Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 598
“Will you lend me your Ulster?”
“I Connaught, I will never be a Leinster.”
“What a Munsterous pun!”
The “triumph,” the primitive exultation out of which humor begins, is simply over the words — knocking them down, degrading them with a “merry ha-ha!”
But outside of the nursery and the classroom, puns get infinitely tiresome. At times, of course, the sheer ingenuity of getting the sounds together excites a sort of intellectual admiration. The thing is not exactly funny, but it is as “smart” as a clever conundrum.
Thus on a famous occasion in the French Chamber of Deputies the announcement was made that the city Herat in Afghanistan had been taken and the question was asked, “What does the Shah of Persia say to it?” This isn’t funny in English and there is no funny thought to it. But there was a burst of merriment, and the member speaking said he was afraid he had “aroused the smiles of the assembly”; and then they roared again. Why? Because in French the words were:
“Messieurs, on a pris l’Hérat, (les rats)
Que dit le Shah? (le chat)
· · · · · · · ·
Je crains d’avoir éveillé les souris de la Chambre.”
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This is the class of pun characteristic of the work of the greatest of all punsters Tom Hood. It is the ingenious incongruity in the words — nothing in the thought — that generally is the basis of his pun. Thus:
Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war’s alarms
But a cannon-ball took off his legs
So he laid down his arms!
The only point here is the oddity of our English language which allows a man to lay down his arms without taking them off — because arms mean two things.
Translate it and it’s all gone:
Ayant perdu les jambes par un
Coup de canon, il quitta le service.
Not so funny, is it, or rather funny in a new incongruity that the French words won’t mean what the English did.
But the pun is at once lifted into a higher range when the confusion of the sound accidentally as it were brings out a secondary effect. This is often seen in the blunders and “howlers” made by schoolboys and students in their examination papers. Here is the oft-quoted case of a schoolboy who defined the equator as a “menagerie lion” running round the earth. He meant an “imaginary line” or rather those were the words taught him. Hence the reflection on the hopelessly mechanical way in which he had been taught. The pun in this case is not a mere verbality; it carries an underlying meaning. Still better perhaps is a piece of misspelling (involuntary pun) of a pupil of mine, years ago, who wrote that “Europe in the middle ages was governed on the fuddle system.” It certainly was.
It will nearly always be found that where a distinguished person has left behind him a reputation as a punster, the puns have survived because of this secondary or further application. This is the case with that lovable man the Reverend Sydney Smith (1771-1845) sometime Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is related that on one occasion his fellow canons were discussing, with characteristic clerical prolixity, the question of putting a wooden sidewalk round the cathedral. “Come, gentlemen” interrupted Sydney Smith, “lay your heads together and the thing is done.” Anyone hearing the story reflects with a chuckle, “Yes, it would be!” An analyst would see that the humor is based on the juxtaposition of the solidity and dignity of the heads of the clergymen and their use as a sidewalk.
Sometimes the wit and merit of a pun depend on its being impromptu and actual, not merely related. Anyone could have thought it out, worked it out. In that case it isn’t amusing. But when it is obviously made on the spot, the element of the impromptu gives it a sort of intellectual merit. I remember once, years ago, in the old unredeemed days of the saloon with the long mahogany bar and the long glass mirror, seeing a bibulous gentleman, irritated at the quality of the “free lunch,” pick up a too-solid sandwich and throw it at the looking glass. A witty friend of mine standing by murmured, “There’s food for reflection.”
On another occasion at a supper party where I was present, also in the dim past, when the game of golf was just beginning its vogue in Canada, somebody spoke of the new clubhouse and of the “pro” just engaged. “It seems,” said someone else “that he’s a very deserving young man; he’s using the money he gets at golf to pay his fees at the university.” “Indeed,” said a witty guest, with a simulation of bright interest, “putting himself through college!”
This same witty friend of mine — it was away back in the year 1900, when Lord Roberts was pursuing General Cronje — once amused himself at a social gathering by announcing, with all the appearance of keen interest, a fresh item of news from the South African War.
“Did you see,” he said, “that Lord Roberts has sent out his p.p.c. cards!”
“His p.p.c. cards?” said the puzzled listener. “What for? Is he to leave South Africa?”
“Oh no — pour prendre Cronje.”
But such effects depend for their value on their actuality. Anybody with a book of rhymes and synonyms could make them up.
The part played in the development of English humor by the pun is represented in America by the part played by bad spelling. For at least a whole generation bad spelling — that is to say, incorrect spelling not sanctioned by the spelling book — was the most obvious and popular mode of comic wit.
It is interesting to see how this came about and how it fits into the theory of humor. In earlier days — in Elizabethan and Stuart times — there was nothing funny about bad spelling — or not to the people who used it, though it may look funny to us now.
Here is an example of seventeenth century spelling from the pen of a highly cultivated gentlewoman, Mrs. Ralph Verney, writing to her exiled husband somewhere about the year 1650.
I must give thee some account of our own babyes heare. For Jack his leggs are most miserable crooked as ever I saw any child’s and yett thank god he goes very strongly and is very strayte in his body as any child can bee: and is a very fine child all but his legges. . . .
