Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 597
“The poet,” said the Roman writer, “is born not made.” But this was only a smart way of saying that he had to be born first and made afterward. So it is with the humorist, and with the art of expressing humor in words. Granted that an innate aptitude is required for real excellence, it is equally true that it may be indefinitely improved by art. As the clergy are wont to say from the pulpit, even a little spark of native merit can be watered in the fire of effort till it grows into a mighty temple. The failure to “teach humor” rests on this misconception, and on the further error of what teaching humor would mean. Teaching humor would not mean teaching people to make fun of things, but teaching people to understand things. Humor, at its highest, is a part of the interpretation of life.
So I can see no reason why humor — as both theory and practice, analysis and performance — should not be taught in college. I could imagine how interesting it would be to plan a set of academic courses. It should run something on this model:
Course I. Elements of Humor. Open to First Year men and Fourth Year women.
Course II. The Technique of Humor. Four hours a week for four years, leading to the degree of D.F.
Course III. Practical: How to Tell a Funny Story. Men only. This course leads to a government diploma, or license, to tell funny stories in pullman cars.
Course IV. Postgraduate: Tears and Laughter. The highest phase of humor where it passes from the Ridiculous to the Sublime. This course is open only to the older members of the faculty and to First Year women. For in this matter women start where men end.
If this book turns out, as it probably will, to be one of those epoch making volumes which create a revolution in human thought, it will be followed by the establishment of regular college departments in humor, leading to such degrees as those indicated above. There will be correspondence courses with circulars and printed testimonials after the following models:
(1)
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
TO THE
EUREKA SCHOOL OF FUN
Gentlemen:
I desire to express my appreciation of the effect that your Course No. 6 (Six Weeks Course in Applied Humor) has had upon my mother-in-law. Before taking the course her disposition was of a melancholy if not morose character. Now she keeps us in fits at meal times. Please give her another six weeks.
P.S. What would it cost to send her abroad for a two-year postgraduate course?
(2)
TESTIMONIAL TO THE
LOUDER AND FUNNIER
DIVINITY SCHOOL
Gentlemen:
Pray permit me, as a minister of a large congregation, to express my obligation for your four weeks course in Pulpit Fun. My church is crowded every Sunday evening and I keep them all in a roar. I understand they talk of sending me away for a year for a postgraduate course. Some propose two years.
(3)
BROKER BREAKS SILENCE: TESTIMONIAL
TO THE BOISTEROUS BUSINESS COLLEGE
Gentlemen:
I want to thank you for the excellent results obtained from your correspondence course on Humor as a Business Stimulant. I am a stockbroker and up till now have been constantly depressed whenever I was cleaned out by a heavy fall of the market. Taking your course has altered everything. The more it falls, the more I laugh. Today there was a twenty point drop in International Hydrogen and I simply sat and roared. This may have been partly because I was selling it. But your course helped me to see the fun of the thing.
Let us turn back and make a beginning with laughter, a thing undoubtedly older than speech. Man could laugh and cry long before he could talk, just as babies can. Indeed it was out of his whines and grunts and chuckles that he made his language. People always connect humor with laughter. In reality it is only an accidental and physical concomitant. Laughter is the mere beginning of humor, both in time and in significance. The end, the final reach, is nearer to tears.
All human origins go back into the mist and vanish into the twilight of our beginning. The sense of fun would reach back as far, to roots as faint, as goes the sense of sight. A potato, in its own infinitely dim way, sees — and no doubt is feebly amused.
More than that, the products of evolution are unequal. Man is by no means the most developed animal in all respects. Compare the sense of smell in a dog, or a deer, with its feeble counterpart in man. So it is with the sense of humor. It is possible that some of the animals are far more developed in that respect than we are. A house fly may have a terrific sense of fun. I have often suspected it when I have seen his merry face and his beaming eyes peeping over the bedclothes in the morning.
No doubt our sense of humor grew up alongside of our emotions and our language. Scholars themselves are in doubt as to just how language began. The chief theories on the subject are known (to those on the inside) as the “splash-spash,” or “bow-wow” theory, and the “yo-heave-ho” theory, and the theory of spontaneous grunts. That is to say perhaps man got into the way of talking by imitating sounds like the splash of water. Or perhaps language started as a sort of whine or chant, like those of sailors hauling in a rope. The tune, the melody, came first, the style, words, the song, long afterward. Or perhaps he began by the sheer natural physical emptying of his lungs, as when a person sneezes or says “Woof! It’s hot.”
Our laughter originated then, it would seem, long before our speech as a sort of natural physical expression, or outburst, of one’s feeling suddenly good, suddenly victorious. It was a primitive shout of triumph. The savage who cracked his enemy over the head with a tomahawk and shouted “Ha! Ha!” was the first humorist. Here began, so to speak, “the merry ha! ha!,” the oldest and most primitive form of humor. It seems odd to think that even today when we give our acquaintances the “merry ha! ha!” over their minor discomfitures, we are reproducing, true to type, the original form of humor. The Germans would call it Ur-Humor. But we don’t need to; we can call it simply the archeocomical or if we like the paleoridiculous.
