American Humor

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

So many wise things have been said about American humor, there seems to be little occasion for saying anything else about it, unless humorously. Absit omen ! that is not within the intention of the present remarks, which aim rather to offer some simple explanation of a familiar phenomenon, the “petering out” of the American humorist, and to point a moral.

I.

One difficulty in talking about humor lies in the indeterminate meaning of the word. The trouble is not so much that it has changed as that it has not made a thorough job of changing. We are inclined to give it a sense well-nigh the most profound before it has rid itself of a very trivial one. We brevet it on even terms with “ imagination ” while it is still trudging in the ranks beside such old irresponsible comrades as “ whimsy ” and “ conceit ; ” and, worst of all, we too often allow it to be confounded with that vulgar civilian, “ facetiousness.” Mr. Budgell, according to Goldsmith, bore “ the character of an humorist ”— the name of an eccentric fellow. He is not at all a joking kind of man, and might perfectly well, for all this description tells us, lack what we call a “ sense of humor.” Cranks are notoriously deficient in that sense, and the people who are hitting off Mr. Budgell as “ an humorist ” mean simply that he is a crank. Now I do not think we have quite outgrown this conception of the word’s meaning, though we have added something to it. We like to think that our popular humorists are first of all queer fellows. Jesters like Bill Nye have not been slow to recognize this taste in their audience, and the absurd toggery of the clown has been deliberately employed to enhance the relish of their screamingness. In fact, our professional man of humor is a pretty close modern equivalent of the Old World Fool; a creature of motley who is admitted to have some sense about him, but must appear under a disguise if he wishes to be taken seriously. More than one of Shakespeare’s Fools possess the illuminating kind of humor ; but the jest is what they were valued for. It would not be very hard, perhaps, to show that in America this ideal of the silly-funny man has survived with especial distinctness, and that upon this survival the quality of our alleged American humor really depends.

II.

If we apply this supposition to the work of the man who is generally conceded to be the foremost of American humorists, it will at first seem not to fit at all ; for here is a personality so mellow and venerable as to be fairly above its task. It would be a mock-respect, however, which should feign to forget what that task was, or shrink from frankly recognizing it as in itself a respectable rather than venerable task — to perfect and to communicate the American joke.

In his prime Mark Twain was often more than merely funny, but rather against his method than by it. In whatever direction or company he at that time traveled, motley was his only wear. There is a good deal of information and not a little wisdom in Innocents Abroad, but this is not what the book was read for; indeed, much of the information and wisdom must have been discounted by uncertainty as to whether or not they were part of the fun. Later, partly perhaps because his eminence seemed to him an inferior if not a bad one, partly because no cruse of jokes can yield indefinitely, he has shown a disposition to adopt a soberer coat. The attempt has not been altogether successful; he has kept on being funny in the familiar way, almost in spite of himself. The anonymity of his historical romance was rendered nominal by the frequency with which his French followers of Jeanne deliver themselves of excellent American jokes, and seem to feel better for it. Since that was written, he has produced a considerable number of essays upon a variety of sober themes. His public has not known quite what to do with them. Its attention, granted respectfully enough, has been conscious of undergoing a sort of teetering process, now inclined to the sober philosophy of Mr. Clemens, now diverted by the sudden reverberation of some incontinent Mark Twain jest.

There would be nothing disturbing in this situation, or rather the situation would not exist, if the author, writing under whatever name or in whatever mood, were essentially and first of all a humorist. But the fact seems to be that the humorist in Mark Twain is naturally subordinate to the jester. That he possesses this superior power the epical narrative of Huckleberry Finn would abundantly prove. But it has never been dominant; as the smiling interpreter of life his “ genius is rebuked ” by his superlative quality as a magician of jokes.

Readers will very likely differ as to whether A Double-Barrelled Detective Story ¹ is superior or inferior to classification. but they will hardly succeed in classifying it. The brutal crime with which it opens, and the mysterious power with which the avenger of that crime is endowed, might have yielded extraordinary results under the prestidigital manipulation of Poe, or the clairvoyant brooding of Hawthorne. But as it stands the net effect of the story fails of being an effect of tragic horror. The sombre note is not sustained enough for that, and the concise and businesslike style, very effective in the preliminary statement of the motive, is inadequate for its development. Indeed, not much can be said for the substance of its development. The villain is a person of melodramatic uncompromisingness, and the boy avenger is curiously unperturbed in the fulfillment of his painful office.

