Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 635
“‘Will you treat my case?’ asks the Mayor.
“‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I’ve had a good deal of trouble with medical societies everywhere I’ve been. I don’t practice medicine. But, to save your life, I’ll give you the psychic treatment if you’ll agree as mayor not to push the license question.’
“‘Of course I will,’ says he. ‘And now get to work, Doc, for them pains are coming on again.’
“‘My fee will be $250.00, cure guaranteed in two treatments,’ says I.
“‘All right,’ says the Mayor. ‘I’ll pay it. I guess my life’s worth that much.’
“I sat down by the bed and looked him straight in the eye.
“‘Now,’ says I, ‘get your mind off the disease. You ain’t sick. You haven’t got a heart or a clavicle or a funny bone or brains or anything. You haven’t got any pain. Declare error. Now you feel the pain that you didn’t have leaving you, don’t you?’
“‘I do feel some better, Doc,’ says the Mayor, ‘darned if I don’t. Now state a few lies about my not having this swelling in my left side, and I think I could be propped up and have some sausage and buck-wheat cakes.’
“I made a few passes with my hands.
“‘Now,’ says I, ‘the inflammation’s gone. The right lobe of the perihelion has subsided. You’re getting sleepy. You can’t hold your eyes open any longer. For the present the disease is checked. Now, you are asleep.’
“The Mayor shut his eyes slowly and began to snore.
“‘You observe, Mr. Tiddle,’ says I, ‘the wonders of modern science.’
“‘Biddle,’ says he. ‘When will you give uncle the rest of the treatment, Dr. Pooh-pooh?’
“‘Waugh-hoo,’ says I. ‘I’ll come back at eleven tomorrow. When he wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.’
“The next morning I went back on time. ‘Well, Mr. Riddle,’ says I, when he opened the bedroom door, ‘and how is uncle this morning?’
“‘He seems much better,’ says the young man.
“The mayor’s color and pulse was fine. I gave him another treatment, and he said the last of the pain left him.
“‘Now,’ says I, ‘you’d better stay in bed for a day or two, and you’ll be all right. It’s a good thing I happened to be in Fisher Hill, Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘for all the remedies in the cornucopia that the regular schools of medicine use couldn’t have saved you. And now that error has flew and pain proved a perjurer, let’s allude to a cheerfuller subject — say the fee of $250. No checks, please, I hate to write my name on the back of a check almost as bad as I do on the front.’
“I’ve got the cash here, says the mayor, pulling a pocket-book from under his pillow.
“He counts out five fifty-dollar notes and holds ’em in his hand.
“‘Bring the receipt,’ he says to Biddle.
“I signed the receipt and the mayor handed me the money. I put it in my inside pocket careful.
“‘Now do your duty, officer,’ says the mayor grinning much unlike a sick man.
“Mr. Biddle lays his hand on my arm.
“‘You’re under arrest, Dr. Waugh-hoo, alias Peters,’ says he, ‘for practicing medicine without authority under the State law.’
“‘Who are you?’ I asks.
‘“I’ll tell you who he is,’ says Mr. Mayor, sitting up in bed. ‘He’s a detective employed by the State Medical Society. He’s been following you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch you. I guess you won’t do any more doctoring around these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was it you said I had, Doc?’ the mayor laughs, ‘compound — well it wasn’t softening of the brain, I guess, anyway.’
“‘A detective,’ says I.
“‘Correct,’ says Biddle. ‘I’ll have to turn you over to the sheriff.’
“‘Let’s see you do it,’ says I, and I grabs Biddle by the throat and half throws him out the window, but he pulls a gun and sticks it under my chin, and I stand still. Then he puts handcuffs on me, and takes the money out of my pocket.
“‘I witness,’ says he, ‘that they’re the same bills that you and I marked, Judge Banks. I’ll turn them over to the sheriff when we get to his office, and he’ll send you a receipt. They’ll have to be used as evidence in the case.’
“‘All right, Mr. Biddle,’ says the mayor. ‘And now, Doc Waugh-hoo,’ he goes on, ‘why don’t you demonstrate? Can’t you pull the cork out of your magnetism with your teeth and hocus-pocus them handcuffs off.’
‘“Come on, officer,’ says I, dignified. T may as well make the best of it.’ And then I turns to old Banks and rattles my chains.
‘“Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘the time will come soon when you’ll believe that personal magnetism is a success. And you’ll be sure that it succeeded in this case, too.’
“And I guess it did.
“When we got nearly to the gate, I says: *We might meet somebody now, Andy. I reckon you better take ’em off, and—’ Hey? Why, of course it was Andy Tucker.
That was his scheme; and that’s how we got the capital to go into business together.”
Chapter Eighteen . HUMOR IN A CHANGING WORLD
A DISTRESSED WORLD — Laughter Turns to a Bark — The New Technique of Fun in the Dark — Robert C. Benchley, Irvin Cobb, Ring W. Lardner and Their Fellows.
THE WORLD in which we have lived for the last twenty years has undergone the shock of forces unparalleled in human history. There was the appalling catastrophe of the Great War, at first a stimulus and later an obsession, a dead weight, a paralysis upon the collective thought of mankind. We do not yet know how much has gone under with it. To it was added the vast collapse of the industrial system of the world, unimagined and unimaginable before. The youngest of us now is a more experienced economist than Adam Smith. To this is being combined, with what seems a terrifying suddenness, the specter of another war, uncontrollable, beyond human power in its approach, beyond human calculation in its consequences. We live thus in an age of preoccupation, of apprehension, of fear. All the old dead certainties are gone. Mankind, restless and distressed, is passing into a kind of mass hysteria of apprehension. In such a situation it is easy to see and to say that we have greater need of humor than ever. But can we get it? Children who ought to be reading Josh Billings and Artemus Ward are babbling about leagues of nations and answering questionnaires on bloodshed. Young lovers whisper of the “profits motive” and whether “capitalism” is doomed. Churches become forums. Lunch clubs sit like parliaments, discussing subjects dry as dust a generation ago, now wet with vitriol. The chairman opens with a joke, as did a Greek, with a tribute to Apollo; then falls the gloom and deepens as the speaker of the day delivers his “message” on the latest phase of our damnation.
* * * * *
Nor is this all. The expression of all art, and of none more than that of humor, is being revolutionized under our eyes by the new mechanism of the communication of thought, found on the screen and the radio. Here is a new world of mechanical voices and illusive visions, of incomceivable rapidity, things made, executed and forgotten in a fraction of a second. Here appreciation turns into a spasm, ecstasy to a twinge and humor to a bark. From the “bark” of a moving-picture audience one can perhaps forecast the outline of the “humor” that is to come — short and snappy, sarcastic — a bark, a snarl — reverting towards the primitive mockery that was cast out long ago.
* * * * *
But even apart from the question of mental hurry and over-rapidity the technique of the art of presenting thought, including that of humor, is bound to be affected by the new physical mechanism of film and radio. Here is a new thing — fun in the dark. Hitherto the dark was for ghosts. Now we are to have, we are having, merry little playlets in the dark, nigger talk in the dark, a dark Fourth of July and dark poetry. The presentation of humor by the voice alone is already creating a new technique, a new set of symbols. Presently the perfection of television and the invention of talking books will further alter the conditions. The nineteenth century took its humor through books. The printed page stimulated the mind to create a picture. The twentieth century will take its humor direct, with words and pictures all supplied, nothing to invent. The effect may be to dull, in the spectator, the warm power of creation; or it may not.
* * * * *
But of all this no one can speak. So much depends upon the point of view. The world, even this harassed world, looks very different to the old and to the young. Old men are apt to see in it, as they always have, a world hurrying to its downfall. Young people see in it a world with but one side visible, close behind them, and the rest opening into an infinity of years and of possibilities. Middle-aged people, absorbed in it from day to day, see nothing and then suddenly wake to realize that it is over, that that is all there was of it.