It seems a far cry to this primitive humor, and yet it is surprising how easily we slip back into it. It has never been quite civilized out of us. Even if we no longer find the triumph of active destruction a “funny” sensation, we can certainly get fun out of the imagination of it. Compare, for example, Bret Harte’s famous account of the breaking up of the scientific society organized at the Stanislow Mining Camp — how, in the middle of a paleontological discussion:
Then Abner Dean of Angel’s raised a point of order when
A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen,
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.
One admits that there is here the added element of the contrast between the gravity of science and the levity of conduct on the Stanislow. But the destruction of Abner Dean counts for much.
Perhaps the best example of this kind of thing is found in the work of that illustrious artist, Captain Harry Graham, who has adorned alike the court and the camp, the stalls and the bookstalls. Captain Graham in his Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes has boldly accepted the destructive principle of primitive humor at its face value without mitigation or apology. His readers in their “heartless homes” are supposed to go into bursts of merriment over such an item as the accidental drowning of grandmamma, the loss of a stranger by the odd chance of a hole in the ice, or by the amusing malice of young Augustus.
It is difficult to reproduce the Ruthless Rhymes without the delightful illustrations which accompany them. But one may in imagination reconstruct the exploits of young Augustus in a picture which depicts a huge London bus, brought to a standstill by some apparent mishap, a little crowd collected, and a malicious boy obviously chuckling over what has happened:
My son Augustus in the street one day
Was feeling quite particularly merry,
When someone asked him, — Wot’s the quickest way
To get me out to Highgate Cemetery?
The quickest way? replies my little Gus,
And pushed the feller underneath a bus!
I will say this about my little son,
’E does enjoy a bit of fun!
Children easily reach back to this primitive humor, just as all their embryonic life processes repeat the history of the race. “Jack the Giant-Killer” is full of it. “Puss in Boots” contains a roaring piece of fun when the cat swallows the ogre.
But for humanity at large, apart from people of exception such as Harry Graham and Jack the Giant-Killer, once the primitive age was over, humor had to be softened from actual destruction and physical injury to the mere appearance of it. It was no longer funny to break a man’s leg and watch him hop round on the stump of it; but it was funny to see a man, with the temporary numbness called pins and needles, stumble about unable to stand up. It became no longer amusing to watch a man drown — though Lucretius many centuries ago thought it entertaining — but it remained funny to watch him take a tumble on skates, as Mr. Winkle does in the Pickwick Papers. The Romans liked to see a chariot and its occupant smashed in the circus; we prefer to see a clown fall off a trapeze. Our clown, poor creature, is the living symbol of our redeemed humanity, uplifted from cruelty to make-believe. Humor thus grew to turn on a contrast between the thing as it is, or ought to be, and the thing smashed out of shape and as it ought not to be. We can appreciate this by remembering that a broken umbrella looks “funny.” This broadened into a general notion of contrast, of incongruity, of a disharmony between a thing and its setting, between its present and its usual accompaniment, like a naked savage in a silk hat.
It was somewhere at the point indicated that mere vindictiveness parted company with humor, and became its hideous counterpart, mockery. The Red Indian exulting and jibing over his tortured victim, this is mockery; the scoffers that stood and “mocked” around the Cross; the taunts of the hanging judges; the sneer of the infidel; the brutality of the critic — all these are mockery, a thing debased and degraded from what it might have been. Too much of the humor of all ages, and far too much of our own, partakes of it.
The original humor was expressed by actions, not by words. It was, and is, represented by progressive gradations as victory, cruelty, teasing, horsesplay, hazing, practical jokes and April Fool. But as early as art and letters themselves, humor found its expression in drawing and in words. Even a savage could draw a man with a long nose. Indeed his main difficulty was to draw him with a short one. Hence the art of caricature could not get far till the art of correct drawing had got further. So, too, with words; when language got properly formulated it became possible not only to use words to call up a funny, or ridiculous, idea, but to get fun out of the words themselves. A contrast or incongruity could be got out of the difference between the apparent and the real significance of the sounds and characters. Here entered the mode of humor called Wit, the presentation of the humorous in a way involving an unexpected play on words, or, as it were, taking fun out of the words themselves. When Pope Gregory said of the captive English children, “Not Angles but angels” (Gregory’s mixture, so to speak), the joke made such a hit that it lasted over a thousand years. The silly anagrams and acrostics of the medieval monks were an early instance of this verbalism.
Humor, then, as an element in art and letters, has come down to us from the centuries. But it was only in quite modern times, preëminently in the nineteenth century, that it received its highest development. Let scholars dispute if they like as to whether Greek drama is higher than the drama of today, whether Homer is a greater poet than Omar, and how Aristotle measures up beside the average college president of today. But about humor there is no doubt. The classical humor is poor stuff: the medieval scholars’ humor is simply silly: the medieval peoples’ humor is primitive. Only with the modern world, and only in proportion as it loses its primitive credulity and the intense earnestness of its beliefs and superstitions, does humor enter largely into literature. Humor in a world of waning beliefs remains like Hope still left at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all the evils of the gods flew out from it upon the world.