For humor in any sense the situation certainly affords the smallest possible opportunity. Yet what if not humor is to prevent uncertainty, the intrusion of false notes, and anything like half-heartedness in the treatment of such a theme ? — to the artist so gross an error as to amount almost to sacrilege. The most characteristic thing in the book is the Sherlock Holmes episode which, as a piece of burlesque, is totally out of place. Elsewhere ingenuity rather than power is the noticeable characteristic. One is irresistibly convinced that the story can have taken very little hold of the author himself.

In the work of the late Frank Stockton, a much more delicate humorist, a far more skillful artist than Mark Twain, the joke element was also dominant, though, as it happened, he cultivated the joke of situation rather than of phrase. But his demure manner does not prevent the delicious collocation of rubber boots and Mrs. Aleshine from entering into one’s soul with all the poignancy of a well-aimed jest. Nor can it be denied that some of his later work showed signs of the same uncertainty of tone which we have just noticed in A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. Especially in the luckless Kate Bonnet, of which nobody can wish to speak lightly, one recognizes, however unwillingly, a lack of spontaneity and a tameness which it is hard to associate with the author of Rudder Grange.

A curious question suggests itself here. How does it happen that the later work of these two prominent American humorists should exhibit so marked a deficiency in the larger sort of humor? Are these to be taken as simple instances of decadence, or is there, after all, a screw loose in our vaunted American humor ?

III.

To answer this question will be to state more baldly the fact suggested above : that we have been content to let the reputation of our humor stand or fall by the quality of the American joke. There is no doubt that we like our jokes better than other people’s, and there is some excuse for us if we fancy that the gods like them better, though even that audience appears as a rule to have reserved its inextinguishable laughter for its own jokes. It is because the English type of set jest appears inferior to ours that we have always sneered at English humor, and particularly at its greatest repository, Punch.

But at its best the joke is not a very high manifestation of humor. Luckily the Miller jest-book is now extinct as a literary form, just as drunkenness is extinct as a gentlemanly accomplishment. In one form or other the jest is bound to exist, but it cannot in this age well serve as a staple food for the cultivated sense of humor. This would not be a bad thing for us to bear in mind when we get to comparing our comic papers with Punch, which is both more and less than a comic paper. We may fairly consider the amazing number of genuine contributions to literature which have been made through the columns of Punch, and reflect whether our Life, with its little dabs of Dolly-in-the-Conservatory verse, its stunted though suggestive editorial matter, its not over-brilliant jokes about the mother-in-law and about the fiancée, and the overwhelming prettiness of its illustrations, can show much of a hand against its sturdy English contemporary. It may not be agreeable to our volatile national mind to concede something to English solidity even in the matter of humor, but it is simple justice.

We know very well, when we come to think of it, that some of the finest humorists have been indifferent jokers. We can hardly imagine Addison setting a table in a roar — or Goldsmith, unless by inadvertence. As for Dr. Holmes, our greatest legitimate humorist, his notion of a set joke was mainly restricted to the manhandling of the disreputable pun.

In the meantime the torch of jocosity is still being carried on by fresh and unpreoccupied hands ; and if the line of eager spectators is now mainly at the level of the area windows, that is, perhaps, not the affair of the torch-bearer. A surprising number of persons above that level, it must be said, appear to take satisfaction in the quasi-humorous work of Mr. John Kendrick Bangs. It is work which deserves consideration because it represents the reductio ad absur-dum of 舠 American humor.” It consists in a sort of end-man volley of quips, manufactured and fired off for their own sake. A book produced by this method cannot be deeply humorous. It is not the outcome of an abiding sense of comedy value, and naturally bears much the same relation to a veritable work of humor that a bunch of fire-crackers in action bears to the sun. The true humorist cannot help concerning himself with some sort of interpretation of life : Mr. Bangs can. His folly is not a stalking-horse under the presentation of which he shoots his wit, but an end in itself. There could be no better illustration of the difference between the jocose and the humorous than a comparison of one of Mr. Bangs’s farces with one of Mr. Howells’s. That recent extravagance of the new adventures of Baron Munchausen ² cuts no figure beside the classical because really humorous adventures of Alice: on the one hand, a series of meaningless whoppers strung into a narrative ; on the other, a sustained jeu d’esprit which, absurd as it is, contains hardly more nonsense than philosophy. Of his latest book ³ it need only be said that it furnishes another installment of the Houseboat on the Styx business, much the sort of thing one might expect of a clever sophomore, with a thumbing acquaintance with the Classical Dictionary. The fact seems to be that Mr. Bangs represents the survival of a school of facetiousness, now happily moribund, which had some standing during the last century, in England as well as in America. Puns, elaborate ironies, fantastic paradoxes, all manner of facetiae were good form from the early days of Christopher North to the end of the Dickens vogue. Nowadays the English jest has been for the most part remanded to its proper place as the servant and not the divinity of the humorous machine. In our ears the English jest is no better than such as it is ; which we do not believe of ours, so that we continue to give literary credit to a function which is merely human. We have a right to use Mr. Bangs for our private consumption, as a man may choose to smoke a brand of tobacco which he knows to be bad, and cannot recommend to his friends ; but we may properly be careful, too, not to confound qualities, not to yield to mere facetiousness the honors which belong to humor.

