The Real Dope

by Ring Lardner

Letters home from the Great War, following other correspondence from a bush league baseball player to his friend Al

Genres: Short Stories

116 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the sports world, marriage, and the theatre.

Father of author Ring Lardner Jr.

Reviews

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Novella by a Michigan author from the early 20th Century. He was known primarily as a sportswriter in the 1920s. This was not one of his best works but it showed humor and an interesting slant on the AEF in World War I.

[Ronald Koltnow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ring Lardner was a widely admired writer just 100 years ago. His fans included Ernie Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. He was known as a sportswriter but he also wrote fiction, especially baseball fiction. His book YOU KNOW ME AL was a collection of letters by a ignorant, self-absorbed pitcher in the bush leagues to his best friend. Lardner continued the series, with pitcher Jack Keefe signing with the White Sox and later going off to fight in WWI. THE REAL DOPE is one of the Jack Keefe books, with our sap hero on his way to France to fight the Kaiser. It is essentially a two-joke book. Jack is illiterate, and his awful spelling and confused diction was thigh-slapping in 1919; it is less so today. There is one good gag where Jack tells us about Jonah Vark, the Maid of New Orleans. The second joke is that dumb-ass Jack is the butt of many practical jokes. He never learns. There was real potential here, but Lardner is not interested in pursuing more that what amounts to hick jokes. Bummer!

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I read this through to the end, other than I admire Lardner and kept hoping it would get better. I thought a novel about Jack Keefe (the comic blowhard anti-hero of YOU KNOW ME AL) fighting in World War I would be either funny or exciting, but it's neither. The book is nothing more than an endless series of unfunny practical jokes and plodding buildups to climaxes that never happen, all told in Keefe's mean-spirited, ignorant and illiterate patter. I was relieved when this book finally ended.

[mkfs · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like a Dana Carvey character in a recurring SNL sketch, Jack Keefe quickly wears out his welcome. The ignorance, the gullibility, the illiteracy, and the Berra-like malapropisms are entertaining for about the first chapter.

I had hopes that this would be a sort of What Did You Do During The War, Daddy? tale; instead it is just pointless buffoonery.

[Tom Hooker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry, I don't remember the plot on this one.

[Charles A Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly Goodreads

The writer seems to be better with short stories than a longer read. He lost me at times but I had to go back to catch up.

[Perry Whitford]

Funny thing, comedy. Ring Lardner was considered one of America's wittiest writers back in his day, and his name still meant something when I was young.

Jack Keefe, star pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, joins the army and heads of the France to fight in WWI, sending letters home to his friend Al.
Very much in a certain type of American idiom, no punctuation, questionable spelling (wile for while, finely for finally)
- becomes the butt of various jokes because of his ignorance and gullibility. When he gives a speech comparing war to baseball and how he understands strategy because he once walked a good batter ('men that can use their brains will win any kind of game') the men write him a mock letter from General Pershing. They also teach him some German instead of French, and set him up on a date with Marie Antoinette.

- boneheaded blowhard who would feel right at home in Trump's America.

- on the Frenchman becoming head of the combined Allied army:
'the French word for fire in English is feu in French and you say it like it was few and if Gen. Foch yelled few we might think he was complaining of the heat.'

[Duane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked You Know Me Al and was hoping for more of the same here. I guess I got it, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable. I read somewhere that Lardner tired of the format of these stories, feeling that the epistle approach was a severe limitation of his capabilities. I think that is more evident here than in his prior work. The stories are largely the same and after a while I began to tire of Jack Keefe. The jokes became stale and the book just didn’t have the same energy. I got the sense that even Lardner lost interest midway through. I also didn’t feel like I was dropped in that era like YKMA. I was at least hoping for that. Not terrible, but far from noteworthy. There is a reason this book was out of print for a long time.

[Tim McKay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Guess it just isn't my kind of humor....