No “scholar” would admit the truth of this. Scholars tell us that Aristophanes was probably the wittiest man that ever lived — so witty that it takes half a page of notes to explain one of his jokes. Scholars also claim that the humor of Shakespeare is deeper than any other — so deep that you often see no bottom to it. And then there were also Dante and Milton and John Bunyan and a lot of other fun-makers who keep their readers in a roar.
Leave Shakespeare out of count. It is dangerous to speak of him; and he was without doubt, as the creator of Falstaff, a great humorist. Make an honorable exception of Molière, a humorist head and shoulders above his time, a timeless man like Isaac Newton or Galileo. Apart from a few exceptions, to most of us the so-called humor of the earlier modern world is pretty dreary. Cervantes had a fine idea, in the mass, but for us what prolixity!
The eighteenth century with its Addison, its Sterne, its Goldsmith, shows the rising sun. But it was the nineteenth century that brought the full effulgence of the day. The Victorian age represents an epoch in the history of letters greater than any that preceded it — greater, in pure letters, it may well be, than any about to follow it. True as this is in general, it is nowhere more true than in the domain of humor. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Alphonse Daudet, surrounded by a galaxy of lesser stars, represent a reach far beyond anything preceding.
In the mere matter of verbal form the nineteenth century, with its diffused printing and its widening education, was able to run riot. The pun came into its own and more than its own. For a generation or two it was par excellence the English form of wit. Tom Hood, with a marvelous facility for words, helped to drive the pun to death at the hands of an exhausted public. What the pun was to England, bad spelling was to America. Here the humor exaltation was a sort of vindictive triumph over the spelling book, the revered guide and the dreaded authority of the little red schoolhouse. A whole generation of Artemus Wards traded on bad spelling. In the end they killed bad spelling in America as dead as the dead pun in England.
But these and other verbal forms are but a matter of the technique, the mode, of humor, not the informing spirit which is its essence. Beyond the verbal effects of jangling syllables and misused words is the higher stage of the humor of character, turning on the contrasts of incongruities that make up “queer” people.
Beyond this again is humor in its highest meaning and its furthest reach which does not depend on verbal incongruities, or on tricks of sight and hearing. It finds its basis in the incongruity of life itself, the contrast between the fretting cares and the petty sorrows of the day and the long mystery of the tomorrow. Here laughter and tears become one, and humor becomes the contemplation and interpretation of our life. In this aspect the thought of the nineteenth century far excelled all that had preceded it. The very wistfulness of its new ignorance — contrasted with the brazen certainly of bygone dogma — lends it something pathetic.
But in the presentation of the theory and technique of humor to be offered in this book, a beginning will be made with the merely verbal and superficial aspects. Later chapters will discuss the humor of character, the history of humor, and its highest culmination in the sublime.
CHAPTER II. FUN WITH WORDS
THAT VERY SILLY Thing, Indeed, the Pun — Bad Spelling and Artemus Ward — Meiosis and Hyperbole — The Technique of Verbal Forms — Mr. Ballou and Mrs. Gamp — The Amazing Genius of O. Henry.
My little dears who learn to read, pray early learn to shun
That very silly thing indeed which people call a pun.
For instance, ale will make you ail, your aunt an ant may kill,
You in a vale may buy a veil, and Bill may pay the bill;
Or if to France your barque you steer, at Dover, it may be,
A peer appears upon the pier, who, blind, still goes to sea.
Ontario School Reader. 1876.
In the above stanza, the poet (the verse looks like that of Theodore E. Hook), having called the pun a “very silly thing indeed,” proceeds to prove it to our satisfaction in the lines that follow. Yet, as I remember it, they were intended at that remote period to be very amusing, an oasis of laughter in a desert of information.
Punsters are becoming rare. Many people have probably never seen one. There is as yet no law against them but only a sort of social ostracism that meets their effort with groans. The use of the groan as a form of applause belongs wholly to the younger generation. It is as effective as it is cruel. And if anything is needed to give the pun its final quietus, the schoolboy groan can do it.
Yet in point of historic dignity the pun stands easily first among the verbal devices of nineteenth century humor. It was among schoolboys and on the border line between the nursery and the schoolroom that it flourished best. But even adults of the earlier generation leaned heavily on it for support, and at least one name — that of Tom Hood — is inscribed in the history of literature on the strength of it.
In the case of the pun, the contrast or incongruity that makes humor is got from the fact that one and the same sound means two different things, and hence the word brings into connection two things that really have nothing to do with one another. In its most elemental sense there is nothing more in it than the indignity done to the words themselves — beyond that there is no thought and no meaning.
The pun naturally flourished best, and still to some extent flourishes, in the nursery and the schoolroom. The ability to use words is a new thing to the child; the ability to misuse them, consciously, is an awakening joy. It is a sort of triumph over the words themselves.
Such are the puns of schoolboys — this ancient one, for instance, on the divisions of the map of Ireland:
