Delphi complete works of.., p.654
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 654
Have you heard of the dreadful fate
Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?
Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life;
Ashtabula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died
Without a thought that destruction
Would plunge them ‘neath the wheel of tide.
I quoted that passage as an illustration in my larger work on the present subject and often referred to it in public lectures, but I quote it here again for a special purpose. When I was lecturing in Chicago a few years ago, I quoted the fate of ‘P. P. Bliss and wife’ to what seemed the great hilarity of the audience. After the lecture, at supper, a grave, elderly gentleman said to me, “I was interested in your reference to the Ashtabula Bridge Disaster. I lived in the town as a young man at the time. Poor Bliss! I knew him quite well. He suffered terribly.”
With that, for me, all the comicality of the poem was lost in the horror of the reality. I could feel what it was that the crude words and ill-assorted epithets of the Michigan ‘poetess’ were meant to convey. Again I realized one cannot joke with death. For some time after I couldn’t refer even to the death of Rameses of Egypt, except to say, “I see poor Rameses is gone.”
This incident is not related here for any personal interest, but in order to enforce again the canon of taste, Let humor keep to its bounds.
But to turn again from the back-water of poetry comically and super-comically bad, into the broadening main stream of humor in verse that we have followed from its remoter sources. We see it here widening and expanding into a larger ocean of human thought as the St. Lawrence, flecked with wind and sunshine, widens to the sea. The final stage of its course is where humor broadens in its outlook till it becomes one with pathos and reflection, joining tears and laughter. Throughout this little work the main stress of emphasis is on that point: humor represents in its history and in its current analysis — lengthwise in time or sidewise in a cross-section of the hour — an ascending series at the bottom of which are guffaws and malice and primitive simplicity, and at the top are smiles and tears and eternity.
The humor that lies in this highest class, as seen in verse, is not of necessity the best known, nor the best. It is the quality of the class that is high, the level, but not of necessity the sample. More beautiful flowers may grow at a lower altitude, but none with quite the serenity.
Examples are always best for explanation. Here is what is meant by humor in verse of the sublime quality. Take this drinking song:
Drink to me only with thine eyes;
And I will pledge with mine,
Or leave a kiss within the cup;
And I’ll not look for wine.
Or try this pleasant invocation addressed to youth and urging early marriage:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may;
Old Time is still a-flying,
And that same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow may be dying.
Both of these (from Ben Jonson and Herrick) carry us back to the seventeenth century: they seemed in that age to reach out so easily for this effect, at least the cheerier people did. Cromwell and his Ironsides would have preferred Julia Moore of Michigan. But the seventeenth century had no monopoly. Listen to Robert Burns when he begins:
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring prattle!
Nor has the old world a monopoly, nor a past age. No one, I think, since the seventeenth century at any rate, ever caught this mood and its expression better than Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Boston, and of all the world. Those who do not know should read forthwith the poem that begins:
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone would do) —
The kind of humor that is here described seems to me to reflect the humor of the highest culture, the humor of the future. Its distinction is its kindliness. It does not belong to the literature of effort, of strong convictions and animating purpose. It is rather that of disillusionment, of loss of faith, and of the wide charity of mind that has come with the shattering of narrower ideals, not yet replaced. I will quote in conclusion and at some length one further example from Oliver Wendell Holmes, not well known but typifying exactly what is here described. It is obviously humor: you can prove it: yet it is sad: but not so terribly sad: full of reflection yet expressed so easily, so lightly.
Come, dear old comrade, you and I
Will steal an hour from days gone by,
The shining days when life was new,
And all was bright with morning dew,
The lusty days of long ago,
When you were Bill and I was Joe . . .
You’ve won the great world’s envied prize,
And grand you look in people’s eyes,
With H.O.N. and L.L.D.
In big brave letters, fair to see, —
Your fist, old fellow! off they go! —
How are you, Bill? How are you, Joe? . . .
Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?
A fitful tongue of leaping flame;
A giddy whirlwind’s fickle gust,
That lifts a pinch of mortal dust;
A few swift years, and who can show
Which dust was Bill and which was Joe? . . .
No matter; while our home is here
No sounding name is half so dear;
When fades at length our lingering day,
Who cares what pompous tombstones say?
Read on the hearts that love us still,
Hic jacet Joe. Hic jacet Bill.
Chapter VIII. HUMOR AND CRAFTSMANSHIP
YOUNG PEOPLE WHO have an inborn talent for drawing or music are sent, if they are lucky enough, to professional schools. No matter how great their native ability, it is presumed that it can be enlarged and developed by precept and practice. It is not derogatory to a person who paints that he tries to do it and doesn’t do it by accident, that he does it of set purpose, and even in part for an ulterior motive. But there is no such general attitude towards the production of ‘humor,’ using the word objectively to mean humorous writing, talking or drawing. Humor is supposed to grow as a wayside flower without cultivation.
