Delphi complete works of.., p.640
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 640
Such letters make a comparatively simple matter for an editor to distinguish between serious and light verse, because of the word “important.”
Incidentally, letters from poets who submit their work directly to a publication without the help of an agent are less indicative but are longer. Usually they are intimate, breezy affairs, that begin by referring to some previously rejected poem that the editor has forgotten about. They begin:
DEAR MR. — : Thanks so much for your friendly note. I have read over “Invulnerable” and I think I see your point, although in line 8 the word “hernia” is, I insist, the only word to quite express the mood. At any rate, here are two new offerings, “Thrush-Bound” and “The Hill,” both of which are rather timely. I suppose you know that Vivien and I have rented the most amusing wee house near the outskirts of Sharon — it used to be a well-house and the well still takes up most of the living-room. We are as poor as church mice but Vivien says, etc., etc., A poet who, in a roomful of people, is noticeably keeping at a little distance and “seeing into” things is a major poet. This poet commonly writes in unrhymed six-foot and seven-foot verse, beginning something like this:
When, once, finding myself alone in a gathering of people, I stood, a little apart, and through the endless confusion of voices...
This is a major poem and you needn’t give it a second thought.
E. B. White There are many more ways of telling a major poet from a minor poet, but I think I have covered the principal ones. The truth is, it is fairly easy to tell the two types apart; it is only when one sets about trying to decide whether what they write is any good or not that the thing really becomes complicated.
SYNDICATED LAUGHTER
A GREAT PART of the written humor of the hour finds its way to the reading public in the form of syndicated matter spread broadcast over a wide chain of newspapers. Syndication has become the art of a specialist. Its difficulty lies in the fact that there is wide range of jokes which a syndicate must not crack and funny ideas which it dare not mention, as witness the limitations of the departed days of Prohibition. But the strength of the process lies in the width of the appeal and the opportunity offered to a specialist editor for discovering and promoting writers of rising talent. Just such a specialist is my friend John N. Wheeler, to whose courtesy I am indebted for liberty to reproduce here a recent “release” of the Associated Newspapers from the pen of Mr. H. I. Phillips.
* * * * *
THE ONCE OVER
EXAMINATION FOR RADIO STUDENTS
(“Training for the profession of radio broadcasting is now a course at the University of Michigan.” — News item.)
1. — Write an essay not to exceed 150 words on the influence of popular dentrifices on the American art, music and literature. Include your opinion on the part played by shaving cream manufacturers in the development of American humor.
2. — Which of the following men do you think has had the greatest educational influence on the young?
Nicholas Murray Butler.
Joe Penner.
Will Durant.
Jack Pearl.
Walter Lippman.
3. — Name the authors of the following famous phrases or exclamations within the time limit specified after each:
“Yowsir!” (Two seconds.)
“Damn the torpedoes, go ahead!” (Two hours.) “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” (One-half day.)
“Wanna buy a duck?” (One-half minute.)
“If that be treason, make the most of it!” (Three hours.)
“Vas you dere, Sharlie?” (Three seconds.)
* * * * *
4. — Rate in the order of their importance in their influence on the American home the following noted persons:
George Washington.
Ed Wynn.
Lowell of Harvard.
Vallee of Yale.
Roosevelt and Garner.
Amos and Andy.
Ethel Barrymore.
Gracie Allen.
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Fred Allen.
5. — Write a 200-word treatise on the advantages of the hill-billy craze in giving employment to entertainers who have never been south of Fourteenth Street, New York City, in their entertainment careers, and state which instrument you think the American public is more familiar with, the grand piano or the musical saw.
6. — State whether you believe Ed Wynn has been greatly benefited in prestige by his affiliation with a well-known brand of gasoline, or whether you think the gasoline has been greatly benefited by the affiliation with Wynn.
7. — Study the following titles and see if you can correctly identify the persons associated with them within the time prescribed:
The Father of His Country. (Ten minutes.)
The Fire Chief. (One second.)
