Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 646
Now notice how simple, one might say how sweet this is. A Southern planter walking round in the woods, would of course carry a gun with him. So the darky narrator took for granted that a man as high up as the ‘Lawd’ would of course carry a gun. And the beauty of it is that his auditors wouldn’t see anything queer, anything laughable about it. ‘De Lawd put de butt of his gun on the ground’ — of course, why not? He wanted to talk. Later on, when the play Green Pastures and Mr. Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun (1928) developed this vein, there was wide misunderstanding. Properly read there is a great beauty in such narrative. It has a kind wistful primitiveness that carries us back to our nursery days when angels played on harps. Thus when old man Noah warned by the ‘Lawd’ started to build an ark, he built it as they would build it on the Yazoo River in the flood area of Mississippi.
“ ’Dis gonter be a side-wheeler, ain’t hit, paw? Sort of like de Stacy Adams?’ say Ham.
“ ’Stern-wheeler, like de Grace,’ say Noah. ‘Only bigger. Us wants room, not fancy stuff. — You, Shem! Tote dat planed lumber up on de texas deck. Rough lumber goes on de main deck.’
“So Noah and Ham and Shem and Japhet hammered and sawed away, out on de hillside, a mile from de river. And purty soon somebody hyars de hammerin’ and sa’nters up to ax Noah what he doin’.
“ ’Buildin’ you a house, is you, Noah?’ say a man.
“ ’Nawp,’ say Noah. ‘I’s buildin’ a ark.’
“ ’Well, whyn’t you build hit by de river so hit’ll float?’ say de man.
“ ’Who buildin’ dis ark?’ say Noah. ‘Me or you?’”
Chapter IV. THE HUMOR OF SITUATION
FROM THE NARROWER ground of the expression of humor in artifices of words and verbal combinations, we pass to the wider field of humor in situation and character. The one is like a cultivated garden: the other like a broad natural landscape. At first all seems confusion; but just as a surveyor measures a landscape into lines and contours, so we can measure and analyse the field of humor. The surveyor’s chart somehow knocks the beauty out of the landscape. So perhaps does ours. The price paid for knowledge is the loss of the eye of innocence. Very likely we enjoy things better if we don’t know too much about them. I have often noticed that music seems to give great pain to people really musical and that an art gallery irritates an artist. “When science from creation’s face enchantment’s veil withdraws,” so sang somebody, “what lovely visions yield their place to cold material laws.” So it may be that the deliberate analysis of a joke changes it from a mysterious reality to a jack-in-the-box artificiality. But it doesn’t matter much. We may go on.
We can begin by using examples to show the kind of thing meant by the humor of situation. Educationists tell us that this is the real way to learn — from the concrete to the abstract. Articles and books on humor are apt to resolve themselves into a series of jokes and stories, or to take on all the appalling dullness of undiluted theory. The happy mean is hard to find. But in the present case a story shows so quickly what is meant that it is worth a page of theory.
Take this one. At a ball one night a lady came to her husband and beckoned him aside and said, “John, you’ve managed somehow to rip your trousers at the back of the leg. Come with me and we’ll find a quiet room. I’ve a needle and thread and I can mend them in no time.” They found a quiet room and the husband removed his trousers and stood patiently in his shirt-tail while his wife was mending the trousers. Just then they heard people coming. “Good Heavens!” said the lady, “get in behind that cupboard door and I’ll stand in front and see that nobody can get by.”
The man dived through the door and his wife held it. A moment later she heard his frantic voice on the other side, “Let me back. I’m in the ballroom.”
Now observe that this story does not depend for its humor on any particular form of words. It could be told in a thousand ways. It is almost foolproof in the telling.
Not even a club bore could quite kill it, though he would spin it out till it wore pretty thin. The interesting point in theory is to notice that the humor arises from the situation, not the words, not the people; and not character — they haven’t any. The situation involves exactly the elements discussed in the preliminary analysis of humor; a sudden juxtaposition of incongruities — the bright publicity of a ballroom and the entire privacy of being in one’s shirt-tail: exultation over the disaster of the man concerned, with a relieving sense that it won’t hurt him. If he opened what he thought was a cupboard door and fell downstairs and broke his neck, that would be very funny to a Potawatami Indian, but not to us.
