Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 606
The highest range of comic verse — highest, that is, in point of dignity, not by any means in point of comicality — is where poetry is used as humorous satire, the effective power of the words being something like the effective power of serious poetry as just described.
Consider this case: Some years ago a bill was introduced in the British Parliament, for disestablishing the Welsh church. The importance of the subject to the world at large, outside of England, was about on a par with the importance of a dog show at Aberystwith. In fact the world at large didn’t know there was a Welsh church, and had no idea what disestablishing it would do to it.
Yet Mr. F. E. Smith — later Lord Birkenhead — speaking against the bill in the House of Commons, declared that “this bill, has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe.” The absurd contrast between the width of the statement and the narrowness of the subject affords at once an opportunity for denunciation.
Now observe the different ways in which the denunciation may be done. First: a member of the opposite side of the house might say:
“Does the Hon. gentleman have the presumption to tell us that this purely domestic piece of legislation, entirely within the statutory control of parliament, can possibly be made a subject of controversy or of protest by another nation? If so, I tell him that his presumption is as false as it is unwarranted.”
Or, secondly, consider how a dignified historian, writing of the incident with a full and leisurely pen, would deal with it:
“The exaggerated plea put forward by a leading member of the opposition that legislation affecting little more than the financial arrangements of a minor principality, and in no way involving the interpretation of religious doctrine or disturbing the spiritual life of the nation, could become a subject of world-wide agitation and protest, was so obviously beyond all the facts of the case as at once to afford a target alike for the denunciation of the orator, and for the jeers of the popular press.”
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But now see how marvelously Mr. G. K. Chesterton dealt with it in a mocking “comic” poem, calling up a supposed vision of pious Roman Catholics horrified by the bill:
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city,
Groaning, “That’s the second reading,”
Hissing, “There is still Committee!”
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna’s point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?
Here are two things put into incongruous juxtaposition — first, the Breton fishermen as they would be if overwhelmed with real disaster, such as hurricane and shipwreck that strewed their coast with corpses, and sent the wives and children and the survivors to crowd around their crosses and altars, and second the real attitude of the Breton fishermen toward the Welsh disestablishment bill.
One may imagine an English tourist in Brittany saying to a fisherman:
Que pensez-vous, Mooshoo, de ce bill pour désétablir l’église de Wales?
And the fisherman saying:
Plaît-il? M’sieu, un bill de quoi?
The effect of the verse is heightened by the further happy incongruities of language — the casual, Are they, Smith? and the tragic setting: the notion of fishermen whispering and murmuring in awe about “committees” and “second readings.”
It is a beautiful example of humorous satire on its highest plane; purely comic poetry may be funnier, and is certainly kinder, but it could not be more effective.
Now take as standing at the other end of the scale, in class not in quality, the deathless ode written by Mr. W. St. Leger on the Chavender or Chub. This is purely and simply a matter of words and sounds. It has no discoverable meaning whatever. But it is delightful.
It appears that the fish commonly called a chub used also to be called a chavender. Indeed Izaak Walton in his Compleat Angler makes the statement, “Now is the time to fish for Chavender or Chub.” The luminous intelligence of Mr. St. Leger at once made clear the fact that if what is called a Chub can also be called a Chavender, that anything ending in -ub can also be called something ending in -avender: and vice versa. This discovery was all that was needed, the result was inevitable and appears in the poem entitled:
A False Gallop of Analogies
There is a fine stuffed chavender,
A chavender or chub,
That decks the rural pavender
The pavender or pub,
Wherein I eat my gravender,
My gravender or grub.
How good the honest gravender!
How snug the rustic pavender!
From sheets as sweet as lavender,
As lavender or lub,
I jump into my tavender,
My tavender or tub.
And so on, for twenty-six more lines, which bring out such delightful verbalities as “clavender,” wherein a man takes his ease, looking out of window at the “shravenders” which bloom beside it; and an improvement on Hamlet in the fine reflection “Ay, there’s the ravender!”
The English, who lean more toward academic humor, perhaps, than we do on our side of the Atlantic, have been especially fortunate in exploiting these verbal forms. For example the ingenious Harry Graham has made the discovery that many of our longer words are so well known and so distinctive that when we have half of them we don’t need the rest. We know it already. Why say, “promiscuous” when “promisc” is quite enough? Why call a thing a “phenomenon” when “phenom” will do? When Disraeli called Mr. Gladstone a “sophisticated rhetorician infatuated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,” he might just as well have said “a sophist rhetorish infat with the exube of his own verbos.”
Now observe this discovery set to words and music.
I gladly publish to the pop.
A scheme of which I make no myst.,
And beg my fellow scribes to cop.
This labour-saving syst.
I offer it to the consid.
