Do you like footnotes?

I am, if you had not already noticed, partial to them. Not just using them (although I am clearly partial to that, too).

Some people, when they read non-fiction, finish the meat of the book, maybe read the afterward or those discussion questions that some books include. Perhaps they dive into the Thank You’s at the back of the book¹. Rarely do they skim the footnotes² after that.

I do.

Often they are proper footnotes, with a lot of citations, properly punctuated with quotes, italics and parentheses, ibids, and et als. Those are rarely of interest, although sometimes while I am reading the heart of the book, I do refer to them because I just can’t believe what the author is saying and want to see the source.³ Sometimes you discover little anecdotes which the editor probably deemed too distracting to the book but the author just couldn’t bear to part with. Sometimes, when the footnote is attached to a quote in the main body of the book, you get to read the full passage in the footnotes – and the full passage is so much more fun than just that little quote. You never know what you’re going to discover.

I blame Will Cuppy for my love of footnotes.⁴

When I was a little girl, we had a wall of bookshelves in the living room. It had several shelves of record albums, an encyclopedia that I think someone gave my parents as a wedding present, a collection of the great classics⁵ in matching blue covers (ditto), Shogun, The Thornbirds, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, Catch 22, Stranger in a Strange Land, Songs for Swinging Surgeons⁶, Phoenix Island, a bunch of books I can’t remember. And The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.

After I hard worked my way through most of the other books at aged 12⁷, I picked up Decline & Fall, expecting it to be boring history stuff.

And discovered it was funny history stuff. Will Cuppy wrote during the 1950s and his narrative style and humor are definitely a period piece from that era. But it’s still funny, even now. The subtitle of the book is, “Great Figures of History Hilariously Humbled” and he goes to town on historical figures from ancient Egypt through Miles Standish. According to the introduction of the 1992 edition, Cuppy died in the middle of writing this book. That’s too bad; he could have tackled “great figures” after Miles Standish.

Here’s an example of a Will Cuppy footnote from a passage on Phillip the Great:

Olympias, the mother of Alexander, […] told Alexander that his real father was Zeus Ammon, or Amon, a Graeco-Egyptian god in the form of a snake. Alexander made much of this and would sit up all night boasting about it.⁶

⁶ He got so that he believed it himself

Funny, right? Right?

Well, 12 year old me thought it was funny. And so many footnotes! Cuppy averages 2 or 3 per page.

But this is what taught me to read footnotes. You never know what you’re going to find and sometimes it’s funny.

Now I re-read Cuppy when I feel overwhelmed by cable news and can’t help thinking: who put these people in office? or, Who made these crazy men billionaires?⁸

Cuppy reassures me that there have always been crazy people in power.

And then they die.

And the world goes on. We will survive this current crazy batch of psychos with power.⁹ It may not be pleasant.¹⁰ But we will survive.

Cuppy provides perspective for me. He reassures me it will be so. We all need a little historical levity¹¹ these days, when the world seems so crazy, and those with money and/or power seem especially out of touch.

Thank you, Will Cuppy.

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¹ Once, when I was skimming the Thank You’s, I found that the author had thanked someone I used to work with who went on to be an editor. I gave me a tiny moment of joy, to see that Joe had become such a successful editor that his authors thanked him. You go, Joe!

² I had something I funny I was going to say here but I got distracted trying to figure out how to use WordPress’s footnotes function – I finally gave up – and now I can’t remember what I was going to say. Maybe it had something to do with some authors, who I adore, who put their funny stories in footnotes right on the page they are footnoting – like Cuppy does – and then have real footnotes at the end of the book where you can look up their citations. God bless them.

³ Once I even looked up the source to check that the source had actually said what the author said they had said. This is the proper use of footnotes for the reader: to help you see when someone is lying to you. (Graham Hancock’s footnotes probably reference his personal notes a lot.) So, when someone introduces “information” that takes you by surprise – even if you agree with it – you should check the footnotes. This is one of the problems with cable news and the internet: no footnotes. So people fall down rabbit holes of misinformation.

⁴ I’d probably like footnotes less if I had to do them because I was writing a history or an academic paper or something.

⁵ Classics = written by OWGs.

⁶ From my father’s days as a flight surgeon in the DMZ.

⁷ I do not recommend Phoenix Island for 12-year olds. And I hadn’t read all of the other books – I avoided those matching blue covers of “classics” like the plague.

⁸ I read about a scientific study recently that said that as your power increases (and, when you have that much money, it’s equivalent to power), so does your risk tolerance. Okay, that makes sense, right? But that risk tolerance leads people in power to believe that they can do crazy things like get blow-jobs from interns in a dark little hall outside the Oval Office. Or play footsie with Russia. Or invade the Urkraine. And get away with it. (This is me now, not the study: this is why kings used to have jesters – to puncture their self-importance. We have late-night comedians instead, but that doesn’t work because people in power don’t risk their thinly skinned egos watching late night comedy. Although it is probably safer to be Stephen Colbert than a court jester. Jesters had to walk a thin line and often, I suspect, found themselves on the wrong side of it. And now I’m going down a rabbit hole looking for historical treatises on court jesters. If you know a good one, pass it along!) And if I were a real writer, I’d footnote that study because it was a real study with real scientists and not just a poll of people who click a link on the internet, which is what some people call “studies” nowadays, only they’re not and you shouldn’t get confused about that. You know who else has a lot of risk tolerance? Psychopaths and serial killers. Think about it. And now I feel like my footnotes need footnotes.

⁹ Although now Putin is threatening nuclear war, so maybe not, because that guy is bat-shit crazy. Of course, I thought the same thing about Reagan. He’s held up as a shining example by a lot of people who weren’t alive or paying attention when he was in office – that guy was nuts. Alas, as the Kingston Trio used to sing, But we must be thankful and tranquil and proud; for man is endowed with the mushroom-shaped cloud; and we must be [something, perhaps it was, careful] for some lucky day, someone will set the spark off… and we will all be blown away. I should probably footnote that.

¹⁰ Ditto.

¹¹ I was trying to write levity-ical history but I couldn’t find an adjectival form of levity. Google seems to feel I should use light instead (levity derives from light or maybe it was the other way around). But light history just doesn’t capture what I was trying to say.