Delphi complete works of.., p.642
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 642
Yet it is not implied in this thesis that the movement of the humorous impulse or the expression of the humorous idea was in all cases consistently inspired by human kindliness. The original devil of malice was not so easily exorcized. It still survives. The development of humor was not always and exclusively of a refining character. One is tempted to think that perhaps the original source parted into two streams. In one direction flowed, clear and undefiled, the humor of human kindliness. In the other, the polluted waters of mockery and sarcasm, the ‘humor’ that turned to the cruel sports of rough ages, the infliction of pain as a perverted source of pleasure, and even the rough horseplay, the practical jokes and the impish malice of the schoolboy. Here belongs ‘sarcasm’ — that scrapes the flesh of human feeling with a hoe — the sardonic laugh (by derivation a sort of rictus of the mouth from a poison weed), the sneer of the scoffer, and the snarl of the literary critic as opposed to the kindly tolerance of the humorist. Not even death, if we may believe the spiritualists, terminates the evil career of the practical joker. He survives as the thing called a ‘poltergeist’ in German — or a something or other in English — a malicious noisy spirit, haunting for haunting’s sake, and unfortunately beyond the grasp of the law.
Yet undeterred by this malicious counterpart, humor goes upon its way, moving from lower to higher forms, from cruelty to horseplay, from horseplay to wit, from wit to the higher ‘humor of character’ (independent of the single phrase) and beyond that to its highest stage as the humor of life itself. Here tears and laughter are joined, and our little life, incongruous and vain, is rounded with a smile.
Chapter II. THE EXPRESSION OF HUMOR: WORDS
WE TURN FROM considering the general nature of humor to the question of its expression, which means the way in which it is ‘put over.’ Indeed, one may revert to etymology and say that the expression of humor means the way it is expressed, or ‘pressed out,’ like wine from grapes as it were. First we may discuss the humor got out of mere words, that is, incongruities found in the words themselves, probably the most primitive method of humor conveyed in language as apart from pantomime, gesture and action. When we see dogs at play we realize that they have reached the humor of action — elusive dodging, artful nipping of the hind leg, etc. This means more than the mere ‘learning to fight’ which some biologists see in it, a sort of survival quality to sustain the evolution of dogs. It has in it the quite different element of ‘fun,’ of nascent humor. But dogs never get beyond this. If they could start a series of funny barks, imitative barks, wrong kind of barks, and do barking for barking’s sake, that would be the dawning humor of words. But they don’t.
Primitive races must have begun very early to find incongruities in their first beginnings of speech that would make the first beginnings of verbal humor. The kind of languages that they used, agglutinative, and made of combinations of repeated monosyllables all alike till rearranged or ‘resung’ in a different way, would lend themselves to it. The Chinese language, still of this form, must be, if I understand it right, one enormous pun. It is as if one struck in English such combinations as “Let’s have a ship-shape shop!” Compare the rapid remark of the busy French butcher—”À qui sont ces saucissons-ci et à qui sont ces saucissons là?” or the immortal “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
Thus do we notice little children just beginning to talk mutter a word, and then fall to laughing at it. We are here witnessing the child repeat, as it does in all things, the evolution of the race. The little creature is back in Asia, fifty thousand years ago. It would be greatly to be desired that some properly equipped scholar should make an investigation and write a work on “Primitive Humor.” No doubt many scholars, anthropologists, have come very close to the topic: but the doubt is whether they are properly equipped. A blind man cannot write on sight.
From the point of view of the world of the last three thousand years, the world of written books, the earliest forms of ‘fun with words’ seem to be found in repetition, in rhythm, in alliteration, in double sense to single sound (puns), and in queer scholarly trickeries of language such as anagrams, acrostics, and crossword puzzles.