Mrs. Verney apparently forgot, or didn’t care, that she had called them his “leggs” a line or two above. A little later in the letter she goes back to “leggs,” and remarks that Jack would “very fayne goe into ffrance to his father.”
Neither Artemus Ward nor Josh Billings ever thought of such a triumph over orthography as “ffrance,” without any capital letter and with a double f.
But in the seventeenth century the idea of a single unvarying standard of spelling was only just getting well established. In an earlier age to spell well seemed to mean to find some striking, expressive and phonetic way of putting letters together to make words. Hence the variations of Shakespeare’s name and the vagaries of Elizabethan writing. Strangely enough the same idea of spelling is coming back again in the modern commercial world. “Koffy Shoppes” and “Fittite” clothes and “Kool” drinks are a reversion to the past.
But in the middle nineteenth century, especially in America, it was not so. The glory of the nation was that it could read and write. It carried its tattered spelling books to its frontier cabins. In the little red schoolhouse the “scholars” spelled out their syllables in chorus. And in the evening gatherings in the log houses and frame schools, “spelling bees,” were at once an education and a diversion. “Abe” Lincoln could “spell down” any other adult in the settlement.
Hence the very eminence of spelling rendered it all the better mark for artful degradation. Bad spelling had in it something of the fun of irreverence without the evil conscience. And of all the bad spellers who ever adorned the history of American humor Artemus Ward (Charles Ferrar Browne, 1834-1867) came easily first. This quaint pathetic person, for a brief hour the delight of London, was a sort of wandering minstrel, born centuries after his time. He wandered from a New England farm to a printer’s office in Cleveland, and from there to the new Eldorado of Nevada and California. He published strange little “pieces,” gathered into what he entitled Artemus Ward: His Book (1862). He wandered over to England, gave what he called “lectures” to uproarious audiences of the “quality” of London — whose laughter elicited from him pained expressions of disapproval. He was, indeed, a perfect artist in make-believe — a humorist not of words but of manner, gesture and assumed personality. On his English lecture tour (his health was frail) he faded and died (1867). But around his memory a loving world has entwined a garland of affection as for a lost child.
Most typical of Artemus’ life and his work, and his place in the development of the humor of America is the famous historical occasion when Abraham Lincoln read aloud to his assembled Cabinet Artemus Ward’s “latest.”
It was on the morning of Monday, September 22, 1862, that Abraham Lincoln called his Cabinet together at the White House. He wished to announce to them what was undoubtedly the most momentous decision of his life. He was to read to them the Proclamation, which he had written the day before, setting free the slaves in the rebel States and destined to end American slavery for ever.
But first Lincoln informed the Cabinet that Artemus Ward had sent him his new book and that he would like to read them a chapter of it; with which, he read to them the “High-Handed Outrage at Utica.”
The dignified Mr. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, listened with dry disapproval. “The President,” he tells us in his diary, “seemed to enjoy it very much.” The Cabinet apparently laughed at it, except Stanton, who wouldn’t.
Then Lincoln laid the little book aside, and told the Cabinet that he had made a “promise to his Maker” which he proposed now to fulfil. With that he read aloud his proclamation for the emancipation of the slaves.
And here is what Artemus Ward wrote, and what Lincoln himself, in the cast of his mind, a humorist of the highest order, evidently found very funny:
HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA
In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.
The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.
1 day as I was given a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.
“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.
Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” & hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.
Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air a wax figger — a representashun of the false ‘Postle.”
Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.
The historic interest of the episode and of the extract is immense. But it seems strange that anybody could have found it very funny. Yet Artemus himself thought the “nub” of the piece (“Judas Iscarrot can’t show himself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site”), so funny that he had already used and readapted it three or four times. As to the President, it has become part of the Lincoln myth that he fell back upon these follies — the jokes and funny stories — only to relieve the breaking strain that threatened to crush him. This is nonsense. Strain or no strain, happy or unhappy, Lincoln loved what he thought a funny story. His cares and his surroundings had nothing to do with it. If he had been invited over to stay with Queen Victoria, he’d have told her a few “good ones.”
Bad spelling, as part of the technique of humor, ran riot in Artemus Ward’s day. But it died out and passed unregretted. To us even in retrospect it is never funny except in the few cases where it pleases and surprises by its ingenuity. It is funny when Artemus, in referring to a boa constrictor snake, calls it a “boy constructor.” It is funny when Josh Billings writes the word “yph” and we realize that he is trying to spell “wife.” But on the whole bad spelling exercises upon us now not a humorous effect but the contrary — which makes the written humor of the poor, lost Artemus little more than a historical product.
It is a considerable advance from the pun and bad spelling to the technique afforded by Meiosis and Hyperbole. These are very recondite terms. I remember many years ago being delighted to read the remark of a London book reviewer: “Mr. Leacock’s humor is based on an ingenious mixture of meiosis and hyperbole.” I felt that, after that, all I needed was a can of meiosis and a can of hyperbole and to go down to the cellar and mix them up.