The Great Emancipator. (Fifteen minutes.)
The Old Maestro. (Fifteen seconds.)
H. I. PHILLIPS.
* * * * *
SYNDICATE SNAPSHOTS
ITINERANT
Some find their heart On a Capri isle; Oh, Cupid’s dart Goes many a mile.
Some find amorous, Ardent yen In a clamorous Five-and-ten.
In little gypsy
Tea roomsy few,
Becoming tipsy,
Strange maids woo.
* * *
Many the places where
Cupid struts —
When a writer of modern Songs goes nuts!
SAM MICHAEL GEVINS.
* * * * *
It looks as if the big munitions salesman is in for a tough winter and might wind up writing sentimental verse for the holiday greeting cards.
* * * * *
F. W. C. insists that after a trip over the country and a careful review of the American scene he thinks the buggy days are back.
* * * * *
GENU-(RE)-FLECTIONS
When a man picks on someone his own size he often becomes extremely modest in his own estimation of himself.
* * * * *
Poverty is a point of view; wealth is a view with alarm. * * * * *
Introspection is like peeking through the keyhole at a directors’ meeting: the room is too full of smoke to see anything.
% %
Johnson accused someone of having ants in his pants, but said nothing about the fellows with termites in their hats.
CHARLES CORWIN.
* * * * *
Add similes: As successful as a motorcycle cop selling tickets for the policemen’s ball.
* * * * *
WHY JOB SEEKERS GO MAD
“WANTED — Superintendent, 50 footer, 25 furnished apartments; #30 monthly. 1497 Times.” — New York Times.
* * * * *
Better bring your stilts.
* * * * *
George Sterney says everybody is wondering whatever became of Mahatma Ghandi. He thinks he famished into thin air.
* * * * *
(Copyright, 1935, by the Associated Newspapers.)
THE COLUMNIST
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO there used to flourish a clever type of journalist called a “penny-a-liner.” The designation meant that he could write readily and easily on anything and everything. He has been reincarnated within the last generation, at much higher rates, in the form of the “Columnist.” No metropolitan newspaper is complete nowadays without its quaint and amusing column of odds and ends, little jests and gentle aphorisms, about anything or nothing, so it be enveloped in an atmosphere of human kindliness. From the fever and fret of the day’s news one turns with relief to the “column” as one turns from the noise of the city to the seclusion of a shaded square. It is not so very long since B. L. T. (Bert Taylor) first began filling up an odd column for the fun of the thing in the intervals of his work as a reporter. Franklin P. Adams and perhaps one or two others began the same kind of thing at about the same time. They were at first like Iliads without a Homer. Now the work has expanded until the “American Columnists” begin to outrank in literature the Greek Sophists and the Welsh Bards and the Italian Cinquecentisti. Most of us think them better anyway.
To quote from “columns” is like exhibiting bricks to show a house. In a kindred book to this I have gathered together some samples of the real thing in column work which are here reproduced (with my permission).
* * * * *
“The Church cannot be holy on Sunday and worldly on Monday,” says Bishop Freeman, of Washington. Bishop, you’d be surprised.
MALCOLM BINGAY, Detroit Free Press.
One of those Earnest Minds writes me a circular letter wanting to know what 10 books I would enjoy reading most. Ten that I have not read.
M. B.
Minneapolis reports a seven-pound baby born to a 48 pound midget. Just a block off the old chip.
M. B.
Of course, the people could go and mine their own coal, and we suppose an elephant might rise his own peanuts.
DON MARQUIS.
Poetry is not what a poet creates. It is what creates poets.
D. M.
A gasoline war, now that prices are rising, is said to be imminent. Ho! for the stormy petrol!
FRANKLIN P. ADAMS.
