Urbanity's Insanity

How TO BECOME EXTINCT--Will Cuppy, with illustrations by William Steig --Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

The man who makes even footnotes funny published his first book in ten years last week. Will Cuppy followed up How to Be a Hermit and How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes with the logically inevitable How to Become Extinct. No one has ever made out a better case for it.

"Becoming extinct has its compensations," Cuppy says in recounting how he himself became extinct on Aug. 23, 1934. "It's a good deal like beating the game. I would go so far as to say that becoming extinct is the perfect answer to everything and I defy anybody to think of a better. Other solutions are mere palliatives, just a bunch of loose ends, leaving the central problem untouched."

Not that Author Cuppy is an escapist. Even extinct he is willing to tackle anything from "Do Fish Think, Really?" to "Are the Insects Winning?", often with disquieting results. He even attacks the bloated reputation of Aristotle, though granting that Aristotle "of course, was frequently right, for it is almost impossible, under the laws of chance, to be wrong all the time. Thanks to him we know that the Weasel does not bring forth its young by the mouth, as held by Anaxagoras. He also denied that Hyenas change their sex every year. He was only guessing, but it sounds like a good guess. I don't know what to say of his theory that flatfooted people are treacherous. Some of them are, very likely."

Secret of Will Cuppy's success is that he can simultaneously be insane and urbane. Says Naturalist William Beebe: "When a scientist states a fact that ends it. But Cuppy is not satisfied and carries it further." Few will profit more from the book than the fast-vanishing Ivory-billed Woodpecker, for whom the author has sound advice:

"Keep away from bird lovers, fellows, or you'll be standing on a little wooden pedestal with a label containing your full name in Latin. ... I don't want to alarm you fellows, but there are only about twenty of you alive as I write these lines, and there are more than 200 of you in American museums and in collections owned by Ivory-billed Woodpecker enthusiasts. Get it?"

Those who neither seek nor fear extinction but simply want to enjoy life can always fall back on the Cuppy footnotes. Some of them:

P: "One of the Carp at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV was said to resemble Madame de Maintenon to an extraordinary degree. The story was finally traced to Madame de Montespan."

P: "Fish glue is used in sizing and general repair work. Nobody quite knows what sizing is. When people are asked if they wish to have some sizing done, they generally say yes. And it goes on the bill."

P: "Herpetologists have recently decided that the Boa Constrictor should be called Constrictor constrictor. I have decided that it should not. Two can play at that game."

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