Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 612
It is a peculiar element in Scottish humor, as appreciated by Scotsmen, that the harder it is to see, the better it is esteemed. If it is obvious, it is of less account. This rests on the intellectuality of the Scotch; having little else to cultivate, they cultivate the intellect. The export of brains came to be their chief item of commerce.
My distinguished friend Sir Andrew Macphail once wrote a novel of Puritan days, in which a Puritan sea captain has a warrant served on him and kicks the officers of the law off his deck. The passage runs:
“The ship-master tore the paper across and threw it in their faces. He fell into a passion: and declared that he hoped God would manifest his Works upon him if he allowed any King, save Him who made the sea, to come within his ship.”
The inattentive reader may not notice that what the captain really said was that he would be blank, blank, b —— d if he would allow any son of a b —— , and so forth.
The point of the humor lies in the analogy between pious exhortation and powerful swearing, and in the fact that the joke requires careful concentration to see it.
It would be fruitless to try to discuss here the exquisite humor of modern France, at its height with Alphonse Daudet. Tartarin de Tarascon is unsurpassed as a creation, and the chronicle of his deeds unsurpassed in execution. But humor defies translation. Turn it literally from language to language and it becomes like Mark Twain’s frog and the Portuguese Grammar. Turn it any other way and that merely turns French humor into English humor, just as Fitzgerald turned Omar Khayyam’s Persian couplets into English thought. When he was done there was nothing particularly Persian about them.
CHAPTER IX. HUMOR THROUGH THE AGES
THE GREEK IDEA of Fun — Chaucer Sets a High Mark in Dirty Stories — Shakespeare and Falstaff — The Soothing Influence of Tobacco — Roast Beef and Rule Britannia.
This chapter, on the historical developments of humor, is appended only for scholars; and they won’t read it. Scholars write, but they don’t read. They talk but they don’t listen. Anyone who has lived among them knows that.
The ancients may have been very funny fellows. But I don’t think so. I am not referring here to the capacity to laugh. That is nothing. Primitive races often laugh easily. The Negroes can laugh more, and at less, than any other living race, with the South Sea Islanders as a fair second. But humor as art, in writing and drawing, is another thing.
Man’s earliest writings were probably names, dates, inscriptions, epitaphs and such. The first real forms of literature were the sacred books. One looks in vain for conscious humor in them. Mark Twain, indeed, after having visited Damascus, claimed that there was at least one joke in the Bible, when it talks of “the street (in Damascus) which is called straight.” Others have found what looks like a real joke arising out of the use of italics in the Bible to indicate a word that is inserted or understood. Such is the statement: “And he said, ‘Saddle me the ass:’ and they saddled him.” There is a similar appearance of a joke in the text “They gave him to eat, and he did eat.”
Such a sanctity still envelops the literature of Greece and Rome that it requires a certain hardihood to say anything derogatory to it. Classical scholars find a majestic humor in Homer and a brilliant wit in the plays of Aristophanes. But it is hard for the rest of us, if we tell the truth, to see it. Homer is about as funny as “Jack and the Bean Stalk”; the Homeric laughter of the Gods would fit in nicely with “Jack the Giant Killer,” and the Algonquin Indians would find it just right.
The Greeks cultivated a lot of little short witticisms — parent forms of the newspaper “joke” of today.
Thus:
“A peasant having heard that parrots live for a hundred years bought one to see if it was true.”
A peasant wishing to see if his horse could live without food, stopped feeding him; after a time the horse died. “Alas,” said the peasant, “just as he was learning to live without food he died.”
In these little Greek stories the “peasant” is usually the butt, the easy mark. He takes the place of the “commercial traveler” in certain anecdotes of today.
The most famous reputation is that of Aristophanes, the comic dramatist. But for us today the cloud of notes and explanations that have to go with his jokes obscures the sight. His play of The Frogs was first produced at Athens in the year 405 b. c. It obtained the first prize in a public competition. The reader can judge of the vast distance that separates us from the humor of the ancient Athenians by reading over the first scene of the play with notes by a Cambridge scholar. The dialogue is supposed to take place as between Dionysus, a god, but disguised as Hercules, and his slave Xanthias. The scene is laid outside Hercules’ house. When they come on the stage, Xanthias is riding on a donkey and carrying an immense pile of luggage on a porter’s pole.
· · · · · · · ·
Xanthias. (Looking round at his burden with a groan.) Shall I say one of the regular things that people in a theater always laugh at?
Note 1. Shall I say? or “Am I to say,” deliberative subjunctive mood.
Note 2. Aristophanes is here laughing at the stale artifices of the comedians who tried to raise laughter by constantly introducing overloaded slaves who groaned and grumbled.
Dionysus. Say what you like except, “I’m overloaded.” But mind, not that. That’s simply wormwood to me.
Xanthias. (Disappointed.) Not anything funny?
Dionysus. Not, “Oh my poor blisters?”
