Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 643
As most people know, puns and the punning habit ran riot in Victorian England. Thomas Hood was merely the brightest star in a galaxy, or if one will, the blackest spot in a darkened sky.
In America puns never assumed the place which they occupied in England. American humor, after the democratic age began, ran in its own channels. This was when the newer civilization that had crossed the Alleghanies to the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi said good-bye to the older culture of New England and Virginia, outposts of Europe, and started a culture of its own. In humor it ran to tall stories, gargantuan exaggerations and new words and expressions reflecting the new life of the West. It did not tend very much towards puns: in a sense a pun is a scholarly thing, or at least a degenerate product of scholarship. Pope Gregory’s joke, or his musing, whichever it was, can’t be appreciated without Latin declensions. But the new America found its own luxuriant riot in the humor of bad spelling. This became as widespread, as execrable and as tiresome as the pun in England. The earliest (puerile) writings of Mark Twain show him as attempting to be funny in this way. He soon shook loose from it. But other celebrities of the day — Artemus Ward and Josh Billings — maintained the same style through life. Here is an example that is historic —
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 and 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 pussy-lanermus 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 3rd. degree.
This is famous as the extract which Abraham Lincoln read to his cabinet before he showed them his Emancipation Proclamation. It is pretty steep reading for us to-day. We have to adopt towards it the same reverent attitude that we have for Greek jokes. What is more, unless Lincoln had explained the spelling, which so far as is known he didn’t, the cabinet couldn’t get it. This is another shortcoming of bad spelling, that it appeals only to the eye.
It is not difficult to account for the vogue of bad spelling in America. In England it made no hit as humor because it had existed for centuries as a matter of custom and indifference. When Mr. Weller told the court in Bardell v. Pickwick that his name could be spelt according to the “taste and fancy of the speller,” he hit exactly the English point of view towards spelling from Elizabethan and Stuart times till almost our own day. It was no great matter. Prince Rupert was probably one of the most brilliant men of the seventeenth century and, in the proper sense of the word, the most scholarly. Yet we have only to read his letters, as printed in Warburton’s Life with his own spelling, to realize that he would just as soon spell ‘dog’ with two g’s as not. The English nation at large never learned to read and spell till the middle of the nineteenth century.
At the opening of Queen Victoria’s reign about half the people of England were illiterate and half of the other half not much better. On marriage registers two-thirds of the brides ‘made their mark.’ In big towns such as Liverpool, only half the children went to schools and the other half, says Mr. G. M. Young (Victorian England, 1936), “did not miss much.”
In America the case was different. Public education began in New England with the arrival of the Pilgrims. The little red school became the Oxford of America. England began at the top: America at the bottom. The spelling-book and the ‘spelling-bee’ were part of the life of the settler. Hence bad spelling had all the fascination that goes with irreverence, and all the incongruity that lay between the rigorous correctness of the spelling-book and the wild luxuriance of free spelling, that somehow hit the mark as well. Presently, as higher culture spread and the West became easternized, America discarded bad spelling as pointless in a world of rotary presses and clicking typewriters. It only exists now in the desperately silly idea of gradual spelling reform, which is like an attempt to grow one hair at a time. It has broken out again recently, however, as a sort of nemesis in the new form of bad spelling used in advertising to attract attention, and perhaps to gain custom by amusing the ‘prospect.’ Hence ‘fit-rite’ clothes, and ‘nite’ restaurants and ‘Uneeda’ biscuits and much else.
Bad spelling having been at length ruled out of court as not funny, the same idea comes in again through a side door in the form of bad typing. The weird possibilities of mechanical errors in typewriting are known to everyone who has tried to learn how to use a machine. The effects are often grotesque. No reproduction of them was ever happier than that effected by Mr. A. P. Herbert in a discussion of “Criminal Type” in his delightful volume Light Articles Only. He begins:
To-day I am MAKing aN inno6£vation, as you mayalready have gessed, I am typlng this article myself Zz½Instead of writing it, The idea is to save time and exvBKpense, also to demonstratO that I can type /ust as well as any blessedgirl if I give my mind to iT’’’’
But after all any humor that can be got out of bad typing is under the same limitation as the humor of bad spelling. It reaches only the eye, not the ear. It is even more limited than bad spelling since it can’t be explained in words even if one tries. Parallel to this is the new department of humor over the radio which of necessity becomes ‘fun in the dark.’