In a sense, and within limits, it is of course true that all art should be of this character. It is contaminated the moment it is connected with a money return, with an ulterior purpose, with limitations imposed by ‘adaptability’ to a particular periodical, and even perhaps the minute it is connected with paid teaching and studied effects. But all that is only a part of the imperfection of the world in which we live. Art cannot be entirely free and self-prompted and self-inspired. The mediæval poet Hans Sachs said that he sang as the birds did, without pay. But most of us are not birds. In any case it is probable that human talent, like human character, needs the sharp stimulus of compulsion. Art cannot be left to inspiration, nor letters to the happy flow of ink. Those who know academic life will know how many of the academic class dream away their lives, still talking of the work they mean to do and at the end fall asleep, babbling, like Falstaff, of the green fields of literature. Even with humor, which seems as spontaneous as the flight of a hummingbird, effort and purpose help achievement. There is no need, then, that humor should be left as a wayside flower. Humor — meaning the feeling of it — can be intensified by cultivation, and humor, meaning the expression of it and conveyance to others, can be taught, and native faculty heightened by effort and instruction. Personally I am quite sure that if I gave a course of lectures on the practice of humor, the students would go away from it, if not better men, at least funnier.
In a little manual like the present, it is not possible to do more than indicate a few general principles that are of use in learning to express humor in words. Students who wish to go further may refer to the larger work on the subject by the author of this volume (Humour: Its Theory and Technique). For a definite study-book on a college pattern, there is the new and excellent manual by Mr. A. A. Thomson, Written Humour. But without venturing so far into the subject readers may see much through the open gateway. In the first place humorous writing demands a very exact knowledge of the value of words, of the mot propre, or of using the right word in the right place. What is still harder, the student must learn to use the wrong word in the right place, as when old Mr. Ballou, as seen above in a preceding chapter, called his fellow Westerner a ‘logarithm.’ Our English language as a consequence of its peculiar origin, its very much mixed ancestry, has a wealth of terms not known to any other tongue, ancient or modern. We can say a thing with Saxon words, or we can say it with Latin words, or we say it with words that have drifted to us from Rome by way of France. Each kind has its peculiar force. The Saxon words carry a more intimate feeling — like home, and heart and hearth, and convey the images of nature, the sunrise, the dawn, the daylight and even-song and dark. Latin seems to have something harder about it, but definite and exact like a steel frame. It makes verbs of great precision — to deliberate, to expostulate, to terminate, or terms that obstinately keep even their absolute Latin form to hold a technical use, such as status quo. One recalls again the Lawyer’s Lullaby that begins, “Be still, my child, remain in statu quo, while father rocks the cradle to and fro.”
Note the beautiful word ‘lullaby’: we could say also, ‘cradle-song,’ or ‘epithalamion.’ But when you want to make an armistice or draw up a contract a ‘status quo’ is better than a ‘lullaby.’ Compare ‘alias’ with one fixed and ‘otherwise’ with a dozen loose ones: or try to find Anglo-Saxon for an alibi. With the Latin we have a lot of Greek words, swallowed whole as they came to us, like ‘hypothesis’ as a double for ‘supposition.’ Then there is the class of words that passed by way of French or Provençal which seem to be distinguished as it were by their ‘distinction’; they are polite words such as ‘embassy’ and ‘embroidery’ and ‘tapestry,’ ‘surveillance’ (as compared with ‘invigilate’ and ‘watch’), ‘annoyance.’ Abstract diction runs greatly to these just as simplicity of nature demands Saxon. Compare, “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, the Ploughman homeward plods his weary way and leaves the world to darkness and to me,” with such later lines as “The applause of listening senates to command,” etc.
We are thus able in English to pick our choice for our meaning among a group of words meaning by origin the same thing but differentiated to separate shades — the dawn, the sunrise, the daybreak, aurora; the grave-yard, the church-yard, God’s acre, the burial ground, the cemetery, the necropolis. These delicate shades of meaning are not learned out of a book. Only usage can teach them, and even with usage there must be appreciation and feeling towards them. This is especially the case with humor which demands for its expression the right word, the inevitable word. Take the list of meanings suggested by such a series as ‘transition,’ ‘change,’ ‘alteration,’ ‘interval,’ ‘shift,’ ‘evolution’ — all are different and must be used with an acute sense of their meaning. Very often, in return, the absolutely correct use of a word that seems inevitable produces in itself a pleasing humorous effect. There is such an unexpected matching of words and sense that it has the shock of humor. Anyone who will read over again that admirable book of the late Sir John Barrie My Lady Nicotine will see that it is a very model in this respect. Each word and phrase is right and couldn’t be otherwise.