IV.

It must be admitted that in this day of smiles across the sea the boundary line even between national methods of joking is not always indisputable. Jerome Jerome, for instance, belongs fairly to our school of jocoseness ; and Three Men in a Boat was popular with us because he applied our method to English conditions. The village and seafaring tales of Mr. W. W. Jacobs are more plainly insular in quality, but in the delicious and unlabored absurdity of his plots and the whimsicalness of his dialogue he strongly resembles Mr. Stockton. His latest story⁴ is hardly a favorable example of his work, which lies properly in the field of the short humorous story of situation. His characters and action are plainly more interesting to him than the details of his text; and the joking of which his tales are full comes naturally and inevitably from the mouths of his persons. Mr. Jacobs is nevertheless, judged by his work so far, to be ranked among the jokers rather than among the humorists.

So far as pure humor is concerned, there has never been the shadow of a boundary line between England and America. Different as they are in personality and in the total effect of their work, what radical distinction in mere quality of humor is there between Mr. Cable and Mr. Barrie ? Was it not the same genial sense of the delicate alternating currents of the feminine temperament which produced both Jess and Aurore Naucanon ? And is not Fielding’s humor as much at home in America as Dr. Holmes’s in England ?

V.

But the domain of humor is not infrequently subdivided on other than national lines. If there is any distinction of sex upon which man prides himself, it is his superior sense of humor. When the matter comes to analysis, it may appear that the distinction is a somewhat narrow one; that the question of the jest is once more the real question in point. There is a certain sort of verbal nonsense, as there are forms of the practical joke, which induces a masculine hysteria while it commands only tolerance from the other sex. Repeated experimenting with Chimmie Fadden’s joke about the way to catch a squirrel has shown pretty clearly that the unresponsiveness of his French auditor was due rather to a limitation of sex than of race. Yet among men it has been one of the jokes of the year. I think men are often unfair when after such experiments, painful enough (for what is more disheartening than to angle for laughter and catch civility), they accuse the woman of not seeing the joke. She does see it, but it does not appeal to her as the funniest thing in the world. She has heard other jokes, and is ignorant of the necessity for all this side-holding and slapping on the back. She therefore finishes her tea in quietude of spirit long before the last reminiscent detonations have ceased to echo in the masculine throat.

But it is a dull and hasty guess to hazard, that because of this difference in taste Miss Austen’s sex is deficient in humor. There are women nowadays — there have always been, one suspects, since new womanhood is as old as everything else under the sun — who have so far cultivated the masculine point of view as to have actually come into possession of the masculine sense of the joke. But, as George Marlow says in a very different connection, “ they are of us.” A true woman’s sense of humor is ordinarily less spasmodic, probably less acute, than a man’s, but (though a man may be a little ashamed of thinking so, as he might be of believing in woman’s suffrage) hardly less real or less fruitful. A very large part of the work done in legitimate humor for the past few years by Americans has been done by women.

Unless in The Vicar of Wakefield, or in that delightful classic of feminine humor, Cranford, one hardly knows where to look for so mellow and sympathetic a touch as characterizes the Old Chester Tales of Mrs. Deland. The central figure of Dr. Lavendar it seems hardly extravagant to class with or only a little beneath Dr. Primrose and Sir Roger, as a creature of pure humor. In Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,⁵ again, Miss Hegan has created a character which in spite of the utmost freedom of treatment entirely escapes the farcical. Mrs. Wiggs will not take her place among the eligible and decorative heroines of fiction, but she will have an abiding charm for unromantic lovers of human nature. In Sonny, Mrs. Stuart employed a somewhat broader method. Yet whatever farcical possibilities it may contain, it would be hard to conceive a more genuinely humorous situation than is afforded by the belated paternity of Mr. Deuteronomy Jones ; a situation not altogether funny, but tempered by the little touch of pitifulness which belongs to the deeper effects of humor. In the work of Miss Daskam one discerns a sharper note, a little tendency to dig and fling, which now and then becomes too insistent. In her latest collection of stories, indeed, it becomes almost dominant. The initial story, The Madness of Philip, is at once a genial interpretation of childnature and a pungent hit of satire against the wooden sentimentality of which the kindergarten method is capable. It neatly suggests that to the child-rights which the disciples of Froebel so eloquently champion should be added the right to exercise common sense as well as fancy, and the right to be spanked when the condition of the system calls for that tonic treatment. The story of Ardelia in Arcady is equally keen and sympathetic. We have been led to suppose that the country is the natural home of every child, so that the pathos of the city child stranded in the country is a new conception. Miss Daskam, however, makes it an intelligible one.