A peculiar mode of verbal humor has of recent years been introduced or emphasized in America in the form, not of bad spelling, but of bad grammar. This is written as an exact transcription of what people say, not as an exaggeration, and is handled always with a peculiar moderation, never overdone and never interfering with the flow of the narrative. The writer uses “I could of done it,” instead of “I could have”: “Me and Mary,” instead of “Mary and I” as the subject, and reversed for the object— “He used to visit Mary and I.” In this method the present tense is used for the past, as is widely done in America, not in the old grammatical sense for vividness, as when one would say— “The room was empty, but what do I see lying on the floor, etc., etc.,” a form which used to be called in the grammar books the ‘dramatic present tense.’ Not at all. The use here meant runs like this— “I come home about six and this feller is waiting for me in the kitchen along with a gentleman who had come to fix the sink.” Notice the use of the word ‘gentleman’ used indiscriminately in this style and helping to give it the false elegance with which the bad grammar contrasts. Indeed, the point lies in this contrast between what is at times elegant diction, and its glaring absurdities. ‘Gentleman’ is freely used, but two gentlemen switch into ‘boys,’ etc. You may write of ‘a crowd of women,’ but each single one is a ‘lady.’ That lost genius Ring W. Lardner was a perfect master of this method. Here, for example, is a scene in elegant life when a husband is moved into a new apartment by his wife and her sister:
“Well, I was just getting used to the Baldwin when Ella says it was time for us to move.
“‘I and Kate,’ she says, ‘has made up our minds to do things our own way with our own money. . . . All as we want is a place that’s good enough and big enough for Sis to entertain her gentlemen callers in it and she certainly can’t do that in this hotel. . . .’
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘all her gentleman callers that’s been around here in the last month, she could entertain them in one bunch in a telephone booth.
“On the third afternoon they (the two ladies) busted in all smiles.
“‘We got a bargain,’ said Ella. ‘It’s in the nicest kind of neighborhood and we can’t meet nothing only the best kind of people. You’ll go simply wild! They’s a colored boy in uniform to open the door and they’s two elevators.’”
There is far more art in this than in the old discriminate exaggeration of bad spelling; how much art can be realized at once by anybody who tries to imitate it. The same effect is admirably achieved by Anita Loos in the famous best-seller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). Here the humorous effect is produced by the reproduction of such a desperate struggle towards good grammar that it produces a sort of super-grammar.
“Mr. Spoffard told us all about his mother and I was really very very intreeged because if Mr. Spoffard and I become friendly he is the kind of gentleman that always wants a girl to meet his mother. I mean if a girl gets to know what kind of a mother a gentleman’s mother is like, she really knows more what kind of a conversation to use on a gentleman’s mother when she meets her. Because a girl like I is really always on the verge of meeting gentlemen’s mothers. But such an unrefined girl as Dorothy is really not the kind of girl that ever meets gentlemen’s mothers.”
But there are further modes of humor arising out of single words far more subtle and far more legitimate than either puns or bad spelling. One of these is the use of a word that is the wrong word for the sense but the right word for the sound: in other words using the wrong word in the right way. This is seen in the speech of people who try deliberately to use big words, as the Negroes do, or at times sententious Cockneys. Indeed, the attempt is the humble and creditable prompting of a mind that would like to have been educated and never was, and finds in words a wistful and appealing grandeur.
To turn this misuse of words into humorous expression is a delicate art. Done clumsily it is as tiresome as bad spelling. At its best it is wonderful. Mark Twain hit it off marvellously in his character of “old Mr. Ballou” in the Western book Roughing It. On one occasion a group of Westerners, including Mr. Ballou, are lost in the snow and think themselves about to perish and one says, “Let’s die without hard feeling towards each other: I freely admit that I have had hard feelings against Mr. Ballou for abusing me and calling me a logarithm; it has hurt me a good deal but let it go.” One might search the whole dictionary and find nothing to equal ‘logarithm.’
Mark Twain also was able to utilize admirably the converse verbal trick of using a word or phrase that is suddenly and amazingly right, contrary to all expectation. He has a story called Cannibalism in the Cars, the idea of which is that a number of Congressmen being snowed in on a mountain train, and about to die of hunger, resort to cannibalism but employ in connection with it the full legislative procedures to which they are accustomed. Notice in the present connection the use made of a verb in the following sentence.
“The next morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast, one of the finest men I ever sat down to.”
The writings of O. Henry offer innumerable examples. Any student of humor who wants a lesson in the possibilities of verbal technique should study the language placed by O. Henry in the mouths of Jefferson Peters and Parlez-voo Pickers in the volume The Gentle Grafter.
The same idea of misused terms has been exploited on an extended scale with delightful success by Mr. A. P. Herbert in a ‘piece’ in which the names of flowers are transformed in delirious fashion. The true gardener (or horticulturist, as he would call himself) never cares to give a flower an English name if he can give it a Latin one. To him snapdragon is not snapdragon, but ‘antirrhinum’ and “a primrose by the river’s brim” becomes one of the Primulaceae distinguished by its tubular corolla and spreading lobes. Mr. Herbert sees his chance and fills the flowerbeds with a nosegay of blossoms that must be read to be appreciated.
