The Algonquin Round Table was a lunch. It happened every day, at a round table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan, beginning in 1919 and continuing through most of the 1920s. The regular participants included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, Heywood Broun, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Franklin Pierce Adams, and a rotating cast of theatrical and journalistic New York. They ate, they drank, and they competed — primarily in the production of wit.
The Round Table is one of the most documented social groups in American cultural history, partly because its members were journalists and critics who wrote about each other constantly, and partly because the wit they produced has been anthologized and repeated for a hundred years. Dorothy Parker's one-liners have become the most quotable sentences in American literary culture. Benchley's comic essays and theatrical reviews shaped American humor. Harold Ross used the network to recruit writers for The New Yorker, which launched in 1925. The Round Table was, among other things, a talent pool for one of the most influential magazines in American publishing history.
But the Round Table was also, in a more fundamental sense, a friendship that used wit as its medium. The members knew each other's capabilities, competed to exceed them, and held each other to a standard that casual social life does not demand. The wit was not performance — or not only performance. It was a form of attention, a way of being present to the moment and to the other people in the room. The person who produced the best line was also, in that moment, the person who had paid the most attention to what was actually happening.
The Law 5 dimension of the Round Table is its culture of correction through comedy. The group's primary critical tool was not argument but ridicule — the precise, well-aimed observation that made a pretension visible or a failure undeniable. This is a form of revision: the social and cultural world around the table was continuously being examined, evaluated, and found wanting. The examination was funny, which made it tolerable, but it was also serious. The group took the quality of thought and expression seriously in a way that was expressed through, not despite, the humor.
The Round Table's limits are instructive. It was a group built on performance, and performance has a specific pathology: the need to be the wittiest person in the room can become its own kind of conformity, producing a style rather than a genuine engagement with ideas. The group made cultural commentary but rarely changed cultural policy. Its radicalism was aesthetic and rhetorical, not structural. Dorothy Parker's politics were to the left of most of her Round Table colleagues, and the gap between the lunch table's wit and any capacity for organized action was a source of genuine anguish for her. The Round Table was brilliant at seeing things clearly and saying them well. It was not built for the work of changing them.