Xanthias. Oh! my poor old neck. Blistered all round and I mustn’t say its blistered! Because that’s funny!
Dionysus. Airs and Insolence! When I, Dionysus, child of the Great Jug, must work and walk, and have him ride lest he should tire himself.
Note 3. Dionysus uses an unexpected word. We expect him to call himself the “child of the Gods” instead of which he calls himself the “child of the Great Jug.” This kind of joke is common with Aristophanes and is called a “paraprosdox.”
There! most readers would drop out at about there, and replace the little book on the shelf of the library with a sigh. The Cambridge scholar may have expected Dionysus to call himself the “child of the Gods”; we didn’t. We had no idea what he was going to call himself. The “paraprosdox” never touched us.
But after all this is not really fair to the Greeks. We cannot understand their jokes without a lot of explanation on the side as to the manners and customs and events out of which the joke arose. But they knew all that already; hence, for them, there was no painful apparatus of explanation. The joke was instantaneous and apparent.
Turn the thing around the other way. Let us suppose that the Greeks had lived after us instead of before us, and had to read and explain with footnotes our Punch and our Mark Twain and our comic strips and Negro dualogues. The effect would probably be as tedious as the explanations of Aristophanes are to us.
Take one of Mark Twain’s typical jokes, put it into Greek and out again with footnotes. Here is one of the best remembered and most characteristic, taken from a volume of his collected sketches. It purports to be an item of telegraphic news of the day and reads:
Elephant escaped from circus today. Chased two plumbers. Killed one. The other escaped. General regret.
Now we don’t need any explanation as to what a circus was, and what a plumber did, and why there was general regret. We get it all at once. But the Greek reader has to have it all doled out to him with notes. Thus “Elephant escaped from circus.” Note 1. The elephant, or elephas, was still seen in the days of Marcus Twainos in connection with a circus, or traveling arena of wild beasts and men. Similar escapes of elephants are recorded by Diodorus Siculus and Edgar Wallace. Note 2. Plumbers — not connected with plumbago, — were a class of highly skilled artisans who were in secret possession of the art or mystery of putting washers (see under wash) on kitchen taps (look under sink). Hence an imaginary regret at the death of a plumber becomes an amusing form of aposiopesis. The learned commentator Eudidulus finds an entirely different meaning. He tells us that a “plumber” was a song bird and gives to the passage an amorous interpretation.
Or let us take a simple example from the accumulated wisdom of Mr. Punch:
Punch’s advice to those about to marry — DON’T.
Greek note. The text here seems hopelessly corrupt. If, on the one hand, the people about to marry, don’t marry, then clearly they were not about to marry. On the other hand if they don’t marry, then no one marries, since also those not about to marry, don’t marry. It is possible that something is missing to complete the passage, such as, “don’t hesitate to do so,” “don’t delay any longer.” This not only makes excellent sense, but is characterized by that pungent wit which distinguished the England of Queen Victoria. Compare as parallel passages “Rock me to sleep, mother,” and “Sing a song of sixpence.”
In other words, translation of humor from one language to another, from one age to another, from one thought to another, is almost impossible. The effects at which the verbal technique of humor depends are lost in the process. The Greeks might have been a terribly funny people and we wouldn’t have known it. Yet as far as we can or dare judge, their standard of humor was pretty primitive and clumsy. Nor did their heavy and cumbrous language lend itself to the subtleties of speech as do the broken-up and reconstructed languages of the modern world. This of course is, to a classical scholar, rank ignorant heresy. The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of ancient languages — a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character that they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu languages and such. Effects of far higher complexity and delicacy are possible where language is put together with separate words. Compare the English “Gin a body meet a body coming through the rye,” with the corresponding Greek which has only three words in it. “Let-it-be-taken-as-a-hypothesis — two-people-coming together each with the other — by-or-in-or-from-a-field of or with rye.”
The same difficulty runs through all the consideration of Latin, and medieval and Arabic humor of the past. It has to be looked at through dim glass. We cannot truly see it. But we can feel sure that, to our bright intelligences, it was not very funny.
After the Greeks and the Romans came the Middle Ages with monks and theologians, troubadours and minstrels as all that there was of literature. It was not an age of letters, still less of humor. The fatter and the jollier of the monks are said to have told one another very funny stories — there being no ladies present — but they didn’t write them down. When they took up their pens they were dreary enough; the nearest they could get to fun was a Latin anagram or acrostic, or some such pedantic word puzzle.
But most people — even the ladies and gentlemen — couldn’t read and write; and if they could, there were practically no books. Hence tales, heroic, or narrative or humorous, had to be told or sung not read; and hence the demand for singers who could carry the lines in their head — improvise them when they fell short — and strum some sort of music with them. These people — troubadours, jongleurs (jugglers) and minstrels — wandered about among the castles, singing for their supper. The art of printing presently killed them, though they long survived in odd places. Walter Scott chronicled the lay of the last of them. Yet their ultimate descendant the organ-grinder still survives.
