One Third Off

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944) was an American author, humorist and columnist who lived in New York and wrote more than sixty books and some three hundred short stories. He began as a newspaperman in Kentucky, rose to national fame, and became one of the best-known and best-paid humorists of the first half of the twentieth century. His public persona, large, genial and quick with a story, was part of his appeal.

One Third Off was published in 1921, in the years just after the First World War, and the title announces its subject: Cobb’s campaign to reduce his own considerable size. The eleven chapters, with titles such as “I Become the Panting Champion” and “On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores”, are short enough to be enjoyed one after another or separately, and they have the immediacy of material written for a popular audience. Some references will need a moment of thought today, but Cobb’s comic instincts and his way with a sentence carry across the decades.

Cobb’s comic method is to start from the ordinary and swerve into the absurd, and here the chief victim of the joke is the author himself. If you have enjoyed the humour of Mark Twain or the newspaper writers of the early twentieth century, you will recognise the tradition and appreciate how skilfully Cobb handles it.

Eleven recordings, about 1.8 hours in all, are read by a LibriVox volunteer. At that length the book can be heard in a single afternoon, and its good-humoured view of vanity, appetite and good resolutions has aged very little. A few references belong to the 1920s, but the comedy of good intentions and a stubborn appetite needs no footnotes.