp, who is a caricature of Cerf. Another caricature of Cerf, named Harry Hubris and portrayed by Bert Lahr, appears in Perelman's 1962 play The Beauty Part.

Cerf died on August 27, 1971, aged 73. He was cremated, and his ashes scattered on the grounds of his home in Mount Kisco, New York.

In 1977, Random House, the company that Cerf had co-founded, posthumously published his autobiography, which he had titled At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf.

Publications

• Try and Stop Me (1944)
• Shake Well Before Using (1948)
• Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles
• Bennett Cerf's Bumper Crop (2 volume set)
• Good for a Laugh (1952)
• The Life of the Party (1956)
• The Laugh's on Me (1959)
• Laugh Day (1965)
• Famous Ghost Stories (anthology, 1944)
• The Unexpected (anthology, 1948)
• At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977, ISBN 0-375-75976-X).
• Dear Donald, Dear Bennett : the wartime correspondence of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. (New York: Random House, 2002). ISBN 037550768X.
• Bennett Cerf's Book of Laughs (New York: Beginner Books, Inc., 1959) LOC 59-13387
• Bennett Cerf's Houseful of Laughter

References

• Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. pp. 95–96. ISBN 0-911682-20-1. 

External links

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• Notable New Yorkers - Bennett Cerf Biography, photographs, and the audio and transcript of Bennett Cerf's oral history from the Notable New Yorkers collection of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University.
• Bennett Cerf at Find a Grave
• Bennett Cerf interviewed by Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview November 30, 1957