The minstrels flourished best as the troubadours of Provence. We are told — in the histories of literature — that they carried their art to a high pitch of excellence. Their language was the half-way form of Latin breaking up into Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. They sang of chivalry and of love. People who couldn’t hear or read a historic, heroic story any other way sat enraptured listening to the troubadour.
We can only appreciate it by thinking ourselves back into the past. To us, now, it would be intolerable. Imagine listening to the news about Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal given to us in this form:
The feast is o’er in Roosevelt’s bower
And the Wizard has gone to his White House tower.
His intellect, serene and bold,
Dreams of demonetizing gold.
Then, summoning an office boy,
He calls for fifteen grains of troy.
Thus in his own mysterious way
Does he concoct the N.R.A.
But the medieval lady sitting in a flood of silk, with her golden head on the steel shoulder of a knight, took in her literature that way. After all, as compared with English “Course No. 9, Medieval Literature” as given in a modern college, it is not so bad.
But love was the chief theme. At that time and place love had run to seed: it had drifted into silly gallantries, and make-believes, the occupation of the idle hours of people who couldn’t fight or eat all the time, wouldn’t work, despised trade, couldn’t think and had nothing to smoke. Hence the silly gatherings, and the Courts of Love, with a code of laws to guide the true love of true lovers, and mock trials and sentences awarded against erring and recreant lovers. The ladies of Provence married kings and princes and carried with them to their new homes their troubadours and jugglers and their Courts of Love.
One of the best known codes was that of the Countess of Champagne (1181-1197 a. d.). It contained in all thirty-one articles. Articles 20, 23 and 30 explain how a true lover should behave himself.
Art.
20.
The true lover is always timid.
〃
23.
Filled with thoughts of love the true lover eats less, and (presently) still less.
〃
30.
Without intermission the true lover is filled all the time with the image of his lady love.
It would be difficult to see where such a true lover would find a place in the modern world. Few people would care to give him forty cents an hour.
But for humor in all these centuries of song and love, one looks almost in vain. Scholarly historians, holding a brief for the past as scholarly historians always do, tell us that the troubadours were terrible satirists. “Their satire,” says one of their admiring expositors, “was as terrible to the ladies of Provence as was that of Archilochus to the Greeks.” But that probably only means that, if they wanted to, they could tell some pretty raw stuff on anybody. Sometimes, as in the Chanson de Roland, humor is represented by mountainous exaggeration. But this is primitive. It reappears in children’s nursery stories. When children read Hans Andersen’s story of the tinder box and hear of the treasure guarded by a dog with “eyes as big as the round tower of Copenhagen,” they shudder and snigger with mingled fear and laughter. So it was with medieval romance. That is as far as it had got. As beside the reach and range of modern humor, it is nowhere. Yet in a way this humor of exaggeration lives long. The nineteenth century still had it, even before the Americans revived it. Sydney Smith once said of a fat lady of his acquaintance, “I was once rash enough to try walking round her but only got half way.”
Nor need one pause overlong to consider the humor of the English Chaucer whose name comes at the close of this period. He died, perhaps, in the year 1400 — and perhaps not. Chaucer has come in for those enduring laurels of praise with which the academic world loves to crown its own initiators of the past. “Like Shakespeare, it would be difficult,” says one of Chaucer’s admirers, “to decide in which style lay Chaucer’s great power — the humorous or the pathetic.” Yet this same critic adds, “It is to be regretted that his tales of the former cast should be almost without exception either positively nasty or unjustifiably licentious. Yet they are related with a spirit, vivacity and ease that have never been surpassed.”
Quite so. In other words he told dirty stories well. So did Abraham Lincoln. He lived in a dirty age of a filth and indecency not known to us now, and to us, if we could see it, no more attractive than a bad smell or a rotten carcase. Chaucer had, for his time, neat and charming tricks of language. But to what extent his humor is humor, to us, is an open question. Yet such is our revering affection for the dawn of our literature, like our own wistful recollections of our childhood, that we resent what seem any cheap and easy affectations of superiority.
The humorous effect, such as it is, rests upon what one of the commentators calls “the delightful gravity with which the animals are invested with intellectual endowments.” In other words it turns on the very primitive incongruity or contrast between animals being animals and yet being able to speak and talking in a very dignified way. Such as it is, the Frenchman La Fontaine, the fable writer of the seventeenth century, did it better still: for he added to it turns of thought with deeper meaning: as thus:
An old wolf lay, reflecting, in his lair —
For what else can you do in a lair if you don’t reflect in it?
After Chaucer came printing, and the early dawn of our literature turned to the full sunrise of the Elizabethan age. There is no doubt of the greatness of this. Bacon and Shakespeare stand as far ahead of the singers and dirty story tellers of the Middle Ages as they do above the Algonquin Indians. Think of such sublime lines as the speech of Macbeth:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
