Algonquin Round Table

Based on Wikipedia: Algonquin Round Table

A Practical Joke That Changed American Culture

It began, as so many legendary things do, with petty revenge.

In June 1919, a theatrical press agent named John Peter Toohey was annoyed. Alexander Woollcott, the drama critic for The New York Times, had refused to mention one of Toohey's clients in his column. The client happened to be Eugene O'Neill, who would go on to win four Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize in Literature, but that's beside the point. Toohey was irritated, and irritated people do creative things.

So Toohey organized a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, ostensibly to welcome Woollcott back from World War I, where he'd been writing for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper. In reality, the lunch was an elaborate roast designed to humiliate the pompous critic. Toohey invited a collection of writers, actors, and wits, and they spent the afternoon mercilessly mocking Woollcott on every front.

Here's the twist: Woollcott loved it.

He laughed along with everyone else, delighting in the sharp-tongued abuse. The lunch was such a success that someone suggested they do it again the next day. And the next. And the next. What started as a one-time prank became a decade-long institution that would shape American humor, launch careers in Hollywood, birth The New Yorker magazine, and establish a model for literary celebrity that persists today.

The Vicious Circle Takes Shape

The group that gathered for those daily lunches eventually gave themselves a name: The Vicious Circle. This wasn't false modesty—they were genuinely vicious. Their currency was the wisecrack, the devastating put-down, the bon mot sharp enough to draw blood. They competed to be the cleverest person in the room, and the room was stacked with some of the sharpest minds in New York.

At first, they met at a long rectangular table in the Algonquin's Pergola Room. As their numbers swelled and their reputation grew, the hotel's manager, Frank Case, moved them to the Rose Room and gave them a round table. They cycled through several names for themselves—first "The Board," then "Luigi Board" (after their waiter), and finally "The Vicious Circle"—but it was "The Round Table" that stuck, especially after a cartoonist named Edmund Duffy drew them sitting at their round table wearing medieval armor, like the knights of King Arthur's court. The image captured something essential: here was a new aristocracy, one whose power derived not from bloodlines but from wit.

The core members read like a who's who of 1920s American culture. Dorothy Parker, the diminutive poet whose devastating one-liners could wilt flowers, was the group's most quoted member. Robert Benchley, the humorist whose gentle absurdism masked genuine comedic genius, became her closest friend. Harold Ross would go on to found The New Yorker in 1925, a magazine that still publishes today. George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly wrote plays together that dominated Broadway. Edna Ferber penned novels like Show Boat and Giant. Robert Sherwood stood six feet seven inches tall and would eventually win four Pulitzer Prizes for drama—more than any other playwright in history.

Alexander Woollcott, the critic whose roasting had started it all, became the group's unofficial master of ceremonies, a role he relished with sometimes tyrannical enthusiasm.

How the Wisecracks Went National

Here's what made the Algonquin Round Table different from every other literary clique in history: they had a distribution network.

Several members—Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, Woollcott—wrote daily newspaper columns that reached millions of readers across the country. When Dorothy Parker quipped something memorable at lunch, it could appear in print by the next morning. When Kaufman delivered a devastating comeback, it spread from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles within days.

This created a feedback loop. The more the Round Tablers' witticisms appeared in print, the more famous they became. The more famous they became, the more pressure they felt to be witty. Some critics accused them of rehearsing their lines in advance, saving up bon mots during the week to deploy at the luncheon table. This was probably true. It was also beside the point. The result was a body of American humor that still makes people laugh a century later.

Consider Dorothy Parker's most famous line. Someone challenged her to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. Without missing a beat, she replied: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."

That joke has survived because it's genuinely clever—a triple play involving a pun, a literary allusion, and a subtle commentary on human nature. But it also survived because it was immediately printed in a newspaper column, then reprinted, then anthologized, then quoted in memoirs, then repeated at parties, then collected in books of quotations, then passed down through generations. The Round Table understood, perhaps before anyone else in American culture, that a joke needs distribution to achieve immortality.

Games People Play

The luncheons were only part of it. The Round Tablers were obsessed with games, and their game-playing created a second life for the group outside the Algonquin's walls.

On Saturday nights, many of them gathered at the hotel for poker. The game had a typically sardonic name: the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. ("Thanatopsis" is the title of a famous poem by William Cullen Bryant about the contemplation of death—the joke being that watching your money disappear across the poker table was a form of slow demise.) The regulars included Kaufman, Adams, Broun, Ross, and Woollcott, with occasional appearances by Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York World, and Harpo Marx, the silent Marx Brother who was anything but silent when not performing.

