Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 369
The city then was not made up of skyscrapers and apartment buildings and residential flats superimposed ten storeys high. It was all made up of boarding-houses. To make a city you had to have a ‘depot,’ a main street of shops and then miles and miles of boarding-houses, to which went horse cars with tinkling bells — cars warmed with straw. All people lived in boarding-houses — young people, too young to have homes; old people, too old to keep them; students burning midnight oil; store clerks, as soon as they had regular jobs; and theatrical people whenever they hadn’t.
So, of course, a whole lot of our current jokes of those days turned on the boarding-houses; on the landlady (poor, maligned soul); on the boarder who couldn’t pay; on the food; the accommodations, and the warmth maintained by one stove pipe that passed each room in turn like the knight’s move in chess. Any people who recall those days will remember jokes as
‘Mr. Smith,’ said the landlady. I’ll just give you three days to pay your board in.’
‘All right,’ said Mr. Smith, ‘I’ll take Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July.’
Or this one: ‘Are you boarding now?’ ‘No, only dieting.’
Part of the standing boarding-house joke was the frequency of moving from one boarding-house to another. Here belongs the story, apocryphal or true, of Mark Twain being seen, in his San Francisco days, carrying under his arm a cigar box tied with a string.
‘Buying cigars?’ asked a friend.
‘No,’ said Mark, ‘moving my room.’
The essence of the story, at any rate, is not exaggerated. I can speak here from personal experience. During my student days, in Toronto, I lived in fourteen different boarding-houses (all marked now, no doubt, with tablets — aspirin tablets) and I moved so frequently that I had a special rate of twenty cents, instead of twenty-five, with Crashley’s Express. Notice ‘express’ did not mean in those days ‘express company.’ ‘Crashley’s Express’ just meant a man and a horse. I forget which was Crashley. An expressman was not a huge fellow like a modern truckman. He was just a little shrimp of a man, but he used to put on his shoulder a trunk three cubic feet each way (you know what I mean) and carry it up to the top floor. In his mid-agony, the landlady would call: ‘Be careful with that trunk against the stove pipe.’ You see, if he hit the pipe, the whole heating installation was dislocated.
But the boarding-house joke was only one of the kinds of jokes that marked the days when America was moving from the farm to the factory, from doing things by hand to doing things by machinery. We had a whole field of fun with a standard crop of jokes about laying carpets, putting up stove pipes and starting balky horses. Try this:
The horse standing outside the drug store refused to start. ‘Hold on,’ said the good-natured druggist, coming out of his store to the aid of the man tugging at the horse’s bridle, ‘let me blow some of this powder in his ear. It’s a new dodge.’ ‘Pouf!’ went the druggist and away went the horse and buggy! His owner watched him to the skyline. ‘Now blow some in mine,’ he said.
The picture, when you think of it — the street dozing in the sunshine, the horses at the hitching posts, the low buildings and the disappearance of the main street over the horizon — the picture is that of a vanished world.
Change in transport, indeed, effected the first great changes that came over our humour as the new country opened. On the drowsy world of the horse and buggy broke the motor car — the horses reared and balked, the motor honked, a battle was engaged. And now, forty years later, you can look over the field that was and dig up jokes as they dig up steel cuirasses in Belgium. Here is a jest that dates the period:
‘What shall I do,’ said the new driver, ‘if I meet a skittish horse?’ ‘Well, I tell you,’ said the expert, ‘you’d better stop the car and then stop the engine, and if the horse keeps on being skittish you’d better take the machine to pieces and hide it in the grass.’
Presently this world of new transport, of rapid communication, of pictures that moved and wires that talked, went sweeping into the World War of 1914, and with that came, I will not say ‘War Humour,’ for there is no such thing, but the humour in despite of war. For mankind, after the first wave of emotion, of anger, horror and fascination — mankind had to find humour to help forget the agonies of war or break under the strain of it. Far away, indeed, these War Jokes seem now — quite unknown to the generation that has risen up since.