* * * * *
One turns to humor. Here it is, still among us, with plenty of laughter still in the foreground whatever the shadows in the back. Is it about to pass into something bigger and brighter, as who should say, “louder and funnier,” or will it fade? People have often thought that great periods in national art and literature come either at the moment of a nation’s sunrise, as in Elizabethan England, or in the evening shadow of its decline, as in Athenian Greece. Plato and Aristotle, said somebody, reflect the departing glory of Hellas. So it may be that the American Humor of Mr. Bob Benchley and Mr. Irvin Cobb and their fellows represents a swan song of fun, never to be recaptured.
* * * * *
It would be impossible to enumerate the names of those worthy to be classed, since the Great War, as American humorists. One can at least select the work of two or three as typical of the kind of high achievement in which great numbers of their fellows have shared. In one sense humor may be divided into high and low: the lowest stage of mere buffoonery and the fun of words, the highest on the lofty height from which we mingle smiles and tears as we look down upon the vanity of life. But in point of performance there are great humorists of every stage. Humorists of the first order represent not a scale but a circle. You may start anywhere in the circle and go round.
Here, for example, is Robert C. Benchley, perhaps the most finished master of the technique of literary fun in America. Benchley’s work is pure humor, one might almost say sheer nonsense. There is no moral teaching, no reflection of life, no tears. What Benchley pursues is the higher art of nonsense and he has shown in it a quite exceptional power for tricks of word and phrase. His work is of a kind more cultivated in England than in America and would easily be taken there for the native British product.
* * * * *
Very different is Irvin Cobb, whose work in literature has a range that runs all the way from terror to tears, from romance to laughter. Cobb’s narrative stories are mostly not “humorous” in the first place, often not humorous at all; but they are, as a rule, adorned by humor.
There is thrown over many of them the peculiar charm that lies upon the South, and the lingering memory of the lights and shadows of the Civil War.
Ring Lardner was a great humorist, fit to rank anywhere. It was his literary lot in life to traffic overmuch with baseball and such lesser activities of the human intellect. But when he turns to life itself, from the home run to the home, from the world series to the world serious, so to speak, the effect is often marvelous. Some of his finest stories, such as the one quoted below, touch that high plane on which humor becomes a vehicle of reflection rather than of laughter.
Chapter Nineteen . SELECTIONS FROM BENCHLEY, COBB AND LARDNER
ROBERT C. BENCHLEY (1889 — ) a graduate of Harvard, an ex-editor of the Harvard Lampoon, a journalist, librettist, and public entertainer at large, has made his name known throughout the English-speaking world as a humorist of the highest literary type. The samples of his work which follow are taken from his book Of All Things, one of a number of volumes that produce the endless rosary of cheerful conceits which Mr. Benchley has threaded on the string of life.
MR. BENCHLEY WRITES “OF ALL THINGS” SHAKESPEARE EXPLAINED Carrying on the System of Footnotes to a Silly Extreme PERICLES
ACT II.
SCENE 3
Enter first Lady-in-Waiting (Flourish, Hautboys and torches).
First Lady-in-Waiting — What ho! Where is the music?
NOTES i. Flourish: The stage direction here is obscure. Clarke claims it should read “flarish,” thus changing the meaning of the passage to “flarish” (that is, the King’s), but most authorities have agreed that it should remain “flourish,” supplying the predicate which is to be flourished. There was at this time a custom in the countryside of England to flourish a mop as a signal to the passing vender of berries, signifying that in that particular household there was a consumer-demand for berries, and this may have been meant in this instance. That Shakespeare was cognizant of this custom of flourishing the mop for berries is shown in a similar passage in the second part of King Henry IV, where he has the Third Page enter and say, “Flourish.” Cf also Hamlet, IV, 7:4.
2. Hautboys, from the French haut, meaning “high” and the Eng boys, meaning “boys.” The word here is doubtless used in the sense of “high boys,” indicating either that Shakespeare intended to convey the idea of spiritual distress on the part of the First Lady-in-Waiting or that he did not. Of this Rolfe says: “Here we have one of the chief indications of Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature, his remarkable insight into the petty foibles of this work-a-day world.” Cf. T. N. 4:6, “Mine eye hath play’d the painter, and hath stell’d thy beauty’s form in table of my heart.”
