The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

This book is hilarious and also historically accurate and very carefully researched. It was published posthumously and one can only imagine the wonderful updates that would have occurred to subsequent additions if he had lived.

The footnotes are witty and sharp and in no way detract from the rest of the work. This is the way history should be written and taught. The historical characters are brought back to earth and are written as real humans with all of their foibles exposed for laughs.

For those that love history, this is a must read. For those who love humour, you will get plenty of laughs while also getting educated. Don't forget to read the afterword. It discusses Will Cuppy in depth. I can only imagine that my place will look like show more his by the time I am dead. He was a misanthrope after my own heart. show less

This is my father's paperback copy which I nearly read to death. I would give it 6 stars if possible. Cuppy did genuine serious research and included real, if bizarre, facts, but he told everything with a marvelous light style and was a master of the comic footnote. The book is lives of the great (chiefly rulers, plus some early settlers of the Americas) running from Khufu to George III and Leif the Lucky to Miles Standish, as well as two essays on royal pranks and royal stomachs. The witty line drawings by William Steig add a great deal to the fun. As with some of Cuppy's other work, this was edited after his death by Fred Feldkamp.

A collection of humorous bios of famous people from history. It's from the 1940s, so it does seem a bit dated, with a slightly musty feel about some of the humor, giant blind spots about things like white people doing anything remotely unpleasant in colonizing the New World, and a few misogynistic jokes that honestly leave me entirely unsure whether Cuppy is satirizing sexist attitudes or embracing them. The style is also rather disjointed, with lots and lots of footnotes, some of which are relevant and some of which aren't. I found the humor a bit variable. There are some moments of real satiric brilliance, some that raise an amused chuckle, and some where it all starts to wear rather thin. I suspect it is one of those books that works show more to best effect when dipped in and out of, rather than read straight through until you get tired of it.

It's also hard to know how seriously to take any of it. I mean, in general it's clearly not meant to be taken terribly seriously at all, but apparently Cuppy actually did to a lot of very real research on his subjects. So I imagine a lot of what he includes is more or less historically accurate, but you never do quite know what's established fact, what's mere rumor, and what's just been thrown in because it's funny.

This volume also features some droll cartoon illustration and two additional pieces about various royal personages: one involving humor and pranks, which I didn't find all that entertaining, and one about their eating habits and food preferences, which I kind of did.

Rating: It's honestly quite hard to rate this. There's a fun, oddball charm to it that makes me want to be kind to it, but I really did find the humor value variable. I guess I'm going to resist the urge to be extra generous and call it 3.5/5. show less

A fine read, and a good deal of it is quite true! Cuppy was a popular figure in his day with a bibliography of several other humourous titles. He also was an authority on military topics. This collective biography was assembled from ocasional pieces after his death, but has become his most famous book. The art of the brutally funny footnote was his particular talent, and is never shown to better advantage than here.

I'd never heard of Will Cuppy until I found this book and while his coverage of the decline and fall of most people is often smile invoking I found the most interesting part of "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody" the foreword in my edition that gives a potted biography of Cuppy. Beyond the fact that "The Decline and Fall ..." was a posthumous release, Cuppy was somewhat of an eccentric chap who lived as a hermit for years and responded to work offers by saying he wasn't a good writer.

After the foreword, much of what Cuppy writes is anti-climatic but there are certainly some interesting sections about various historical features that were both amusing and educational.

A very interesting and entertaining look at general history. There are many laugh-out-loud comments on the foibles of famous people from Pharaoh to Miles Standish, and various kings, tsars and queens eating habits. This seems to have influenced a number of writers: Sellar & Yateman's '1066 and All That,' as well as 'The Education of Hyman Kaplan.' I think Harry Shearer must have admired this author when he was in middle school (did Harry Shearer go to middle school?) Anyway, I highly recommend it.

A childhood favorite I picked up while visiting family. It's a nice lighthearted general romp through history, although it's showing its age by now (the Sumerians will blow over? really, sir?), and definitely written by a white guy who did not know much about the-world-beyond-Europe-and-America, as far as I can tell.

But if you're trying to convince someone that no, really, history is amazing, full of awesome people who did fascinating things for the most hilarious and fucked-up reasons, you could do a lot worse than to hand them this.