Elias Parker Butler He Made the World Laugh

Elias Parker Butler

Ellis Parker Butler didn’t look like a rebel. He looked like a man who’d sell you a life insurance policy, then slip a punchline into the fine print. Born in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1869, he grew up surrounded by cornfields, Methodists, and people who thought laughter was fine—as long as it didn’t interfere with work.

Butler thought work was the joke. “The world,” he wrote, “is so full of serious people that a little nonsense is downright necessary for balance.” Another time, he said, “A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

He sold insurance by day and wrote stories by night, hammering them out after dinner in rented rooms and sending them to any magazine that would listen. Most didn’t. He kept writing anyway. “I write because silence makes me nervous,” he said. “And because somewhere, someone might need a good laugh more than I do.”

Then came 1905—and Pigs Is Pigs.

It was the story of a railway clerk who refused to release two guinea pigs until the buyer paid the livestock rate instead of the pet rate. The animals multiplied. The paperwork multiplied faster. Soon, the absurdity of bureaucracy had reproduced itself into immortality.

Readers lost it. The New York Times called it “an ideal absurdity.” The Saturday Evening Post compared him to Mark Twain—“a new Mark Twain in miniature.” The Critic said Butler “writes with the smile of a man who knows what fools we are.”

Butler shrugged. “It’s just a story about how fast guinea pigs can make a fool out of a man,” he said. In another interview, he added, “If there’s a moral, it’s that rules are fine—until they start running the people who made them.”

Overnight, Ellis Parker Butler became the funniest man in America. He wrote thirty books, hundreds of short stories, and essays that made readers laugh until they noticed what they were laughing at. “Humor,” he said, “is the one thing that makes truth digestible.”

His novels poked at the self-help craze and small-town pride of early America. In Kilo: Being the Love Story of Eliph’ Hewlitt, Book Agent, he wrote, “There is no book so bad that it will not sell if you tell people it will make them better.” He wasn’t cruel—just honest enough to sting. “I never laughed at people,” he said. “I laughed at the way they tried so hard to be right.”

His people were us—clerks, barbers, busybodies, and fools trying to do right and tripping over their own rules. “The trouble with the average man,” he wrote, “is that he wants to be reasonable but insists on being right.”

Critics didn’t know where to put him. H. L. Mencken called his work “wholesome lunacy,” though he admitted Butler could “find philosophy in a farce.” The Nation said his humor “hides a morality sharper than his pen lets on.” A reviewer for The Bookman wrote, “Ellis Parker Butler writes with the clean mischief of a man who likes humanity too much to scold it.”

Butler didn’t care. He was too busy writing. “I’m an optimist,” he said. “I believe in the future because the past has been such a mess.”

He became one of the highest-paid humorists in America. His stories ran in The Saturday Evening Post, McClure’s, Harper’s, and The Century. He wrote about marriage, money, pride, and pigs—often all in the same story. He once joked, “I’d rather make a man laugh than make him think—but I’ll settle for both if I can.”

When someone accused him of wasting his talent on comedy, Butler fired back: “If a man can make another man laugh in this world, he’s doing sacred work—even if it’s only over a pig.” He also said, “There are too many writers who want to save mankind. I’m content if I can save the reader’s afternoon.”

By the time he died in 1937, Butler had written for nearly every major magazine in America. He wasn’t part of the modernist crowd; he didn’t brood over meaning or experiment with despair. He just told the truth sideways, with a grin. “There’s more courage in keeping cheerful,” he said, “than in writing another tragedy.”

After his death, one reviewer wrote, “Ellis Parker Butler never laughed at us from above; he laughed with us from the next seat over.” Another said, “He was a humorist who believed too much in decency to ever turn cruel.”

That’s about right. He believed humor was holy, laughter was democracy, and pigs—well, pigs were destiny.

“The world may never run the way it should,” he wrote near the end of his life. “That’s why God invented humor—to keep the rest of us from resigning.”