3. and. A favorite conjunctive of Shakespeare’s in referring to the need for a more adequate navy for England. Tauchnitz claims that it should be pronounced “und,” stressing the anti-penult. This interpretation, however, has found disfavor among most commentators because of its limited significance. We find the same conjunctive in A. W. T. E. W. 6: 7, “Steel-boned, unyielding and uncomplying virtue,” and here there can be no doubt that Shakespeare meant that if the King should consent to the marriage of his daughter the excuse of Stephano, offered in Act 2, would carry no weight.
4. Torches. The interpolation of some foolish player and never the work of Shakespeare (Warb.). The critics of the last century have disputed whether or not this has been misspelled in the original, and should read “trochies” or “troches.” This might well be since the introduction of tobacco into England at this time had wrought havoc with the speaking voices of the players, and we might well imagine that at the entrance of the First Lady-in-Waiting there might be perhaps one of the hautboys mentioned in the preceding passage bearing a box of troches or “trognies” for the actors to suck. Of this entrance Clarke remarks: “The noble mixture of spirited firmness and womanly modesty, fine sense and true humility, clear sagacity and absence of conceit, passionate warmth and sensitive delicacy, generous love and self-diffidence with which Shakespeare has endowed this First Lady-in-Waiting renders her in our eyes one of the most admirable of his female characters.” Cf. M. S. N. D. 8: 9, “That solder’st close impossibilities and mak’st them kiss.”
5. What — What.
6. Ho! In conjunction with the preceding word doubtless means “What hoi” changed by Clarke to “What hoo!” In the original MS. it reads “What hi!” but this has been accredited to the tendency of the time to write “What hi” when “what ho” was meant. Techner alone maintains that it should read “What humpf!” Cf. Ham. 5:0, “High-ho!”
7. Where. The reading of the folio, retained by Johnson, the Cambridge editors and others, but it is not impossible that Shakespeare wrote “why,” as Pope and others give it. This would make the passage read “Why the music?” instead of “Where is the music?” and would be a much more probable interpretation in view of the music of that time. Cf. George Ade. Fable No. 15, “Why the gunny-sack?”
8. is — is not. That is, would not be.
9. the. Cf. Ham. 4:6. M. S. N. D. 3: 5. A. W. T. E. W. 2: 6. T. N. 1:3 and Macbeth 3: 1, “that knits up the raveled sleeves of care.”
10. music. Explained by Malone as “the art of making music” or “music that is made.” If it has but one of these meanings we are inclined to think it is the first; and this seems to be favored by what precedes, “the music!” Cf. M. of V. 4: 2, “The man that hath no music in himself.”
The meaning of the whole passage seems to be that the First Lady-in-Waiting has entered, concomitant with a flourish, hautboys and torches and says, “What ho! Where is the music?”
FOOTBALL; COURTESY OF MR. MORSE
SUNDAY MORNING these fine fall days are taken up with reading about the “40,000 football enthusiasts” or the “gaily-bedecked crowd of 60,000 that watched the game on Saturday.” And so they probably did, unless there were enough men in big fur coats who jumped up at every play and yelled “Now we’re off!” thus obstructing the view of an appreciable percentage.
But why stop at the mention of the paltry 50,000 who sat in the Bowl or the Stadium? Why forget the twice 50,000 all over the country, in Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta, who watched the same game over the ticker, or sat in a smoke-fogged room listening to telegraphic announcements, play by play, or who even stood on the curbing in front of a newspaper office and watched an impartial employee shove a little yellow ball along a blackboard, usually indicating the direction in which the real football was not going. Since it is so important to give the exact number of people who saw the game, why not do the thing up right and say: “Returns which are now coming in from the Middle West, with some of the rural districts still to be heard from, indicate that at least 145,566 people watched the Yale-Princeton football game yesterday. Secretary Dinwoodie of the San Francisco Yale Club telegraphed late last night that the final count in that city would probably swell the total to a round 50,395. This is, or will be, the largest crowd that ever assembled in one country to watch a football game.”