Such humour to the mass of the people in America was as new as war itself. For the older wars, humour and all, had drifted into history. There had been the jokes of the Civil War — all long dead — jokes about army contractors, draft evaders and ‘contraband’ negroes, done out in the quaint misspelling of the immortal Artemus Ward and of Orpheus C. Kerr. These, in 1914, lived on only as history.
The humours of the Spanish War had already faded. ‘When you hear those bells go ting-a-ling-a-ling.’ One recalls the verses about the Spanish ships and the snowballs in hell, or the jokes on the impecuniosity of Spain.
‘Charge!’ shouted the Spanish officer. ‘No,’ answered the manager of the arms factory. ‘C.O.D.’
All that came and went so quickly that there was no time to develop a school, or mode, of jest or a reaction from jest to bitterness. But compare the World War in relation to humour. Its earlier jokes turned on the organization and discipline of war, all new to the public, all different from civil life.
A private in camp called out to a passing figure in khaki, ‘Hey, Buddy, give me a match.’ Then he realized his mistake. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he stammered, ‘I didn’t see you were a general.’ ‘That’s all right,’ said the general, ‘luckily for you, I’m not a second lieutenant.’
But presently there came the jokes that turned on the disillusionment, the world weariness bred of years of war, the sentiment of its futility, the question, ‘What price glory?’
Here is such a one, related, so it is recorded, by General Perishing:
A dilapidated soldier, his clothing in rags, a shoe missing, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling, was heard to mutter to himself as he shambled away, ‘I love my country, I’d fight for my country, I’d die for my country. But if ever this damn war is over I’ll never love another country!’
The ‘saddened’ smiles with which people tried to ‘laugh off’ the war were followed by the barrage of jests with which the nation greeted prohibition. These cracked like machine gun fire along the trenches of the vaudeville stage from New York to Los Angeles. The cherished right to drink, down and outlawed, entrenched itself behind the right to joke. A new language sprang up — speaking of speak-easies, bootleggers, hi-jackers and hip flasks — and a new set of jokes with it.
But here a new problem arose. Was it wicked to joke about prohibition? If it was law now, shouldn’t it be illegal to make fun of it? In England, it has always been forbidden — by a taboo — to make fun of the King, or of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In America, by a taboo with a kick behind it, it is equally forbidden to make fun of the President. You may make game of him but not fun of him. Of these three the Archbishop is now out of it. You can have all the fun with him you like. But the other two hold.
So, as I say, a lot of people claimed it was wicked to laugh at prohibition. And in any case the laugh threatened to monopolize too much of the field. A lot of theatres put prohibition jokes on the ban. The poor low comedian saw his livelihood cut off before he got it. Many of the newspapers cut out all jokes on drink and, most typical of all, writers of popular fiction and crime stories had to cut all boozing out of the narrative. The great detective, hitherto eating nothing but all to the good on drink, had to work on tea, and looked pretty sour on it.
Yet oddly enough, in earlier days, as every joke book shows from Artemus Ward to Mr. Dooley, drink had formed the chief subject of the American joke for half a century — men coming home tight; men too tight to come home; men wondering where home was; there was no end to it. Second only to it were the perennial jokes on quaint negroes, comic Irishmen and Scotsmen from Aberdeen. Some graduate research student should work it out into percentages of frequency or — no, if he did he would make it so dry that even drink wouldn’t keep wet.
Then came the jokes on the failures of prohibition — open laughs with obvious meaning.
‘Look at that man,’ said the lady at the window; ‘he’s fallen down in the street; he must be drunk.’ ‘How can he be drunk?’ said her friend. ‘It’s prohibition.’
And after that came the jokes that spelled good-bye to prohibition, and it was all over.
But when that huge figure with the feet of clay toppled over, down fell another beside it. This was the colossus called ‘Big Business’ — the American Image before which we had all bowed down, which founded colleges and held on the palm of its hand the little shrimps called Science and Learning and the Ministry. Business had taken everything over, and then down went business in the depression — like Humpty Dumpty. When it fell off the wall of Wall Street the outside world laughed. ‘Oh yeah!’ and after that nobody said any longer ‘A business man told me.’ And if anyone said, ‘Business men think—’ the interruption was, ‘Do they?’
