We were at some convention in the UK, Peter and I… London, Glasgow, Leeds, who knows where any more?… and we were in the convention bar (which as at most cons over here seemed to be serving as a sort of anti-Green Room, where you go after your panel and wait for the next thing to happen), and Terry Pratchett was there (as just about always, it seemed, when he wasn’t signing or on a panel).
And we got to talking, and – this being around the time when footnoting started being A Thing in Terry’s books – I said to him, “Have you ever heard of a writer called Will Cuppy?”
And he got that gleam in his eye, and snickered. And within a matter of seconds the three of us were firing favorite Cuppy quotes back and forth the way Monty Python fans will recite choice bits of skit to each other. God knows how long it went on. (1)
Cuppy’s seminal (2) The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody was first published in 1950, just after his death and some seventeen years after he’d started work on the book. Take a look at a sample page – the one from the beginning of Cuppy’s essay on Hatshepsut – and see if the look of this is somewhat familiar.
…So it would be entirely fair to say that Cuppy was an influence for Terry. And he raised the bar so high on this usage style that I’m sure Cuppy would have approved.
(1) Not long enough.
(2) Well, it sure as hell seems to have been seminal for our Ter.