An ingenious verbal device, closely related to those mentioned, is where a metaphor is suddenly ‘disconnected’ and sounds like an absurdity. Ever so many of our words are metaphors, that is, words that meant something else and were used as a striking form of comparison. The man who first called the skyline of the Spanish mountains ‘sierras’ (saws) made a great hit.
We use a lot of verbs metaphorically as when we talk, let us say, in connection with rebuilding a house, of ‘throwing the hall into the dining-room.’ Literally this is absurd, and the absurdity becomes patent if we repeat the phrase enough to call attention to it. “Acting on the specialist’s advice,” wrote Harry Graham in his inimitable Private Life of Gregory Gorm, “Lord Porcupine began on the ground-floor by throwing the dining-room into the front hall. He then proceeded to throw the smoking-room into the billiard-room, and the drawing-room into the study, and, by throwing the library into the gun-room, provided an excellent dining-room to replace the one he had thrown into the front hall. This, however, involved throwing the pantry into the kitchen, and the kitchen into the servants’ hall, and having gone thus far, it became inevitably necessary to throw the servants’ hall somewhere, and there was nowhere left to throw it except into the garden.”
People of a humorous turn notice these absurdities readily: solemn people never.
Twisted uses of words are sometimes made with a further artful implication of a new meaning, just as the pun carries a genuine second meaning when legitimately used. Thus the annual Baseball World Series is, or ought to be, the last word in carefree amusement. But mentioned with a Yiddish touch, as the ‘Voild’s Serious,’ the implication is as entertaining as it is obvious.
But there are still deeper and more subtle effects to be got out of individual words than these superficial inconsistencies. It seems more or less clear that certain sounds still retain for us something of their primitive qualities as growls of anger, groans of distress, or yelps of delight. Hence there is a ‘tone’ quality in words. Nobody needs to be told what a scrumptious afternoon is, or what kind of individual is meant by a boob, a slob, or a goof. Sometimes of course these illuminated words are merely abbreviations or remaking of others, as boob is of booby: or they are combinations of two into one, like the telescoped words that Lewis Carroll made so famous. Everybody recalls ‘brillig’ as meaning ‘brilliant twilight’: ‘galumping’ a compound of ‘galloping and leaping’: a ‘vorpal’ sword, to mean perhaps ‘violent and fatal,’ and the priceless name ‘Rilchiam’ to combine ‘Richard and William.’
But I am claiming here that there is far more in the matter than that. The tones have a sort of instinctive subconscious sound-appeal. Thus when Dickens made up his wonderful proper names, such as Mr. Vholes, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Weller, and a hundred others, they are drawn from the under-sound and any connection with other words is either accidental, or by attraction, but not of necessity. Thus Vholes, the name of a rascally lawyer, if you like is vampire and ghoul but only because it had to be: what is Gamp — is it gruesome and damp?
The subject, one admits, is a difficult one. It is quite possible that many names seem appropriate and self-evident because we have read the book and grown used to him. Pendennis is a good name and Harry Lorrequer and Maggie Tulliver: but if she had been called ‘Jane Goodall’ would it have made any difference? One feels that Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves couldn’t have been called anything else. It is a topic that belongs not solely to the subject of the vocabulary of humor and of the mechanism of humor but to the subject of language at large. What is really meant is the question of the extent to which the primitive beginnings of speech still affect living language. A scholarly treatise could be written on the topic Do We Growl Still?
If we put together all the various kinds of verbal effects just described, and other lesser and similar ones, we can see at once the distinction that is to be made between humor and wit. We can define wit as being an expression of humor involving an unexpected play upon words. Thus wit is far the lesser term of the two: it is all included under humor. There could not be real wit without humor. It is possible indeed for people with more cheeriness than brains, more voltage than candlepower, with high spirits but low intelligence to chatter away on a line of imitative jokes and secondhand effects without any real humor. But this is only in the same way as a person may be sentimental without sorrow, pious without religion and didactic without learning. It is this possibility of replacing true wit with imitation, gold with dross, that has led to a tendency to degrade wit as the crackling of thorns under a pot. On the strength of this idea some writers seem to try to separate wit from humor by a line different from that just drawn, as if humor were of a different quality and atmosphere. Definition, of course, is as free as disbelief, and it would be of no value to pile up citations of authority, since the matter lies outside of the ambit of quantitative measurement. But judging in a general way what each of us feels to be the sense attached by good writers and good speakers, the distinction just given, making wit a form of humor, is the one most frequently made and most widely accepted.
We speak, for example, of ‘a witty French Abbé’ because we understand that French Abbés had a way of getting off good things and their good things always turned on words. But whoever writes of a witty Scotsman? Not that there are none; indeed, I am sure that there must be, the population of Scotland being close to five millions. But as a matter of fact the amusement that comes out of Scotland (and the exports of that realm are what make it illustrious — the export of brains, of Scotch whisky, and of golf) somehow always seem to turn on character. Thus:
