To the ‘World’s Smartest Human’
Iask you to fill your glasses — your Nalgene bottles, your Starbucks cups: whatever, it’s a metaphor, Jack — for a toast to one of my favourite newspaper columnists, a man who does not exist named Cecil Adams. “Cecil” is the author of the Chicago Reader’s The Straight Dope feature, which first appeared in the esteemed alt-weekly on Feb. 2, 1973. Many of us who admire the column know it from a classic series of Ballantine paperback anthologies; the first was published in 1984. Uncle Cecil, stubbornly maintaining the fiction of his being to the 11th hour, has informed his devoted “Teeming Millions” in an online note that the instalment of June 27 will be the last.
The Straight Dope can boast of the greatest distinction any consumer product can enjoy: it does what it says on the tin. The conceit of the column was that readers could send in esoteric or controversial factual questions and get an authoritative answer from Adams, allegedly the World’s Smartest Human. “Is there really such a thing as quicksand?” “Why is tennis scoring so weird?” “What came first: orange, or oranges?”
Such inquiries were a major stock-in-trade for the newspapers of old. In the 1970s, if you were arguing about something like that in a bar, phoning up the city room of a local newspaper was an accepted method (and one that big newsrooms anticipated) of getting a quick, informed answer. But The Straight Dope gained special notoriety. Since the Reader was not a mainstream broadsheet, it could handle, and publish, sex and drug questions that might give Ann Landers the vapours. Cecil would take anyone’s absurd or insane counterculture-flavoured query to the library, or run it by a surprised expert, and return with plainlanguage answers written in the best Chicago newspaper tradition.
He claimed or feigned no credentials beyond bare assertions of genius, and while Cecil would offer unabashed guesses or approximations where no categorical answer was possible, his replies did have an awesome halo of finality, and often reflected enormous reporting effort. Corrections and retractions were, on the rare occasions they were necessary, offered in a spirit of comic impatience. (Cecil is never wrong: he is merely guilty of having oversimplified the truth out of regard for the Teeming Millions’ limited ability to absorb complex information.)
Cecil was, in short, a sort of American-style Jeeves — an omniscient, worldly mystery man at the service of the reader, but with a dash of overt sarcasm thrown in. The suspicion that “he” might actually be the World’s Smartest Human was hard to resist. He had his own illustrator, Slug Signorino, who depicted Cecil as a turkey in a scholar’s mortarboard: their thorny relationship was an essential part of the Straight Dope universe, and was carefully preserved in the anthologies.
The official story is that “Cecil,” the touchy and secretive personage who wrote the column, has had a series of “editors.” The Straight Dope column should not be allowed to pass from the world without observing that “Cecil’s” voice was established by his original “editor,” Mike Lenehan, and that for most of the column’s run Cecil has been in the care of Ed Zotti, who is described as his “editor and confidant.” Many hands have surely filled Cecil’s inkwell at one time or another. In 2011 Zotti admitted “I do much of Cecil’s typing,” adding “... but Cecil presides. Editors will come and go. I’ll get hit by a bus some day, but Cecil will be eternal.”
Sadly, it seems that Cecil may have been inadvertently devoured by his own audience. The Straight Dope column is, as I have hinted, essentially a pre-internet phenomenon. In the age of Google and Wikipedia it is no one’s first instinct to present a simple factual question to another, smarter lone human. When the internet meteor hit the planet of newspapers, The Straight Dope made a successful transition: some questions addressed to the column began to be tackled online by a “science advisory committee” (i.e., Cecil’s traditional expert sources, speaking for themselves), and a for-pay message board grew up around the feature.
Now the Chicago SunTimes, which bought the Reader in 2012, is selling off the title — but it wants to hang onto the Straight Dope intellectual property and the community forum, leaving Cecil himself in mid-air. The Teeming Millions have been turned into a network capable of applying collective effort to Straight Dope-style questions, and perhaps more willing to tolerate ambiguity in the answers. In short, the public no longer has as much need of oracular authority as it once did. The bus missed “Little Ed,” after all, and ran over Cecil Adams. Rest in peace, great one.