Repetition, saying a thing twice over — and ‘then some’ — is one of the oldest and most obvious methods of emphasis, of imitation and, in a sense, of amusement. We still revert to it very naturally when we talk of a ‘long, long way,’ a ‘big, big man’ or in the familiar ‘very, very’ so much used in England. One has the idea (quite unprovable) that this is more habitual in the Old World than the New — English people are more apt to talk of the ‘blue, blue sky’, lingering on its blueness, than we are in the New World. We make it blue and let it go at that, in too big a hurry for a second coat of color. But I think we lose something of the simple emphasis of repetition. Such a phrase as ‘my old, old friend’ is better than ‘my old friend, if he will permit me to call him so, having known him for forty, I think it is forty, years.’ Repetition is also used, and always has been, for imitation — such words as hippety-hop, clopin-clopant, bumpety-bump.
Repetition as used for whole phrases and apart from single words is also based on the principle of conservatism, of liking to meet an old friend again, or enjoying again a sensation once before enjoyed. Thus Homer keeps on saying “tell Hector with the waving plume,” though he could easily have distinguished him more briefly as T. W. Hector. There is a well-worn story of a curate who could not, apparently, grasp the excellence of this primitive principle of repetition which is nowhere better illustrated than in the Old Testament. Finding that the text of the Lesson he had to read kept repeating the words “harp, flute, sackbut, psaltery and dulcimer,” he substituted the phrase “the band as before.” That curate should have lived in Kansas.
But repetition used, so to speak, for ‘fun,’ was born early and has never died. How easily we reach out for such nicknames as Jo-Jo or Poppo-Poppo: how instinctively we accept such a combination as Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-eh, and how pleasant it is to know that there is actually an American newspaper that carries on its title-page “The Walla-Walla Wahoo, Walla-Walla, Wash.”
Repetition verges close on what may be called ‘rhythm,’ meaning combinations of words that have a special appeal by adding sound to sense. ‘Rhyme’ is of course the most obvious example, but metrical forms, and any combination of spoken sounds that please the ear, are of the same class. At times the sound used in speech imitates the sound of the thing discussed — onomatopoeic forms, as the grammarians called them. Rhythm is far more used for beauty than for humor, for harmony rather than for incongruity. But at times we get amusement out of sets of words for their very lack of rhythm — lucus a non lucendo. Compare, for example, Tom Hood’s line:
“Even is come and from the dark park, hark.”
Sometimes a set of syllables becomes so smooth and rhythmical and flows so easily that we can’t understand what they mean, which sets up an incongruity between the appearance of speech and the fact of unintelligibility.
“Didon dina dit-on du dos d’un dodu dindon.”
French lends itself especially to such over-rhythms as this, being, in spite of its beauty, a highly unintelligible language — at least to the dull Anglo-Saxon ear. When two comfortable middle-aged Frenchmen sit side by side in easy chairs in converse, it is hard for our ears to tell whether they are talking or just gargling.
In the highest class of comic verse (a theme which deserves a volume) the very ease of the rhythm becomes, as it were, a source of humor. No one excelled in this the late W. S. Gilbert, many of whose lines became laughable for what seems the very aptness, the inevitability, of the rhythmical effect.
“It’s grasped a better hand than yourn —
Come, gov’nor, I insist!”
The Captain stared! the bo’sun glared —
The hand became a fist!
(The Bab Ballads.)
People might well keep repeating “the hand became a fist” and chuckling over it, just as a baby chuckles over the words it learns to say.
The device of alliteration — the reappearance of one and the same letter — used as a means of emphasis or of amusement, seems also to go back as far as written language and no doubt further. The Anglo-Saxon used it in what they understood to be poetry. Lines of Cynewulf, ‘improved’ into modern English, read
Winsome is the wold theere: There the wealds are green,
Spacious spread below the skies; there may neither snow nor rain,
Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire, etc., etc.
The device, however, is as young as it is old. In America, at least, alliterative combinations are still created afresh, with every decade, with almost every day— ‘sob-sisters’ and ‘lounge-lizards’ and ‘boy-bandits,’ ad infinitum.