Humor further demands great ‘naturalness’ of language, the use of phrases and forms so simple that writers straining after effect would never get them. W. S. Gilbert in especial was blessed with this felicity, as seen in Etiquette (already quoted) and Prince Aghib.
So too in a high degree were Lewis Carroll and Sir Owen Seaman. Bret Harte showed the same quality; compare —
Then Brown he read a paper, and he reconstructed there,
From those same bones, an animal that was extremely rare.
Another general consideration of very high importance in expressing humor is the use of comparisons by similes, metaphors and by subtle implications. Comparison is the very soul of humor. It adjusts the focus of vision on a thing in the light needed. It is the discovery of resemblance and of the lack of it that builds up the contrasts, discrepancies and incongruities on which, as has been insisted throughout this treatise, humor depends. To make metaphors demands both originality and training. One is lost in admiration of such comparisons as, ‘A face like a ham,’ ‘eyes like puddles of molasses,’ ‘legs like twenty-five minutes past six,’ and the sentence, “His hair all hung over his face in tangled strings like he was behind vines.” Metaphors are the very life of humor: very often the effect can be got merely by extending the use of a word to a new case or cases, where it fits in with surprising aptness. To ‘liquidate’ an account means to close it up and finish it; the new use ‘to liquidate’ a peasant would be humorous but for the horror of it. Indeed the principle involved is wider than the ground of humor. A vast quantity of our words are metaphors taken from words antecedent to them. We enrich our power of expression by perpetual and renewed comparisons, as a tree grows always in the bark and never at the heart.
No humorist who ever lived ever made greater and more continuous use of comparison than did Charles Dickens. It was a main characteristic of his mind to see likenesses in unlike things, to personify inanimate nature. His books are one vast comparison, flashing perpetually in humor. When he landed in Boston in 1842, his romantic imagination caught the bright red of the brick houses, the still brighter white of the wooden, the gilded signs, the painted railings, all glittering in the morning sun— “all so light and unsubstantial in appearance that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime.” He kept glancing up at the boards, he tells us, expecting them to “change into something”: he felt certain that “Clown and Pantaloon were hiding in a doorway or behind some pillar,” and that “Harlequin and Columbine were lodged over a one-story clockmaker’s shop.”
Such comparisons were characteristic of Dickens and all his work. He was for ever comparing everything with everything else: and, above all, in this way endowing inanimate objects with life and movement: for him windows grin, doors yawn, clocks wink solemnly and trees talk in the night breeze. The fancies of Barnaby Rudge watching the clothes dance upon the clothes-line are those of his creator.
We now pass to the more difficult and highly technical subject of jokes and how to narrate them. In our cautious survey of the field we have now reached the point where we may safely venture on such a discussion. To have done so prematurely would have turned this volume into a joke book and broken down the student’s intelligence, just as the premature presentation of logarithms breaks down algebra to rule of thumb.
A joke may be defined as an item of humor reduced to a single point or particle. It represents the breaking up of humorous matter into its elements, so that we can examine and appreciate one little bit of it without any extraneous context. One might say that a joke is a self-contained humorous thought. Its essence is its isolation.
At first the number of jokes and kinds of jokes seems legion. One might despair of ever reducing them to scientific analysis or finding in them any laws of thought or principles of humor. Here for example is that excellent compendium, Mr. Lewis Copeland’s World’s Best Jokes, 1936. It contains almost 400 pages of matter, the jokes being divided into twenty-eight classes. There are jokes classified by nationality — American, Negro, Irish, Scotch, etc.; by professions — preachers, lawyers, doctors, hobos, etc.; verse, toasts, and even the epitaph that carries a joke beyond the grave. There is an interesting cross-division in an index dividing the jokes according to the basis on which they rest, such as ambiguity, double meanings, slips of the press, etc. In such a vast labyrinth it seems at first hard to find a thread of philosophical guidance. But at the same time if we examine jokes, one by one, we can discover that they form no exception to the canons of humor laid down: they bring together a set of facts, phenomena, or fancies, actualities or accidents, that set up an incongruity.
A typical joke proceeds from a hypothesis — let it be granted than so and so: then in such and such circumstances an absurd result follows. To take more specific instances, let it be granted that professors are absent-minded; let it be granted that Scotchmen are avaricious; let it be granted that bashful men are afraid of women — then observe what happens to them. In other words a joke is a sort of syllogism with a major proposition as its hypothesis. The rest of it, in one fashion or other, can be reduced to a set of consequences running to an absurdity.
All of this in abstract language is not very comprehensible. So it may be better put into the concrete with a set of illustrations. Here for consideration is a list of jokes some of them already cited for other purposes in this book and others chosen as well-known standard examples.