Thus, in the saddened world of business disaster people try to ‘laugh off’ the depression.
‘My husband,’ said the professor’s wife to the family lawyer, ‘has had a complete breakdown and must do absolutely nothing for six months. His old students want to help him. What would you suggest they might do?’ ‘They might buy him a seat on the Stock Exchange.’
So there we sat in our Post-War world of the ‘Thirties. It was really a Pre-War world but we didn’t know it. We kept ourselves as merry as we could with the old perennial jokes — the negro has been Heaven’s blessing to America — and the jokes of the hour on depression, hard times, Hitler’s hair and Mussolini’s hairlessness.
But did the subject of our humour really change through all these passing decades? No, not in its reality, but only in its latest embodiment. Mankind laughs at its troubles and jests at its oppressors. Children make fun of father, schoolboys laugh at their teacher, students at their professors and prisoners at their guards and turnkeys. Laughter is the last refuge of sorrow or oppression. Our new oppressions of the moment — industrial collapse, the war danger and such — only stepped into the place of the old ones.
With which it suddenly occurs to me that I have left out the most perennial topic of all, one that in 1959 was running as strong as it was a hundred years before. Women! Did that graduate student, counting up his percentages, touch me on the elbow and whisper ‘women’? Why, of course, women, women — the second most important thing in the world and, like all its treasured possessions, the object at once of its flattery and its jests. Jokes on women! Here is change indeed!
Many people can look back with me from memory, and all from hearsay and reading, and recall the ‘comic’ women of the ‘Eighties and the ‘Nineties. Here was the Old Maid, that butt of jokes that never ended from the Pickwick Papers on. An ‘Old Maid’ — any years over thirty made her that — wore curl papers and frilled pantelettes. You remember the one who wanted the conductor to stop the train at Poughkeepsie because she had to take a pill! There were thousands of Old Maid jokes. But she’s getting her own back now all right, with a lip-stick and a vanity box and her pantelettes thrown away when she goes on a ‘necking party.’
Comic women — they’re all gone. Women are emancipated, they have all been sophisticated (a Victorian Old Maid would have denied that she ever had), and the emancipation is written broad across the pages of humorous literature. Where, now, is the Suffragette and the Woman with the axe, the Temperance Woman and, best of all, the Blue Stocking? A woman who learned anything out of a book was funny in those days; a girl at college must be an awful frump! Algebra! Good God!
But now, look and see. College girls — Oh my! The public just eats them up! Here they are, in their ‘shorts,’ all over the funny pages, getting off their he-and-she jokes and leaning out of their dormitory windows. The blessed damozels who leaned out from the golden bars of heaven were not a patch on them. And their language!
He: ‘I love to think of you as the old-fashioned girl — sweet, beautiful, adorable, innocent.’
She: ‘Yeah! big boy, what kind of chump are you?’
How much has it all really changed, our humour? I only wish I had the time and space to talk about it. Believe me, fun didn’t die with Mark Twain and Josh Billings. There are a lot of solemn people among us to-day, but so there were in Mark Twain’s time. Pericles said — or let’s be exact — Thucydides said Pericles said: ‘All the world is filled with the graves of brave men.’ Senator Tom Corvin — you’ve heard of him, from Ohio, long ago — improved on this and said:
‘All the world is filled with the graves of solemn jackasses.’
They are still mooning round among us, and they get a sort of false admiration. But mainly we can laugh them off. For after all, we still have our sense of humour and our jokes.
But while we were still making as merry as we could with Depression Jokes and College Girl Comics, all of a sudden — sudden for the honest people of the world — Depression, Collapse, Jokes and all were swept aside with the new tempest of war.
What price humour now?
STUDIES IN HUMOUR III - WAR AND HUMOUR
I AM QUITE sure that when Adam and Eve were put out of the Garden of Eden, Eve said, ‘Well, thank goodness, Adam, we’ve got our sense of humour!’ And Adam, trudging along deep in thought, paused and said, ‘How’s that?’ and took a first step towards getting one. ‘I certainly had to laugh at that snake,’ said Eve with a toss other head and a false snigger. ‘At the snake?’ said Adam, and went on with his reflections.
