Re: Adventures in Time and Space

On Wed, 31 May 2006 16:01:42 GMT, "Mike Schilling"
<mscottschilling@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Something I've never been sure of: did people in the 30s and 40s drink much
more than we do nowadays [1], or was heavy drinking considered cool, so that
wish-fulfillment characters drank like fish?

Yes to both.

This was, incidentally, a weird after-effect of Prohibition and
Repeal. Nobody considered drunkenness cool or inherently funny prior
to World War I (though some drunks were amusing), but during
Prohibition drinking acquired the allure of the forbidden. Drinkers
were daring outlaws, bootleggers and moonshiners were folk heroes, but
forbidden things also become the subject of humor (I just watched
"Last Comic Standing" last night, which really brought this home --
jokes about racism, child molestation, birth defects, etc.), so drunk
humor was everywhere.

When Repeal came (1933, was it?), booze became a sign of
sophistication because hey, the government had said we were grown up
enough to handle it. The dashing outlaw drinkers had won out,
defeated the fuddy-duddy do-gooders.

It took awhile for that to wear off.

In the 1950s booze was a way of dealing with what was seen as a
horribly stressful era -- in a way the entire country had
post-traumatic stress disorder from World War II and Korea. The air
of sophistication had faded, but high consumption was still seen as
perfectly normal.

If you read Thorne Smith's work from Prohibition or the like,
drunkenness is seen as inherently funny. The resemblance to stoner
humor of the 1960s is unmistakable. After Repeal it's not
_automatically_ funny, but instead has acquired the air of
sophistication. And throughout the whole period from 1920 to 1965,
there's not much evidence of any sense of moderation -- people drink
to get drunk, and often continue until they pass out. The DTs are
common in fiction, hangovers almost universal -- though in real life
the DTs were rare after Repeal, because they were usually due to
drinking homemade crap with a high methanol or isopropanol content.




--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
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