Delphi complete works of.., p.609
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 609
But for the moment turn to the other class, the far smaller class, of funny stories. In these the story is amusing all through, not the end alone but the steady current of the narrative. We laugh as we listen. In the case of the nub story, the listener agonizes and then explodes. With the other kind he comes to a boil and stays there. The story is interesting, and even amusing, all through, without waiting for the nub, by reason of something in the setting and the circumstance. Here is an excellent example for the authenticity of which I can give a personal guarantee. I reproduce the story as I heard it told by my gallant and witty friend Major Charlie Greenshields of the Montreal bar. He said:
I was coming on the train the other day from Toronto to Montreal and was in the Pullman smoking room talking with three or four fellows. At Kingston Junction a man got in, a very quiet man, he seemed, and sat down and lit a pipe.
Then someone said, “I beg your pardon. You’re Allison, aren’t you?”
The man said “yes,” and then everybody fell silent because the fellows all knew that Allison is the hangman.
Then the fellow who had spoken before said, “You’ve been up at Kingston for—”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence because the fellows all knew that a man had been hanged there that day at Kingston.
“Yes,” the hangman said, “at eight o’clock this morning.”
“Everything go all right?” asked the other man.
“Yes, first rate, no hitch at all.”
Meantime the porter of the car had come along and stood listening in the doorway, his mouth wide open with interest, his eyes popping, his ears on end.
“I was a little afraid about it,” the hangman went on. “You see” — and here he looked round at the crowd and spoke in a more confidential tone— “I generally size up a man, pretty accurately, his height and his weight and all that, so as to get the drop right.”
There was a murmur of “yes,” “yes,” all round, in a sort of awestricken tone.
“But this was different,” said the hangman “this was a colored man—”
The porter fairly jumped in his tracks.
“A coloured man, about the size of the porter there, in fact much the same build—”
A perfect convulsion shook the porter. He fairly gasped. His eyes were glued on the hangman. He felt himself on the scaffold.
“However,” the hangman concluded in a reassuring tone, “everything went all right — fine.”
With that he sat back and went on smoking.
All the rest of the trip the nigger hung round the hangman, fascinated; passed the matches to him; wiped the window sill; picked up anything he dropped. At the end of the journey he came and dusted him off, as gently as if he were a museum specimen.
“Here,” said the hangman, giving him a quarter, “you’ve certainly been most attentive. I hope I see you again.”
“And if you do, boss,” said the nigger, quivering with anxiety, “Ah hope it’ll be in a Pullman car.”
There: that story in a college course on humor could be made the subject of an entire lecture. Observe the extraneous interest that is lit up at once, like a lamp, by the fact that the incoming passenger is a hangman — an interest that rekindles when he speaks of the technical aspect of his profession. Notice that the amusement doesn’t have to wait for the end. It begins with the first appearance of the porter, and it is clinched and driven home by the final stroke at the end.
Of course such a story is still further heightened when narrated by a finished raconteur, such as is my friend. A few appropriate gestures and we see the spasms of the porter; the lolling of a tongue for a fraction of a second suggests the expression of his face; a change and a drop in tone calls up the hideous fascination of a hanging; the plain casual, louder, words, “a man like the porter there,” bring a sort of instant comic relief.
Yet even with ordinary narration such a story ranks a long way up.
But observe how a third-class story teller could smash it up.
He begins:
“I was on the train the other day from Toronto to Montreal — well, as a matter of fact I only got on at Belleville, but that’s neither here nor there — or wait, now, was it Belleville? Well, anyway it doesn’t matter,—”
Chorus, of listeners: “No, no, it doesn’t matter.”
The story teller continues:
“Well, when we got to Kingston Junction — the Canadian National you know doesn’t go right into Kingston; there’s a little shuttle train runs up and down—”
“Oh, yes, and say!” breaks in one of the listeners, “they say they’re going to cut out that shuttle train altogether.”
“What’s the idea?” asks someone else.
“Oh, they say nearly all the people ride up and down in their motor cars anyway, and so they’ll just leave it for the private cars and the taxis. Isn’t it a caution the way the motor cars are killing the local traffic? You know that radial line that goes up to Jackson’s Point, well — but I’m afraid I’m interrupting your story.”
“No, no,” says the story man, “it’s all right.”
“Well, I was just saying that they’re going to take those electric cars off, that’s all. But go on with your story.”
“Well,” resumes the story teller, “when we got to Kingston Junction—”
And with that he is off on the second lap: in time he’ll finish.
Even where a story depends mainly on the nub and would get along with nothing else except plain narration, the story is lifted into a higher class when told by a comedian or raconteur capable of embellishing it. A good example is offered by a story that was for uncounted nights related by my worthy friend Al Jolson from the stage of the Winter Garden Theater in New York. It was afterward so widely repeated that no doubt most readers have heard it. But it is re-introduced here in the interests of science. This is the story:
A certain wealthy Jew came to Harvard University to enter his son as a student. He was especially anxious to have him taught to speak English correctly and without a Yiddish accent. “I vant him taught the way you spigg here,” he said, “and I vant you should take him in hand yourself and give him brivate instructions.” “Well,” said the Harvard professor of English, speaking with that large, cultivated accent that marks the place and the subject, “I shall certainly be glad to do so. We rather flatter ourselves here on our English.”
The Jew went away and returned a few months later.
“Vell!” he asked, “and how is my boy getting on mid his English?”
“Oh,” said the professor, “he is megging brogress, goot brogress. I togg mid him effery day.”
The story is a good one in any case, and almost story-teller-proof. But with a masterly imitation of voices and accents it reaches to the highest class.
This shows the reason why the “dialect” stories flourish — the Jewish stories, the Negro stories and the Irish stories. Apart from the particular point or climax, they offer the amusement of the accent; they draw, in other words, upon the domain of “fun with words” in which belong puns and parodies, bad spelling, spoonerisms and all such. Like all these, they become infinitely tiresome when badly done, far worse than simple honest conscientious narration ever can be. Anyone can listen with tolerance and forgiveness to an honest narrator of a story, merely trying to get it over, for its own sake, with no pretense of art. But the narrator imitating a Jew or pretending to be a nigger, steps on to other ground. He’s trying to be funny himself. People resent it if he can’t do it. It is the penalty paid by unsuccessful art. Nor does good intention condone it. A man may do his damnedest to play the trombone, and yet excite anger.
All of which serves to introduce some of the chief faults and fallacies to be noted and avoided in telling funny stories.
Fallacy No. 1 — The Pointless Story
It often happens that the narrator, fascinated by his own actual recollection of what happened, does not realize that he is quite unable to convey it. So he puts the story over, without the point.
I remember a particular instance of this in the case of Jim Thorpe, a hotel man in my native village — proprietor and bar-keeper both, as they used to be in the old days of the country tavern. Jim would stand endlessly wiping up the beer on the bar, and listening to the boys talk, and joining in. One day somebody casually mentioned a certain Dr. Bentley.
“Well, sir,” said Jim, pausing in his wiping, “the Doc’s a pretty smart man on the uptake. He always comes back at ’em pretty quick. I had to laugh here yesterday when he came in and some of the boys was here and Bill Thayer began to gag Doctor on that old horse of his. ‘Well, Doc,’ he says, ‘I hear your horse is going to run against J. I. C.’ That’s the horse you know that won out last week.”
“And what did the Doctor say, Jim?” asked the boys.
“Well, sir, he just up as quick as that and sez he — Well I forgot just what he said, but he give him a good answer!”
My bygone friend’s failure only represents, reduced to its simplest form, the failure of countless attempts at narrating something funny from actual experience. The fallacies lie in thinking that, because a thing was funny in actual fact, the mere assertion that it was funny will make it so. Women especially fall into this error.
Example: Amusing Incident related a million times by a million girls, the words in parentheses representing the thoughts of the listener.
We had such a funny experience when we were traveling in Wales, one afternoon when we went for a climb on Plingommon. Half way up the mountain there was the funniest little cottage and sitting outside it the funniest old couple you ever saw. You’d have died laughing at them.
(Would I? I doubt it.)
The old man was simply too amusing. We asked him how much further it was to the top of Plingommon, and he put his hand up to his ear and said, “Eh what?” in the queerest way. It was just a scream.
(It must have been.)
So we asked the little old woman and all she could say was, “O! aye!”
It was simply killing.
(Yes, I feel dead already.)
Sometimes, however, the very pointlessness of a story may be turned into point, and the sheer utter emptiness of it make it incongruous and funny. Thus:
“Your mention of Ventnor,” said the retired Anglo-Indian colonel to his assembled friends at the dinner table, “reminds me of a most — er — extraordinary — er — coincidence in my own life, connected — er — with it. I went down there years and years ago with my — er — wife on our — er — er honeymoon. We were swimming in the sea just beside the — er — jetty and my wife dropped her ring and it fell into the — er — water and we tried and tried and simply couldn’t find it. Well, we were in — er — India for years and years and when we came home last year we went down again to — er — Ventnor. And my wife said — er— ‘Why this is where I lost my ring just beside the — er — jetty. Do let’s see if we can find it.’ So just in a spirit of — er — bravado, so to speak, we went and fished round among the — er — shingle, the loose stones, you know.”
“And you found it?” asked a listener.
“Er — no, we didn’t; extraordinary thing; we — er looked all over, and we didn’t — er — find it. Coincidence, wasn’t it?”
I acknowledge this story as the personal property of my gifted ex-colleague Professor Whitnall of McGill University. He is able to narrate it with a running accompaniment of sputterings something like the noise of a bathroom tap half full of air, which he assures me is the sound made by a retired Anglo-Indian colonel.
A similar pointlessness is found in the unsuccessful attempt to make the story interesting by reason of its setting. This is the converse of the hangman story quoted above. The case is often seen where the supposedly funny story is told about illustrious or aristocratic people, the result being utterly flat. I have elsewhere applied to these stories the name of “aristocratic anecdotes.” Once the type is understood there is no trouble in reproducing them. But there is no need to make them up. They can be found in any quantity in any book appearing with such a title as Twenty Years at the Court of Queen Isabella Maria Amelia, by Lady de Wish-Wash; Crowned Heads I Have Knocked Together, by Colonel the Hon. Fitzfizzle Bang; Inside the Yildiz Kiosk, by Major Sneak; and Downing Street from the Back, by “Scrutinax.”
Here are a couple of samples of such stories, taken from a bygone book of mine which a few people may still remember with kindliness.
I — Anecdote of the Duke of Strathythan
Lady Ranelagh writes:
“The Duke of Strathythan — I am writing of course of the seventeenth Duke, not of his present Grace — was, as everybody knows, famous for his hospitality. It was not perhaps generally known that the Duke was as witty as he was hospitable. I recall a most amusing incident that happened the last time but two that I was staying at Strathythan Towers. As we sat down to lunch — we were a very small and intimate party, there being only forty-three of us — the Duke, who was at the head of the table, looked up from the roast of beef that he was carving, and, running his eye about the guests, was heard to murmur, ‘I’m afraid there isn’t enough beef to go round.’
“There was nothing to do, of course, but to roar with laughter, and the incident passed off with perfect savoir-faire.”
II — Tenderness of A Queen
Lady de W. writes:
“My dear mistress, the late Queen of Saxe-Covia-Slitz-in-Mein, was of a most tender and sympathetic disposition. The goodness of her heart broke forth on all occasions. I well remember how one day, on seeing a cabman in the Poodel Platz kicking his horse in the stomach, she stopped in her walk and said, ‘Oh, poor horse! If he goes on kicking it like that he’ll hurt it.’ ”
But quite apart from Pointlessness, or missing out the Point, there are plenty of other ways of killing a funny story. Among these is (2) the Fallacy of Running Corrections.