The alliterative newspaper heading has been used, and over-used, in America for a generation. An American newspaper man making up a title instinctively looks for alliteration. He cannot bear to write “Criminal Escapes”; he would sooner sacrifice some of the meaning and write “Vandal Vamps,” or “Dangerous Desperado Disappears.” It always defies analysis to see why alliterate headings should carry emphasis unless it is, or was once long ago, for the shock of surprise: and since then it is mere custom. It is easier to see why alliterative combinations are, or once were, ‘funny’: there is an evident incongruity of language, a piece of ‘fun with words.’
But of all mere devices of language the one that stands supreme through the ages, denounced and execrated but refusing to die, is the pun. Expellas furco, tamen usque recurrit. By a pun is meant the use of a word or phrase which has two meanings which the context brings into a glaring incongruity. Thus when Tom Hood writes of a veteran of the Peninsular War that he had “left his leg in Badajoz’s breeches,” we get at once a marvellous contrast and incongruity between what has happened to him, and what seems to have, but didn’t. The pun in and of itself is just a matter of words, vox et praeterea nihil, and this is why it has been so roundly and so soundly execrated. An execrable pun (the phrase clings to it) is one that has no other point to it than just the similarity of word sounds. “He who would make a pun would pick a pocket,” Dr. Johnson is said to have said but didn’t say, or didn’t say first. But a pun may have a saving grace as well. The combination may be so ingenious that the very ingenuity pleases. It tickles us, so to speak. Let us take in proof a well-known story. There was an heroic poem, by Thomas Campbell, on the battle of Hohenlinden (a.d. 1800) which caught the attention of the English world of that day and which began:
On Linden when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser rolling rapidly.
That’s the introduction, take that for granted. Now it happened that the witty someone-or-other, attempting to pay an evening call on his friend Campbell, and finding the stairway narrow and dark, slipped and fell with a great deal of clatter down the stairway. Campbell, hearing the noise, put his head out of his door at the top of the landing and called, “What’s that?” To which his falling friend called back, “I, sir, rolling rapidly.”
There is no sense in this, no philosophy or reflection, but the “cussed” ingenuity of it appeals to us. Take this further example.
It is related of the famous American humorist Bill Nye, who flourished at a time when puns were still permitted, and even enjoyed in America, that he was once introduced to Sir Mackenzie Bowell (rhyming with howl), a leading Canadian statesman of the day, and asked him very modestly if he was one of the “Bowels of Compassion, Ohio.” There is no sense in this, no meaning and no depth; and perhaps there never were any Bowels of Compassion, Ohio, anyway. But the parallel of sound is so ingenious and so complete that it appeals. Indeed, as will presently be seen in the case of anagrams, it seems as if the appreciation of ingenuity and the sense of amusement lie close together. This may well be, because ingenuity performing the impossible sets up a sort of natural or physical incongruity. We laugh when we see a conjurer make a billiard-ball vanish from his hand, or take a half-crown piece out of a boy’s ear. Similarly we laugh at each new and ingenious little machine — for instance the latest American one in which you stand on a platform, drop in a nickel, and the machine, thirty seconds later, hands you a framed photograph of yourself. In each case custom presently makes stale the effect and laughter dies. If a man fell down our stairs every morning and said, “It’s I, sir, rolling rapidly,” he would get tiresome. But while the novelty of the ingenious effect lasts it carries amusement.
But very often a pun has a much higher saving grace than mere ingenuity. It carries with it a further meaning. It becomes a subtle way of saying something with much greater point than plain matter-of-fact statement. Indeed, it often enables one to say with delicacy things which would never do if said outright.
Compare the writings of the Middle Ages in which dialogues as between animals represented talk which one dared not ascribe to prelates and cardinals. You can say in a barnyard what you had better not say in a court. Compare also the veiled writings of the eighteenth century in letters from Persia, or stories of Abyssinia as used to criticize the uncriticizable institutions of France or England. So with the pun as a form of polite satire where direct attack would be uncivil and displeasing. One thinks here of the famous and often-quoted pun of the Rev. Sydney Smith when he said to his fellow-canons of St. Paul’s Cathedral who were discussing the question of a wooden side-walk round the edifice. “Come, gentlemen, lay your heads together and the thing is done.” Observe that the pun itself is buried in the two meanings of the word wooden. But if Dr. Smith had said, “Gentlemen, you canons are a wooden-headed interminable lot of bores,” it would convey the same truth but with an unpermissible directness.
