The Worst of Clark Ashton Smith: Gut-Busting Paragraphs of Unintentional Comedy

I always got the feeling that, unlike Lovecraft, CAS found much amusement in his ostentatious use of language. In The Tale of Satampra Zeiros I laugh when he says the creature's appearance gave evidence of 'anthropophagic inclinations', which struck me as a surely wry rather than sincere.

Unintentional comedy with Smith would likely come from his pulpier sci-fi pieces, which are his weakest works. I suggest we scour those.

[Druidic]

There is more conscious humor in Smith than in Lovecraft; I don't think it should be mistaken for purple prose. It's usually brilliant. Michael Shea picked up on Smith's sardonic wit and blacker rhan black humor and his fine fantasy novels have generous helpings of it.

[Robin Davies]

I've never found Smith's work unintentionally funny. However, when I first encountered The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison I was gobsmacked by the outrageously flowery language and found this bit particularly funny:

"I like not the dirty face of the Ambassador," said Lord Zigg. "His nose sitteth flat on the face of him as it were a dab of clay, and I can see pat up his nostrils a summer day's journey into his head. If's upper lip bespeak him not a rare spouter of rank fustian, perdition catch me. Were it a finger's breadth longer, a might tuck it into his collar to keep his chin warm of a winter's night." "I like not the smell of the Ambassador," said Lord Brandoch Daha. And he called for censers and sprinklers of lavender and rose water to purify the chamber, and let open the crystal windows that the breezes of heaven might enter and make all sweet.

I thought at the time that was just awful writing but now I realise the humour is intentional. (Er, isn't it?)
You can always tell a shady character by his bad body odour and a mass of bogies up his nose...

[qcrisp]

"...a rare spouter of rank fustian..."

Eddison, I dub thee a rare spouter of rank fustian. Arise, and body forth thy spurious odiferous bombast!

[singing flame]

I think I agree that the humor or satire in Smith is mostly intentional. Anyway I just read The Door to Saturn which contains a lot of hilarious passages. Here is one that made me laugh out loud:

"The Bhlemphroims, it was learned, had not always been headless but had reached their present physical conformation through a slow process of evolution, in which the head of the archetypal Bhlemphroim had been merged by imperceptible degrees with the torso. But unlike most peoples, they did not regard their current stage of developmen with unqualified complacency. Indeed, their headlessness was a source of national regret; they deplored the retrenchment of nature in this regard...".

The "Bhlemphroims"!? "head merged with the torso"!? Also it cracks me up that they don't approach their situation with "unqualified complacency".

Turning to next page there is this one:

"They saw the Djhibbis, that apterous and Stylitean bird-people, who roost on their individual dolomites for years at a time and meditate upon the cosmos, uttering to each other at long intervals the mystic syllables yop, yeep, and yoop, which are said to express an unfathomed range of esoteric thought."

Yop.

[singing flame]

The plot of the story is in itself quite brilliant. The two protagonists are chosen to deliver a cryptic message from the god Hziulquoigmnzah (love those names btw), a message which they eventually find out basically means "f*ck off".

[Frater_Tsalal]

Some of the ideas he wrote for potential story plots in his so-called Black Book are pretty great as well. I especially enjoyed this one):

[25] The Little People
A race of pygmies, limited in number, deep in the earth, desire to possess the earth's sunlit surface. By use of a terrible ray they madden human beings and all animal life into universal homicide and suicide. One man, an isolated scientist in a mountain laboratory, remains immune. He meets the little people when they emerge at night upon the depopulated world. They tell him what they have done, tell him the only other survivor of humanity is a woman thousands of miles away in a mountain valley. Dawn comes, and the little people are blinded and killed by the rays of the unaccustomed sun. The surviving man sets out on his long journey to find the last woman.

[Raul Urraca]

"His meditations, as he walked homeward that evening, had been splendidly replete with the shining of costly metals, with coins and ingots and gold-work and argentry, and the flaming or sparkling of many-tinted gems in rills, rivers and cascades, all flowing toward the coffers of Avoosl Wuthoqquan"
-The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan
Avoosl Wuthoqquan is a damn hilarious name. It ends the sentence like a punchline. I'm certain the tale was written at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

From "An Offering To The Moon"

Quote

This unhealthy and exorbitant interest in a more than problematic past should be discouraged or at least supervised.

[A Defrocked Academic]

From “Xeethra”:

Quote

So it occurred that the boy Xeethra, tending the black and piebald goats of his uncle Pornos, was obliged to follow his charges further each day on the combes and hilltops. […] Surprised and enchanted, the young goatherd followed his capering flock into this sheltered paradise. There was small likelihood that the goats of Pornos would stray afield from such goodly pasturage; so Xeethra did not trouble himself to watch them any longer. Entranced by his surroundings, he began to explore the valley, after quenching his thirst at the clear waters that sparkled like golden wine.

The capering goats of old uncle Pornos. Unfortunate.