VI.

If there is a characteristic form in which the American’s sense of humor is inclined to express itself, it is probably satire, the form which lies closest upon the borderland of wit. And our talent for satire is still further defined by our preference for the method of the interlocutor. The Biglow Papers established a sort of canon by which our work in this field will long be judged. We have done nothing of late in satirical verse, to be sure, while much has been done in England — if indeed this impression is not due to the fact that the newspaper provides our only market for such wares. But it can hardly escape notice that in other respects our recent successful experiments in satire have held to the method of Lowell and Artemus Ward: the expression of wisdom in dialect or in the vernacular.

The satire in the Chimmie Fadden books⁶ deals mainly with class questions. In addition to the Bowery boy’s own acute remarks, we are given his report of the observations of Mr. Paul, a young society man whose somewhat tedious addiction to the “ small bottle ” does not interfere with his delivery of sententious comments upon life which doubtless gain much from Fadden’s garbling Bowery version of them. The attempted thread of narrative does not seem to have been really worth while. There is no doubt that the book has been more considered than the early Chimmie Fadden papers. Perhaps for that reason it is tamer. Chimmie’s lingo rolls from his lips less spontaneously. The old familiar expletives will be missed, the “ sees ” and “ hully chees ” and “ wat t’ ells ” which endeared him to the public some years ago. And it must be admitted that the satire is of a thinner order.

But that is not at all remarkable. I do not think anything like justice has been done to the literary merit of the Dooley books.⁷ This may be due to the copiousness with which the sage of Arehey Road has poured forth his opinions ; or, again, it may be due to the fact that so clean and acceptable a vin du pays has needed no bush. Critics, it may be supposed, are useful in pointing out excellences which most of us are not likely to perceive : but everybody understands Mr. Dooley. I am not so sure that the latter supposition is true. Much of the Dooley satire seems so good that it must, in part, escape the comprehension of many readers who are convulsed by the Dooley phraseology.

That phraseology in itself is a remarkable thing. Nothing is harder to catch than the Irish idiom, nothing harder to suggest on paper than the Irish brogue. We are only too familiar with the sham bedad and bejabers dialect, of some commercial value to writers of fiction, but not otherwise existent. Some readers will have noticed what painful work has been made of it lately by the inventor of that unconvincing figure, Policeman Flynn. But Mr. Dooley — one can hardly elsewhere, unless from the mouth of Kipling’s Mulvaney, hear so mellow and lilting a Hibernian voice as this. The papers must have been written with great care, although they have appeared very often. It is astonishing, in view of the great range of theme involved, and the periodicity of their publication, that there is so little unevenness in them. They are practically monologues, for the occasional introductory word is of the briefest, and the supernumerary Mr. Hennessey serves simply as the necessary concrete audience.

For several years now Mr. Dooley has been expressing himself in this manner upon the most serious themes, social, civil, and political. During the Spanish War his criticisms of army methods and of the general administrative policy were sharp and uncompromising. It has been said by a friend of McKinley’s that the President followed the papers as they appeared in the press with the keenest amusement and attention. Certainly this was true of a great many of the American people. The reason for his vogue is obvious. With all his pure Irislmess, he is pure American, too ; and his commentary upon current events with its alternating simplicity and shrewdness, its avoidance of sentimentality, and its real patriotism, probably represents, very much as Hosea Biglow represented, the sober sense of the people. This union of individual and representative humor must be the basis of whatever claim can be made for the permanent value of Mr. Dooley.

But this is enough to give his creator a place among the humorists. A vein of jests is soon worked out, but humor is a perennial fount. The advance of years is too much for the cleverness of the funny man, while the humorist is fruitful to the end, and after.

H. W. Boynton.