All the really best puns are of this last class; and on such a footing the pun deserves to survive and does survive in England, though to an American editor a pun is as a red rag to a bull. Strangely enough, the puns of the greatest punster who ever punned in England, Thomas Hood, were almost entirely of the cheapest class, the execrable puns with no second meaning to save them. Hood himself once wrote in exculpation —
However critics may take offence
A double meaning has double sense.
Yet the great mass of his puns have only a double sound without any second meaning of sense. Take, as proof, some of those most quoted: “He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell” . . . “A cannon ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms” . . .
Puns are of great antiquity, although the word itself is new, is English only and quite lost as to its etymology. It seems to have been in more or less frequent use from about the time of Queen Anne, but where it came from no one knows. Scholars tell us that it may be the Welsh word pun which means ‘the same.’ But then again it may not. It is also possible that it connects with ‘point’ and ‘punctilio’; also that it doesn’t.
Oddly enough, the pun can be used in a sense that is rather derisive than humorous. It was said above that the original stream of humor of exultation and demolition changed, or rather divided into the separate channels of kindly humor and cruel humor. So it would seem that the play upon words can be used not to create a laugh but to intensify the emotions of contempt. This may be — or it may not be — the explanation of Shakespeare’s use of puns at critical moments of a drama. “Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old.” John of Gaunt is not trying to be funny, nor, presumably, is Shakespeare. Gaunt is getting bitter about himself and ‘rubbing it in’ by taking a crack even at his very name. So with the famous ‘pun,’ if we dare call it so, made by Pope Gregory about the little English boys sold in the Roman slave market. “Non Angli sed Angeli.” In that charming book In Pursuit of Laughter (1936) we read: “Of course it is a pun and a very good one. But its note of profound and prophetic sympathy has done much more than its wit to keep it alive for thirteen hundred years.” In other words, the play of sound is used for point not for humor.
This is a matter which would readily admit of further study. If this little book, having the dignity of forming part of a university library, is used by students seriously interested, one might suggest that a thesis On the Literary Use of Puns would be a valuable field of study. But no doubt the answer is that a German has already written it.
The punster pays the full penalty, and even more than the full one, that has been seen to attach to humorous writers as opposed to those without humor. People won’t ‘take him seriously.’ Thomas Hood, who started his Comic Annual in 1830, aspired more and more to be a satirist of public affairs, a champion of good causes, as witness his matchless Song of the Shirt published in the Christmas Punch of 1843, and since become a part of the history of England. Here is a poem undisfigured by any incidental and inappropriate puns. But with most of Hood’s work the case was otherwise and he found it more and more difficult to get himself taken seriously. The fact that he crowded even his serious essays with puns, spoiled his work for serious acceptance. To write with humor is bad enough. But to write with puns goes too far. Even Sydney Smith, whose puns were few and far between, as mere occasional fireworks, but whose humor was like a sustained glow of heat, found it hard to get himself accepted at full value. “Now I can do something for Sydney Smith,” said Lord Grey when the Whigs came in in 1830. But he found that Sydney Smith was not the stuff of which bishops are made.
But there is perhaps a special reason why punsters, not humorists at large, should pay this penalty. The law often goes on the principle that an example must be made: military law starts from this idea: and in the courts of Kentucky, we are informed, it is a maxim of law that it is better that a hundred innocent men should be hanged rather than that one guilty one escape. So with the punsters. Common observation shows that his activity is a menace to society. It runs easily to a sort of mental degeneration in which the unhappy victim tries to make puns all the time, hears only sounds and not ideas, his mind as vacant as a bell waiting for its clapper. Many people hate the idea of drinking because of drunkards — and so do many hate puns because of punsters. Poetic justice therefore warns them in time.