Of every thoughtful individ.
· · · · · · · ·
The author working like a beav.,
His readers’ pleasure could redoub.
Did he but now and then abbrev.
The work he gives his pub.
· · · · · · · ·
If playwrights would but thus dimin.
The length of time each drama takes,
(The Second Mrs. Tan. by Pin.
Or even Ham. by Shakes.)
We could maintain a watchful att.
When at a Mat. on Wed. or Sat.
· · · · · · · ·
Quite different from the verbal comicality of comic verse, or the use of verse as a means of satire, is the form that may be called Narrative Comic Verse. This is intended to be the counterpart of serious narrative verse, once such a popular form of literature. To this latter class belonged the narrative poems of Sir Walter Scott (Marmion, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and so on), and most of the works of Lord Byron. In an age which sees a story told by electricity in one evening and forgets it coming home, the method is too slow.
Comic narrative verse was meant to be the amusing form corresponding to such things as Marmion. It was not parody; it was intended as funny narrative on its own account not as a parody of something else. Compare as two examples The Lay of the Last Minstrel and John Gilpin.
The way was long, the wind was cold;
The minstrel was infirm and old.
His harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
The last of all the bards was he
That sang of Border chivalry.
The parody form of this runs:
The way was long, the wind was cold;
The minstrel was infernal old.
His harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an awful boy.
The last of all the bards was he,
And, I believe, deservedly.
But now set beside it:
John Gilpin was a citizen
Of credit and renown,
A train-band captain eke was he
Of famous London town.
etc.
Here follow in verse the misadventures of John Gilpin which we remember from our childhood. He decides to take a holiday, a day off, with his wife and his three children and his sister-in-law and her child. They are to drive out to the Bell at Islington, dine and return. But as his women folk and children fill the chaise, Gilpin sets out on horseback. His horse runs away, the people shout, the poultry fly, the donkeys bray, he dashes past the Bell, gets to goodness-knows-where and at last safe home.
The analysis of the humor shows it to be based on the humor of discomfiture and misadventure — the destructive contrast between doing things properly and bungling them — that was so popular from the days of Goldsmith to those of Dickens. John Gilpin and Mr. Winkle are of the same family. Dickens could have written up the John Gilpin story as a sketch of Boz. Thus: —
Who so sprightly as Master John Gilpin as he stands beside his steed ready to mount? What so bright as the red coat that he has manfully thrown about him, and what so gallant as the trusty sword that has known the terrors of the drill field . . . etc. etc.
As with the prose form so with the verse form, the humor is supposed to come more clearly to view from the neat and felicitous phrases that convey it.
I came because your horse would come
And if well forbode,
My hat and wig will soon be here, —
They are upon the road.
Throughout all such narrative verse there is a running contrast between the smoothness and the felicity of the verse, and the triviality of the occurrences recorded. If we carry this a little further we come into the closely related domain of what may be called Mock Heroic Verse. Here there is a sustained contrast between the elevation and dignity of the language and the obvious unimportance or triviality of the subject. Thus in a poem by Mr. E. V. Knox that appeared in Punch a few years ago we have a panegyric of fat men, couched in language fitted for the praise of crusaders. Take the verse:
Like a great trout within a darkened pool,
Or like a prize ox fattened for a show,
Calm in adversity, in danger cool,
Turning a bulbous eye on freak or fool,
Such are fat men and I would have them so.
This is marvelous. The language actually imposes on us; there is a majesty and dignity about it that carries conviction. We forget what it is about; we feel that anything so noble must be true. And there is far more “to it” than the mere usual mock-heroic effect by which for example a battle between two grasshoppers is described as a desperate duel, or the love of the lobster portrayed in an agony of sentiment. Mock heroic stuff was done to death and died two generations ago. Nobody reads it now. But this is different. It involves a complete shifting or overturn of usual valuations. Fat is generally comic. A “fat man’s race” is a joke. The “fat boy” in Pickwick is a sustained source of merriment. A fat lover is ridiculous. The tears of a fat man are laughable.
Yet here is the fat man suddenly changed from a “suet-man” to a “super-man.” Perhaps he is. And so the humor rests, as all high humor does, on a real basis of thought. It starts us thinking about fat: it is as if a physiological society held a debate on the question:
“Resolved that any serious increase of adipose tissue militates against the intensity of intellectual and spiritual life.”
It recalls to us Shakespeare’s thought as put into the mouth of Cæsar,
“Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights;
Yon’ Cassius hath a lean and hungry look; —
He thinks too much.”
Or we remember Hamlet’s agonized cry: —
“Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt.”
