The Humorist from Hell – Ted Shane
101 years ago, the 1925 epic film version of Ben-Hur was released by MGM. It received almost universal applause—almost. It was the most expensive silent movie ever made with sequences filmed overseas and in the United States. It cost a reported $5,000,000. Upon its release, the film critic for The New Yorker magazine, Theodore Shane, shared his thoughts—and they weren’t all that complimentary. Shane wrote that $4,999,999.95 had been spent “on massive effects and the remaining $.05 on drama.”
In addition, he noted that the original story, an 1880 novel by Lew Wallace (who was a Union general in the Civil War, among other things), was pretty lacking in drama to begin with, just a “piece of bric-à-brac romance (that was) nothing more than a super Rover Boys story touched up with a Biblical background.”
Ted Shane, also known as the Humorist from Hell, wrote books and magazine articles in the first half of the 20th century. He also created the “Cockeyed Crosswords” that were popular from the 1930s to the 1960s and appeared in various magazines.
Theodore Sidney Shane was born in New York City in 1900. His father was a tailor who had immigrated from Hungary in the 1880s and his mother was the daughter of German immigrants. Before he became a humorist and writer, he went to Canada to enlist in the Black Watch, the famous kilted Scots division called the “Ladies from Hell.”
He was only 16 when he joined and he fought in World War I with the division. Nicknamed Die Damen aus der Hölle (Ladies from Hell) by German soldiers for their distinctive tartan kilts and unparalleled bravery, the pipers from the “Black Watch”—the 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland—garnered a fearsome reputation on the battlefields of World War I.
Standing in full view of German soldiers, oftentimes armed with only their bagpipes, pipers were the first “over the top”, acting as a clarion call for British troops to keep moving. The sound of the bagpipes would spread terror among the German troops—when one “Lady from Hell” fell, miraculously another piper would seemingly arise out of the trenches to take his place. The wailing of the pipers served to rouse the troops, but it came at a great cost. An easy target for the Germans, of the 2,500 pipers who served during the Great War, an estimated 500 were killed, while another 600 were wounded, a casualty rate of 44 percent.
After the war, Shane studied at Columbia, graduating in 1923, and he began writing book and movie reviews as well as humor pieces for magazines that included the old Liberty magazine, where his humorous crosswords also appeared.
He moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1930 when he married Margaret (Peggy) Woodward Smith Boyd, a native Hoosier, who was also a successful writer. He lived there off and on until his death — he and Peggy also spent three years in Hollywood writing for MGM and 12 years in Europe. He wrote profiles, particularly of sports figures, like Dizzy Dean (“His Dizziness”), Leroy ‘Satchel” Page, (“Satchel Man”), and the Harlem Globetrotters, (“Barnums of Basketball”), for Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and other magazines, and worked as editor of 1,000 Jokes magazine.
He published several books of crossword collections as well as “Heroes of the Pacific” (1944) and, though he did not drink, he wrote the light-hearted and popular “Bar Guide” (1950), illustrated by VIP (Virgil Partch) a popular cartoonist.
In 1940, Shane and writer-broadcaster Lowell Thomas wrote “Softball, So What?” about their experiences on Thomas’s famous softball team, The Nine Old Men. The Nine Old Men played in Ridgefield and in other places for benefit games in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The team included men like heavyweight champion boxer Gene Tunney, humorist Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle (F. Chase Taylor), cartoonist Paul Webb and Novelist Homer Croy.
Among the many celebrities who played in their games were critic Heywood Hale Broun, Believe It Or Not creator Robert Ripley, self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie, and baseball great Babe Ruth — Shane wrote: “A .100 softball hitter, Ruth has made only one homer — off Broun, one of the softest softball pitchers in the game.” Among the people who came to watch the Old Men play was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a friend of Thomas.
In 1946, Shane tested the local political waters, running unsuccessfully for the Connecticut state senate from Ridgefield’s district. He was a Democrat in a very Republican district and lost in landslide. Ted Shane died in Ridgefield in 1967 at the age of 66 without ever revising his wry opinion Lew Wallace’s masterwork or the 1925 Ben-Hur.