They played charades with such intensity that they gave it an ominous title: simply "The Game." They played a murder mystery parlor game they called "Murder." And they regularly decamped to Neshobe Island, a private island on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont that was owned collectively by several group members but ruled autocratically by Woollcott. His biographer charitably described him as a "benevolent tyrant," though the emphasis seems to have been on "tyrant." On the island, they would swim, play croquet, and continue their endless verbal sparring in a pastoral setting.

The practical jokes deserve special mention. They were elaborate, patient, and psychologically acute. Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant once conducted a weeks-long campaign against Woollcott involving a prized portrait he kept of himself. They secretly made several copies, each painted slightly more askew than the last, and periodically swapped them out while commenting innocently to Woollcott, "What on earth is wrong with your portrait?" By the time they were done, Woollcott was questioning his sanity. Then they quietly returned the original.

No Sirree! And the Birth of a Hollywood Career

Given their theatrical connections and competitive instincts, it was inevitable that the Round Table would eventually try to stage their own production. In April 1922, they mounted a one-night-only revue called No Sirree!, a parody of a popular European touring show called La Chauve-Souris.

The revue was a potpourri of in-jokes. The opening chorus featured Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams, and Benchley singing while the virtuoso violinist Jascha Heifetz provided intentionally off-key accompaniment from offstage. Dorothy Parker wrote a song called "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" that was performed by Robert Sherwood while Tallulah Bankhead and Helen Hayes served as chorus girls. There were parodies of Eugene O'Neill's gloomy dramas and A.A. Milne's whimsical plays.

Most of it has been forgotten. But one sketch launched a career.

Robert Benchley performed a piece called "The Treasurer's Report," in which he played a nervous amateur trying to deliver the annual financial report for some unnamed organization. His character was unprepared, easily flustered, and constitutionally incapable of staying on topic. The humor came from watching a basically decent person drown in the shallow waters of bureaucratic obligation.

The audience loved it. The sketch so delighted Irving Berlin that he hired Benchley to perform it nightly as part of the Music Box Revue, at the princely salary of five hundred dollars per week. In 1928, "The Treasurer's Report" was made into a short film—one of the first sound films produced in the Fox Movietone system. It launched Benchley's second career as a film comedian. He would eventually appear in more than fifty short films and features, becoming one of the most beloved screen personalities of his era.

Encouraged by the success of No Sirree!, the Round Tablers tried to repeat it with a professional production called The Forty-niners, funded by Kaufman and Connelly. It opened in November 1922 and closed after fifteen performances. The group's genius, it turned out, was best suited to lunch.

The Critics of the Critics

Not everyone was charmed by the Vicious Circle. Their very success invited backlash.

The mildest accusation was "logrolling"—the practice of exchanging favorable reviews and plugs among themselves. Since many Round Tablers were both critics and creators, the opportunity for mutual back-scratching was obvious. When Woollcott praised a Kaufman play, was it because the play was good or because they'd shared lunch the day before? When Adams quoted Parker in his column, was it because she was genuinely witty or because she was a friend? These questions never had satisfying answers.

Some critics thought the group was trivial. H.L. Mencken, the legendary Baltimore newspaperman whom many Round Tablers admired, dismissed them to fellow writer Anita Loos with characteristic venom: "Their ideals were those of a vaudeville actor, one who is extremely 'in the know' and inordinately trashy." James Thurber, who actually lived at the Algonquin Hotel and had a front-row seat to the proceedings, accused them of being consumed by their elaborate practical jokes at the expense of more serious pursuits.

Gertrude Atherton, in her 1923 bestseller Black Oxen, created a barely-disguised parody called "the Sophisticates" who met "at the sign of the Indian Chief," where they engaged in "a great deal of scintillating talk" while "appraising, debating, rejecting, finally placing the seal of their august approval upon a favored few." The satire stung because it was accurate.

Groucho Marx, whose brother Harpo was a regular at the poker games and occasional luncheons, never felt comfortable with the group. He captured something essential about their dynamic when he said: "The price of admission is a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto." For all their camaraderie, the Round Tablers could be cruel, and their cruelty wasn't always deployed in self-defense.

Dorothy Parker's Devastating Self-Assessment

The harshest criticism of the Algonquin Round Table came from one of its own.

Dorothy Parker, years after the group had dissolved, delivered a verdict that has haunted its legacy ever since:

These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them... There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth.

This is brutal, and it's worth sitting with. Parker is saying that while she and her friends were trading one-liners at the Algonquin, the real work of American literature was happening elsewhere. Hemingway was writing The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby. Faulkner was inventing Yoknapatawpha County. The Round Tablers, by contrast, were performing for each other—and their performances, however brilliant, left nothing behind but the echo of laughter.

Was she right?

What They Actually Accomplished

Parker's self-flagellation was probably too harsh, and it's worth taking stock of what the Round Table actually produced.

Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, and it remains one of the most influential magazines in American publishing. The magazine's sensibility—urbane, ironic, devoted to long-form journalism and fiction of the highest quality—was shaped by Ross's years at the Round Table. The founding contributors included several Circle members, and the magazine's early years were essentially a continuation of the lunchtime conversation by other means.

George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly collaborated on multiple Broadway hits, and Kaufman went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for drama. Robert Sherwood won four Pulitzers—still the record for a playwright—and later served as a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt. Edna Ferber won a Pulitzer for her novel So Big and wrote Show Boat, which became one of the most important American musicals. These were not trivial accomplishments.

Beyond the Pulitzers, the Round Table contributed something harder to measure: a style. They helped define a particular kind of American wit—fast, democratic, self-deprecating, with a sting in the tail. This wasn't the elaborate wordplay of Oscar Wilde or the philosophical irony of British humor. It was sharper, faster, more suited to the pace of urban American life. You can draw a straight line from the Algonquin Round Table to the writers' rooms of 1950s television, to Woody Allen, to Saturday Night Live, to Twitter.

And then there's Dorothy Parker herself. Her short stories, particularly "Big Blonde," are still read and taught. Her book reviews for The New Yorker, published under the pseudonym "Constant Reader," remain models of the form. Her poetry, particularly the darkly comic verses about suicide and heartbreak, captures something essential about the experience of being alive and disappointed. When Parker dismissed the Round Table as "loudmouths showing off," she was being unfair to herself.

The Long Fade

The Round Table didn't end with a bang. It faded, gradually, as its members moved on to other things.

By the early 1930s, the daily lunches had become irregular. Some members had moved to Hollywood for the new talking pictures. Others had married, or divorced, or taken jobs that left less time for midday socializing. The Depression changed the mood of the country; the carefree wit of the 1920s seemed out of step with a nation standing in bread lines.

Edna Ferber said she knew it was over when she arrived at the Rose Room for lunch one day in 1932 and found the group's table occupied by a family from Kansas. Frank Case, the Algonquin's manager who had hosted them for more than a decade, was asked what had happened. He shrugged and offered a typically New York reply: "What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street? These things do not last forever."

Some friendships endured beyond the dissolution. Parker and Benchley remained close until his death in 1945, though her increasingly strident left-wing politics created tension between them. But when the surviving members gathered after Alexander Woollcott's death in 1943, many of them realized something melancholy: they had nothing left to say to one another. The Round Table had been the thing that connected them, and without it, they were just people who had once been young together.

Legacy in Bronze and Film

The Algonquin Hotel has never stopped trading on its Round Table connection.

In 1987, the hotel was designated a New York City Historic Landmark, in recognition of the literary and theatrical figures who had gathered there. In 1996, the Friends of Libraries USA designated it a national literary landmark, specifically citing "The Round Table Wits." A bronze plaque on the front of the building commemorates the honor.

The Rose Room, where the Round Table actually met, was removed in a 1998 renovation. But the hotel commissioned a painting called "A Vicious Circle" by Natalie Ascencios, depicting the group at their famous table, and created a replica of the original table where visitors can sit. The hotel occasionally stages a musical production called "The Talk of the Town" in its Oak Room, keeping the memory alive for tourists and history buffs.

Hollywood has also kept the flame burning. In 1987, a documentary called The Ten-Year Lunch won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 1994, a dramatic film called Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker, told the story from her perspective, capturing both the glamour of those luncheons and the loneliness that surrounded them.

What The Round Table Teaches

A century later, what can we learn from a group of wits who gathered for lunch in a New York hotel?

The most obvious lesson is about the power of scene. Creative people need other creative people. They need places to gather, routines to anchor them, and rituals to shape their interactions. The Algonquin Round Table worked not because its members were individually brilliant—though many of them were—but because the group dynamic brought out something in each of them that they couldn't have accessed alone. Competition sharpened their wit. Audience demanded their best. Friendship provided the safety to fail.

But there's a warning in the story too. The Round Table became so focused on its own cleverness that it sometimes forgot to look outward. Parker was right that the real literary giants of the 1920s were doing their work elsewhere, often in isolation, grappling with deeper questions than "who can get the biggest laugh." The Round Table optimized for sparkle, and sparkle is wonderful, but it's not the only thing.

Perhaps the most poignant lesson is about time. The Round Table lasted roughly ten years—an eyeblink in the history of American letters, but an eternity if you were there. Those daily lunches must have seemed like they would go on forever. The friendships must have felt permanent. The jokes must have seemed worth saving for. And then one day the table was occupied by a family from Kansas, and it was all over.

Things do not last forever. But for a while, at a round table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel, some of the funniest people in America got together and made each other laugh. That's worth remembering.