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The genius of Jean Shepherd, who died Oct. 16, is that he broke the cardinal rule of storytelling - he did not get to the point.
The writer, radio raconteur, and humorist who created the movie "A Christmas Story" liked to dawdle, lollygag, and sidewind his way through tales that were funny precisely because they took their time getting to their destination.
Years ago, at one of his annual shows at Princeton University, he even stretched the act of walking onto the stage into a two-minute routine, complete with a punch line that brought down the house.
The show was at Alexander Hall, a vast Romanesque pile with massive stonework, arched windows, 60-foot vaulted ceilings - looking less like an auditorium than a set for a Dracula movie. Showtime came, but no Jean Shepherd. The minutes ticked by, the audience of close to 1,000 was becoming restless. All the while, a chubby man in nondescript clothes was wandering around the stage, casually looking up, down, and around at the giant brooding archways. Finally, Jean Shepherd finished his inspection and spoke.
"This place would make a great john," he announced.
On his nightly WOR radio broadcasts in the 1970s, Shepherd would spin out tales ef his boyhood in an Indiana steel town, populated with characters like Schwartz, Flick, Junior Kissell, to absurd lengths, often taking two or three installments to relate a simple story about a borrowed car or a school bully.
Some found their way into his books, like "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters" and "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash." Ultimately, a handful were compressed and intercut to create the 1983 movie "A Christmas Story," which has taken its place alongside "It's a Wonderful Life" as a favorite movie of the holiday season.
This movie account of 9-year-old Ralph Parker, the kid obsessed with getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas ("you'll shoot your eye out, kid") captured the American version of Christmas in all its tacky glory: the garish lights, the lawn figures, the department store Santas, the Muzak
Christmas carols.
You'd expect that kind of edge from Shepherd, the hipster who once collaborated with jazzman Charles Mingus on an album.
What makes "A Christmas Story" disarming is Shepherd's real affection for the American way of Christmas, commercialism and all. Unlike Mark Twain, the humorist to whom he's been compared, Shepherd had a lot of patience for human folly.
In fact, Shepherd was a unique blend of folksiness and sophistication - mining his blue-collar boyhood for laughs, while at the same time contributing regularly to Playboy and Esquire, editing an anthology of humorist George Ade's fables, even giving over his ratio show on one memorable occasion to a blow-by-blow recounting of "Moby Dick."
What "A Christmas Story” doesn't capture, good as it is, is the- endless detail and digression that is the essence of Shepherd's art.
Tales like the one about the Bumpus clan, the hillbilly family next door who raise packs of slavering hounds, lose their epic quality when reduced to a mere subplot, tightly bound up with five other stories.
Shepherd, who honed his style by having to fill 45 minutes of radio time a night, was in his element when he could expand a single minor incident into a Homeric saga, sometimes taking days of air time to reach a climax.
It's unfortunate that all stories - even Shepherd's - have to come to an end. He was the original rambling man of radio, and he'll be missed.
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