1898–1971 · Random House co-founder, joke anthologist, What's My Line? panelist
Bennett Cerf co-founded Random House in 1927 with Donald S. Klopfer and became its best-known public face, but a much larger audience knew him from the television panel show What’s My Line?, on which he appeared from 1951. His fame outside publishing rested on humour: Try and Stop Me (1944), Shake Well Before Using (1948) and a long run of similar collections. Those books were compilations — anecdotes, puns and gags gathered from other people and older printed sources, with Cerf credited on the 1944 volume as its compiler. That is precisely how this definition reached his column, and why his name on it settles nothing about who wrote it.