A WREATH FOR WILL ROGERS
THESE SAMPLES of the humor of the hour may fittingly conclude with a tribute to Will Rogers, whose death came as a personal shock to the millions to whom his name seemed that of a merry companion. When Will Rogers met his sudden and tragic fate in an airplane disaster on August 16, 1935, the newspapers quoted in tribute to his memory some of the innumerable aphorisms and wisecracks of which he was the author. Among them were the following: * * * * *
A hotel was named after Rogers in Claremore, a six-story building which he boasted had more bathrooms than Buckingham Palace. “I use to envy General Grant and Jesse James because they had cigars named after them. But shucks now I’ve kinda got it on ’em.”
* * * * *
On being criticized once for the liberties he took with the rules of syntax he asked: “Syntax. What’s that? Sounds like bad news.”
When he found out it meant grammar, he laughed and replied: “Didn’t know they were buying grammar now. I’m just so dumb I had a notion it was thoughts and ideas.”
* * * * *
In referring to the English and the Americans, in his radio in celebration of the Silver Jubilee of the King and Queen May 6, 1935, he said: “We both have manners and customs that drive each other pretty near crazy and an American with a mouthful of chewing gum can get on your nerves (an Englishman) almost as much as an Englishman can with only one eye full of monocle can get on ours, but after all, neither commodity contributed to the success the nations have made.
“We will never have trouble with each other, England, you or us. We both have humor. If we started to fight, we would have to stop in the middle and start laughing at each other. I don’t know — you are naturally funny to us and we are like a mickey mouse cartoon to you.”
THE END
Humor and Humanity
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter I. ON THE NATURE OF HUMOR
Chapter II. THE EXPRESSION OF HUMOR: WORDS
Chapter III. THE EXPRESSION OF HUMOR: IDEAS
Chapter IV. THE HUMOR OF SITUATION
Chapter V. THE HUMOR OF CHARACTER
Chapter VI. COMIC VERSE: THE LIGHTER NOTES
Chapter VII. HUMOROUS POETRY: THE UNDERTONES
Chapter VIII. HUMOR AND CRAFTSMANSHIP
Chapter IX. HUMOR AND SUBLIMITY
PREFACE
THE AUTHOR HAS given to this book the title Humor and Humanity, rather than the obvious and simple title Humor, in order to emphasize his opinion that the essence of humor is human kindliness. It is this element in humor which has grown from primitive beginnings to higher forms: which lends to humor the character of a leading factor in human progress, and which is destined still further to enhance its utility to mankind.
STEPHEN LEACOCK.
McGill University.
Chapter I. ON THE NATURE OF HUMOR
HUMOR MAY BE defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof. This definition may be compared (to its advantage) with the famous dictum of Immanuel Kant that the ludicrous is “an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Kant’s idea seems to go off with a pop and vanish. Even Henri Bergson’s assertion that “the comic is something mechanical encrusted upon the living,” would leave some readers unsatisfied. Aristotle said that what is laughable is merely a subdivision of what is ugly, involving some defect that is not connected with pain or injury. Aristotle only said this as a casual remark in his Poetics, but it contains the essential element which the word kindly in the definition is meant to convey.
In any case it is difficult to make a definition of humor, or of wit or of the ludicrous, or any cognate terms, short enough for easy understanding, without leaving out important considerations. Thus humor, quite obviously, may mean either the expression in art (words, or pictures, or pantomime) of the incongruities of life, or the sense in us which enables us to express it. We can talk of a book of humor, or of the humor of the man who wrote it. As Kant would say, if we let him, the word is either objective or subjective. But the essence of the definition lies in the word ‘kindly,’ and the central theme in the present work is to show the development of this aspect of humor from ruder and more primitive beginnings to the higher reach and the deeper significance which it has now attained. But before we can come to that there is much ground to be traversed.
With honorable exceptions, books on humor are written by people who haven’t any. The work is left to writers on philosophy and psychology, and it is amazing how dull scientific people can be when they try. It is a tradition that they must not be bright. Our language is replete with the buried metaphors of such words as ‘depth,’ and ‘profundity’ and ‘weight,’ as terms of praise; and ‘superficiality,’ ‘lightness,’ etc., as terms of disparagement. They do not correspond to fact. The surface is the best thing to see. A lark sees more of the surface of the earth than the earthworm. For a broad view of anything we ought to need a ‘superficial’ man. In this way we talk of a ‘weighty argument,’ as if argument should be as heavy as a bag of cement, whereas in reality good argument should be as light as a high explosive.