Years after Adam used to tell the whole story with the greatest humour. Eve didn’t like his bringing it up. They had come up in the world since.
So does many a brave descendant of Adam to-day, overtaken by disaster in life, still say, ‘Well, thank heaven I still keep my sense of humour!’ But this really shows that he hasn’t got any; what he means is a brave defiance of adverse fate, which is quite another thing.
All of this in connection with the present world of war and distress and the question of how we stand towards it, and whether, as so many people express it, we can still keep our sense of humour in spite of all the disaster, the death and destruction, and, worse still, the outbreak of brutality and cruelty that has come over mankind. There is no danger that bravery cannot face, there is no suffering that fortitude cannot bear, but are we to think that there is no disaster that humour cannot alleviate? There are mental qualities that can be taken on at will to meet emergency, or at least increased in each of us by will — a sort of power in reserve. We can heighten our resolution and harden our endurance, but is humour such a quality? Must we try to enlarge and stimulate our sense of humour so as to get more and more fun out of less and less material? Personally I think not. Humour is not a weapon against war. Humour is one of the things that war can kill, that could not survive in the world if it were under the domination of force and cruelty that now lies upon Europe.
Yet here is an odd thing. All our traditional notions of war for generations back are somehow mixed up with ideas of fun and adventure, of jolly Jack-tars and comic ‘bosuns’ and a sort of rip-roaring devilment that turns danger into a picnic. I say ‘for generations back,’ but let it be noted that I only mean our modern generations. The ancient world knew nothing of this attitude. The Old Testament hands out slaughter and lots of it, but it never calls it fun. It relates, ‘And of the Amelecks there were slain four thousand, and of the Abimilecks were slain five thousand,’ but it doesn’t add, ‘but the biggest joke of all was on the Bullnecks who were all slain.’ So with the Romans and Greeks. They write calmly of putting a whole army to the sword, of passing them ‘under the forks,’ or pushing them over a cliff. That was, for them, just a plain fact — business, as it were. But neither Livy nor Tacitus would write, ‘One of the most amusing, indeed comic, episodes of the massacre was the drowning of Vercingeotix in his own horse-trough.’
I imagine it was the age of chivalry, when knights fought on either side or both sides, at so much a throw, that turned war into a game and first opened up the idea that a battle was first-class fun.
Once started, the idea ran riot as it descended down our literature. No doubt this presentation of a gay and gallant, glorious and uproarious aspect of war helped to stimulate courage. But even at that one may doubt if it was the best sort. The courage of the Cromwellian Ironsides on their knees before battle could beat it out every time.
Yet it became, I say, a traditional attitude. Till yesterday, at least till the Great War, and that is historically yesterday, all our war memoirs and war fiction were written up with this queer false hilarity. In fact it became a convention that military episodes of death and danger must be written up as if they were one huge laugh. Take as a sample such a passage as the following, which every reader of one generation back has read a hundred times. It is taken from the book called by some such title as ‘Bullets, Buckshot and Bombshells, or The Memoirs of War Correspondents in the Karroo’ — that or something else.
It runs:
‘I was standing between Lord Kitchener and General Roberts, looking through our field-glasses towards the enemies’ lines which were only a hundred yards away, and laughing and joking as we always did when the enemy were about to open fire on us.
‘Kitchener, whose wit is as keen as his sense of fun, said, “Well, why don’t they start?” To heighten the joke, he had hardly tittered the words when a veritable hail of bullets drove at us. The air seemed absolutely black, with them. In fact, I very seldom remember seeing the air quite so black with bullets. General Roberts, who has a deep sense of humour which sometimes comes to the surface, turned to Kitchener with a quiet smile and said, “What do you know about that?”...”Yes,” said Kitchener, putting up his eyeglass with the greatest nonchalance, “let’s go.” We moved off, laughing heartily. The joke was that, as we went, a volley of grape shot hit Kitchener in the stomach; luckily it was sideways.’