Hyperbole, as most people know, means overstatement, exaggeration. Meiosis, as nobody knows, means understatement. Hyperbole has had a lot to do with the general development of our language. In order to “put a thing across” we state it strongly, we overstate it, often to a degree not literally possible. This is called a figure of speech. Thus we talk of people being “bathed in a flood of tears,” or being “on fire with enthusiasm.” They aren’t. Presently the very familiarity of the words weakens them. To say that a man is “incensed” or “melted” sounds quite literal and ordinary. We have to find a new exaggeration. Thus moves language. Half our words were once lies, used for effect.
But in a quite different way exaggeration was used, from the earliest times, as a mode of narrative and presently of conscious humor. All primitive literature is full of it. See the legends of the Round Table and the Sagas. In the nineteenth century this mode was worn out as narrative, except in the nursery, but came into its own as humor. It was one of the type forms of what came to be called “American Humor,” though never its main reliance. Mark Twain developed it to a high degree. In his Innocents Abroad, in describing his visits to the Italian picture galleries, he says:
We have seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, and twenty-two thousand St. Marks, and sixteen thousand St. Matthews, and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, and four millions of assorted monks, undesignated, and we feel encouraged to believe that when we have seen more of these various pictures, and had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in them like our cultivated countrymen from Amérique.
But exaggeration taken by itself is poor stuff as humor. It needs to be combined with some other subtle elements, as a chemist makes a compound with a crude base and a minute portion of a powerful drug. Compare Bill Nye:
“There must be at least 500,000,000 rats in the United States; of course I am speaking only from memory.”
It is not the number of rats that is exaggerated; it is the power of consecutive human observation. The effect is brought out by the incongruity between the familiar form of words “speaking only from memory,” and the queer purpose to which it is put — counting all the American rats.
Sometimes the exaggeration goes beyond the bounds of what is possible in the physical world, yet retains a ludicrous analogy with common sense. As an illustration — a brave man ought not to fear lightning and should be willing to face it rather than let it subdue his native courage. But what are we to say to Eli Perkins’s statement:
“I got so sick of the lightning everlastingly fooling round my farm in Maine that one day I went out to the barnyard and took six strokes of it on my bare back.”
The opposite form to exaggeration is meiosis, or understatement, and this probably flourishes more among English writers and English people generally than anywhere else in the world. It is a part of English character. English people abhor sentimentality (the overdone expression of feeling), prefer to keep their sorrows silent rather than to parade them, and admire reserve and reticence. They like to make the least of things rather than to make the most of them.
Thus an Englishman speaks of the paintings of the great masters as “not half bad.” He classes Beethoven’s music as “rather good” and describes Niagara Falls as “quite striking.” If he is ruined financially he says he has had “rather a nasty knock.” If he has lost one arm and one leg in the war, he “came out a bit shy.” If he falls out of an airplane he says that things looked “rather ticklish for a while.” If he is dead broke, he says, he is “up a tree.” If he is half starved he says he’s “in a hole.” It will be recalled how the war news from the North Sea used to call it “certain signs of activity” when two or three war ships clashed together; and when the Germans bombarded the Yorkshire coast, spoke of it as “liveliness.”
A Frenchman, as far at least as his language goes, lives in a world of tragedies, passion and disasters. All of his words are overstatements. He is “crushed,” “overwhelmed,” “annihilated,” “transported.” All sorts of things happen to him all the time.
The American hits a happy mean between the English and the French, and whenever anything happens to him he lies about it. If he loses his money he says he has made a “clean up” and is getting out. If his wife leaves him he says she is in the Adirondacks. After all, it’s simpler and nicer for one’s friends. All three, English, American and French are just as good men. It is only the method of expression that differs.
So it comes about that the English easily slip into meiosis as a congenial form of humor. What they do unconsciously as their way of talking they do consciously as their way of joking. This is done not only in literary writing but in casual narrative. Thus an Englishman would tell about having a row with a cabman in words such as these:
“So the gentleman seemed to be getting rather excited (the cabman isn’t a gentleman and he is more than rather excited) and dancing around in most extraordinary manner and even suggesting the possibility of bashing one’s face so that one was just wondering about a little bit of persuasion over the head with a golf club, when luckily a bobby . . . etc., etc.”
English story tellers of a humorous sort, such as Mr. P. G. Wodehouse (a prince among them), run easily to a sort of sustained understatement. Mr. Kipling, who could have been a great humorist if he had had time to (it is a leisurely trade), rolls off whole pages of meiosis. In his case it is better still; it is “smothered meiosis,” depending less on the single word than on a general effect. In Kipling’s hands (apart from a few pieces of exception) the whole of India is meiositated (or meiosificated), with the horror, the tragedy, and the stink taken out of it. Consider in such a connection the battle scenes in “The Drums of the Fore and Aft.” The whole story has a sort of undercurrent of something like humor running underneath. Giant Afghans are pleasant fellows, and Goorkhas with Kukri knives cheery little chaps always on the grin. . . . Thus ever mankind, through the mouths of those who speak for it, seeks to explain away its evils.