Written over the portals of the library of a certain great university is the legend “Learning Maketh a Full Man.” It seems a very stodgy conception. It ought to make him light as air, able to hop like a humming bird among the flowers of scholarship. But popular fancy will not have it so. The scholar must be heavy, and full and dull, and the public will take him at his own estimate. Such a conception is seen in the heavy ‘doctors of divinity’ of the eighteenth century, to whom the poet Jemmy Thompson was referring when he described a “doctor of tremendous paunch, awful and deep, a black abyss of drink.” These men had replaced the lean ascetic scholarship of the monasteries, and had been left side-tracked when the newer men moved to the newer things, mathematics and natural science. To the yokels and squires about them they seemed ponderous and profound with unspoken thought. In reality they were probably too full in the evening and too sleepy in the morning either to say or to think a great deal. But they have left their mark upon our literature and our traditions in the cult of dullness which obsesses us. Learning should be bright and luminous, as cheerful as Sydney Smith, as optimistic as Leonardo da Vinci: gloom, like that of Carlyle, mostly means indigestion.
So, too, it has come about that even our laughter is decried. When the poet talked of the “loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind,” he meant to express approval — a mind free from care. But popular interpretation shifted the word vacant to mean idiotic. ‘Idle laughter’ is contrasted with ‘profound reflection,’ as if it were better to be puzzled than to be happy, to look inwards instead of outwards. When Gratiano says, “Let me play the fool!” his auditors think, “Certainly, you’re just the man fit for it.” Compare also, “Alas poor Yorick! I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest”: but Yorick is dead, and death covers all our faults. Fellows of infinite jest, when alive, are rated low.
Many people recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’s saying, so often quoted that it is always new: “The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. The wit knows that his place is at the tail of the procession.”
There was in the United States, in the days of Abraham Lincoln, a bygone Senator called Corwin — affectionately and for everybody — Tom Corwin. He was a great man and he knew it. He had the intellect and the energy and the goodwill to lead a nation: and he was aware of it. But the world didn’t know it, because Tom Corwin was always full of fun and valued a joke and a laugh more than solemn silence. Sometime before his end he left to the world the legacy of his leading thought. “The world,” he said, “has a contempt for the man who amuses it. You must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments on earth have been erected over the graves of solemn asses.”
What we are saying, then, is that people who sit down to write books on humor are scientific people, philosophical analysers who feel that they must make something serious, something real out of it, and show us that humor can, in the proper hands, be made as dull and as respectable as philology or epistemology.
Hence the elaborate analysis and the elaborate definitions and distinctions. One contemporary writer, for example, has a whole book to elucidate what ‘nonsense’ is and how to distinguish what is nonsensical from what is ‘ludicrous,’ or ‘ridiculous’ or ‘absurd’ or ‘funny’ or ‘comical.’ All these words run so closely together, with shades of meaning at once so obvious and so impalpable, like the blending colors of the rainbow, that it is as unprofitable as it is futile to try to reduce their meanings to a contrasted scheme of gradations. When Euclid says, “Which is absurd,” he doesn’t mean us to break into a roar of laughter. Is a ridiculous thing the same as a comical thing? It doesn’t matter. To what extent is a ‘funny’ man also a ‘witty’ man? Perhaps he is, and perhaps he isn’t. Is ‘ludicrous’ the same as ‘laughable’? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. One modern analyst of humor has a whole chapter on the “varieties of the laughable,” distinguishing twelve main divisions with three or four subdivisions of each. It appears that you can make a man laugh in about forty different ways, including tickling his ribs, telling him a dirty story, or informing him very suddenly that his wife has eloped.