We begin turning up our encyclopedias to see who was fat. Were the Apostles fat men? How about Alfred the Great? Surely Dante at least was thin! Ah! But Napoleon — he grew fat as he succeeded. Yes, but wasn’t that why he lost Waterloo? And so on.
We turn now, as the professors say, to the very interesting question of the technique of comic verse. In other words, how do you do it, anyway?
Now there is a lot of verse which ordinarily would be called “comic verse,” which belongs in reality under other heads. A good deal of it, for example, is mere parody, as already discussed in the preceding chapter.
But even at its best all parody verse has to be marked down as belonging in a low class. Even at its best it is parasitic; it is not first-hand literature.
Another elementary form of comic verse is to make it depend on puns, as discussed in an earlier chapter. Great masses of Tom Hood’s comic verse amounted to nothing more than this.
Faithless Sally Brown
Young Ben he was a nice young man,
A carpenter by trade;
And he fell in love with Sally Brown,
That was a lady’s maid.
But as they fetch’d a walk one day
They met a press gang crew;
And Sally she did faint away,
Whilst Ben he was brought to.
The boatswain swore with wicked words,
Enough to shock a saint,
That though she did seem in a fit
’Twas nothing but a feint.
“Come girl,” he said, “hold up your head,
He’ll be as good as me,
For when your swain is in our boat
A boatswain he will be.”
(Ben having been taken away to serve in the navy, Sally presently forgot him and took up with another lover. Ben returning home to find himself forgotten in his despair commits suicide.)
His death, which happened in his berth,
At forty odd befell;
They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll’d the bell.
The last verse is probably one of the best remembered of Hood’s innumerable puns, and the most characteristic of his genius. Any merit or amusement that is in the poem lies purely in the ingenuity of the language. The “story” is nothing. A child could think of it; and meaning it has none.
There are other variants of comic verse technique, on a purely verbal plane not much exploited, which might still exercise the ingenuity of the student. Take this case. A well known poem is often so well known that people know both the end and the beginning and so get a pleasant shock of humorous effect when all of the poem is left out, except the beginning and the end, and yet it seems to be there: thus:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward.
Then they rode back, but not,
Not the six hundred.
A similar “degradation effect” can be got by mixing, half and half, two well known poems that happen to have the same meter. Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith” and his “Slave’s Dream,” have the same form of line and the same rhythm. Put them together and you get:
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands,
His breast is bare, his matted hair
Is buried in the sands
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
etc. etc.
Another form, always to be connected with the memory of Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland is found in the use of words that are not really words — known as such — but arrangements of sounds that seem to imply a certain meaning though apparently not making any sense at all.
It is probable that, as we go on using our native tongue year after year, unconsciously certain sounds become connected with certain kinds of ideas. This is obvious in the case of the straight imitation words, (onomatopœia as the scholars call it), such as “splash” and “bang” and “hiss.” But the principle carries much further and made-up words seem to carry a meaning though we cannot tell where it comes from. Proper names as invented in fiction are a good example; there are certain names that seem of necessity to indicate a cheery man, or a taciturn man, or a contemptible man. Charles Dickens had a master hand for such invention. Thus, when he christened the two cheerful old philanthropists in Nicholas Nickleby, the Cheerybles the thing is obvious. But take the repulsive, damp, oleaginous, brandy-soaked “nurse” in Martin Chuzzlewit — what name so apt as Mrs. Gamp? Or the slimy, ghastly lawyer of Bleak House who drained the life out of young Richard Carstone — Mr. Vholes. The name is wonderful! One may say, if he will, that these names are direct combinations of two words — that Vholes is combined of “vampire” and “ghoul”; or that Gamp is “gruesome” and “damp.” It may be so. But it doesn’t follow, and it doesn’t follow that Dickens meant it so. It is more likely our subconscious connection of words and sounds.
Lewis Carroll applied this to comic verse, the supreme example of it being the famous Jabberwocky:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Some of the words no doubt are made by direct telescoping of two known words. “Brillig” may be “brilliant” and “twilight.” But a lot of the words are not combinations. They stand by themselves.
When the same technique is carried to an extreme, language is reduced to a series of grunts, groans, pauses and booming reverberations — with here and there a word or two to carry the sense. Anyone who has heard the recitation of “Starlight,” the Australian race-horse, winning the cup, will know just what is meant.
But the highest comic range of comic verse — for which indeed the name “comic” seems a little cheap — is found in humorous poems not depending on parody, or pun, or mere verbal eccentricities, but humorous in themselves. Among the best known examples are Bret Harte’s “Heathen Chinee” and his “Society upon the Stanislaus,” as chronicled by Truthful James; Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Etiquette”; and other such masterpieces of human genius. To write such verse demands far more than mere academic knowledge or verbal ingenuity. It is far above the reach of common men.
