Maria Bustillos awards the title to James Thurber:
Thurber abided in uncertainty and pain always, every minute, in his work and in his life, and though the pleasures he was able to enjoy and to transmit are all the more beautiful and delicate for their fragility, there's always been a tendency among casual American readers to take Thurber's hilarity as the point of his work. To see his comedy as shtick, rather than the dead serious moral philosophy that it really is. …
But it was Thurber who first opened the vein that later American humorists like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and Louie CK continued to mine.
These writers never cast off their essential seriousness, a deep sense of the gravity and precariousness of the human condition, but incorporate an antic humor into a larger worldview that is informed by grief and pain. We might put it this way: Thurber was the first American to turn terror into comedy, and that's why he's our Kafka. The difference is that if Thurber had written The Trial, Josef K. might easily have been set free on the whim of a drunken night porter and escaped into God knows what altered condition, as Walter Mitty does. The world of Thurber is both crazier and more lifelike than Kafka's, because in Thurber there is room for silliness and fun, for pleasant surprises, and luck, and the pleasures of imagination, love and beauty, and the chance of a meaningful interaction with another person—as well as room for fear, bewilderment and disaster.
Thurber's famous story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," is being adapted for film by Ben Stiller, but looking back at a previous adaptation, Bustillos doesn't have high hopes.
The Dish 