In this terrible type of narration the speaker keeps correcting himself, and appealing to his memory for reconsideration. Thus:
I was traveling last winter in Scotland (he says), and we came to a little place in the Highlands, Bally-hooly — or, wait a bit, was it Bally-hooly? No, I don’t believe it was. Wait a bit, I’ll get it in a minute, Ballycooly, that’s it, Ballycooly.
We were to take the ferry there to go across Loch Hooch into Loch Haggis — or, no, I believe it was the other way from Loch Haggis into Loch Hooch — or is it the other way? Well, anyway it was either from Loch Hooch into Loch Haggis or from Loch Haggis into Loch Hooch — it doesn’t really matter which it was —
Quite so. It doesn’t really matter. But unfortunately the narrator doesn’t realize this till the story — even if it amounts to one — is killed to death.
Very similar is (3) the Fallacy of the Needless Introduction. It is the art of a good story teller that he knows where to begin; the fault of the bad story killer is that he doesn’t. The bad story teller is so afraid of leaving anything out, so afraid of not getting the setting of the story properly presented that his story is all beginning and little or no end. The habit and custom of a long introduction has come down to us from other and more leisurely times. We have no time for it now.
It was the custom of Sir Walter Scott to open his novels with a vast chapter called Introduction. But when he had written it he generally felt that he was beginning the thing too suddenly. So he put in front of it a chapter called Preliminary; and, when even that seemed abrupt, he set before it what he called a Prologue. This, with a Preface to precede it, served to start the story off.
Now this was all right for Walter Scott’s novels. It was like digging a deep foundation for a vast structure. It was like the gradual kindling of a blazing fire whose warmth is to go in all directions. Readers who survived the introduction — and in Scott’s day all readers did — got their reward in the deep absorption that grew upon them as the story developed. Readers in those days read little but read deeply. A few books covered a lifetime. Readers now read much and thinly. In the old days the reader’s mind was saturated by what he read; now it is just a thin coat of varnish over his bald head.
Scott has paid the penalty. Modern readers, nine out of ten, and even ten out of nine, have no time for him. Those who have, find the absorption still there.
But what applies to Walter Scott will not apply to the telling of a funny story. To preface it with a long introduction is as cruel as it is unkind. Yet many story tellers cannot help putting in the introduction.
Thus, suppose one of these unlicensed and incompetent story tellers wants to tell you any one of the stories quoted above. He begins it like this:
I heard a good story the other day. I was driving over to Guelph — it’s quicker, you know, than going on the train because you cut across country. I guess you must save twenty miles. But we had a lot of trouble with the engine (my brother-in-law was with us) and neither of us know much about an engine. So at last we laid the car up in a garage and decided to go on in a bus. There is a bus, you know that we could get on the old Dundas Road (at least partly on the old Dundas Road). At any rate we decided to take it. But by this time it was getting late and I looked at my watch and I said to my brother-in-law “By jove, it’s getting late. I think we’d better go in and get some food in the hotel.” So anyway we went in to get some food; and there at the table was a man that I know as well as I know you, though I’m hanged if I can think of his name. However, he’d only just begun dinner, so Will and I sat down beside him and we got talking and he told us what seemed a darned funny story — but perhaps you’ve heard this —
And with that, after being assured about a dozen times that you haven’t heard the story, he tells it. Which introduces another Fallacy in story killing familiar to every sufferer, — (4) the Fallacy of Asking Whether the Listener Has Heard It Before. Don’t ask whether he has heard it. He won’t say so anyway. Here’s an example:
I heard a darned funny story last night — I don’t know whether you have heard this. There was an Irish soldier came home from serving in India — have you heard this? — and he went to the pension office wherever it is — have you heard this? — to see if there was any back pay or pension or whatever it was coming to him; and in the office was a very pompous sort of chap with a gold eyeglass — have you heard this? — and Pat says to him — but perhaps you’ve heard this —