Try one or two more. Here is a story which I read a few years ago as an actuality reported in a Montana newspaper, and which carries with it all the truthfulness that goes with Montana.
A young man cleaned his evening suit for a dance by rubbing it all over with nitric acid. The suit was thin and much worn and a little greasy. So what he had really done, though he didn’t know it, was to turn himself into nitroglycerine. At the dance as soon as the heat of the room fully reached him, his suit blew up and left him like a singed chicken.
Here, as a supreme example, is a story told by Sir Henry Lucy of his friend Canon Ainger. The canon, very fond of children, was invited to a children’s party. On his arrival, the servant was about to show him into a room where the buzz of voices indicated company. “Don’t announce me!” said the reverend gentleman. Then, to get the full fun out of his entry, he put himself on all fours, threw his coattails over his head, pushed the door open and came crawling into the room making a noise like a horse. Hearing no children’s laughter, he looked up. He had come to the wrong house. This was a dinner-party.
Here again the humor is not dependent on any special form of wording: nor on character, except in a general way. ‘Canon Ainger’ becomes a general term for ‘reverend gentlemen’: the Archbishop of Canterbury would do just as well.
The humor of situation arises, therefore, out of any set of circumstances that involve discomfiture or disaster of some odd incongruous kind, not connected with the ordinary run of things and not involving sufficient pain or disaster to over-weigh the pleasures of contemplating this incongruous distress: or it may arise without any great amount of personal discomfiture when the circumstances themselves are so incongruous as to involve a sort of paradox. One and the same principle runs through it all, as it does through all humor, the idea of the ‘thing smashed out of shape,’ the comic broken umbrella spoken of above. If a college of humor were ever established, it should make its coat of arms of such emblems as a broken umbrella, and its professors should wear little pill-box hats like clowns. Even at that, however, the shock of surprise once gone, the little hat would appear as grave and dignified as a ‘mortar board,’ a thing really shaped to fry eggs in. So much does custom color judgment.
Humor of situation — discomfiture, incongruity — could be traced back to the earliest forms of what we call ‘horseplay.’ The logical succession would run from injury to ‘horseplay,’ and from that to practical jokes and ‘playing a trick’ on someone. Apollo, we are told in Greek mythology, having had a controversy with Marsyas in regard to music, skinned him alive and hung up his skin in a cave; in other words he ‘took the hide off him.’ This was crude stuff to which musicians of to-day would not stoop. A degree further up appears the rough and boisterous brutality that passed for primitive fun. In Longfellow’s Hiawatha we read of Pau-Puk-Keewis (Canto XVI), apparently the first American story-teller:
From his lodge went Pau-Puk-Keewis,
Came with speed into the village,
Found the young men all assembled
In the lodge of old Iagoo,
Listening to his monstrous stories,
To his wonderful adventures.
In the next canto we hear what happened to Pau-Puk-Keewis when Hiawatha got hold of him. Apollo with Marsyas had nothing on Hiawatha — the chase of Pau-Puk-Keewis ending in the finale “with their clubs they beat and bruised him, pounded him as maize is pounded” is as close to fun as Hiawatha ever got.
Next to these two stages, the mythological and primitive, can be set what we might call a mediæval, the rough horseplay that passed for diversion in the Middle Ages — ducking people in ponds, and other merry tricks of the sort. This was humor of action, not of literature, but it expressed itself in words in the mediæval drama that was springing into being as a sort of humorous derivative of a church show. Here originated also all such habits and practices as initiating apprentices, and new boys at school, or the antics of Father Neptune in ducking people in a tub of water when a ship crossed the line. In Ralph Roister Doister (a play written probably about 1553), we see the same idea translated into written comedy. Ralph, coveting a rich marriage with Dame Constance, makes a grand assault upon her house, and is put to rout by her maids.
It is interesting to see how the elements of gravity and humor intertwine and alternately separate and come together again. Mankind has a tendency towards either direction. Bring into being such a thing as a Rotation Club, or Elks, or an Astronomical Society and it will move, as it were, both ways at once. The Rotation Club will begin naming its officers Grand Masters and First Emperors, Second Satraps, and such: the less it knows of Greek, the more it will use it. At the same time it will keep breaking down — or rising up — into fun. It is this tendency which accounts for the continuous element of horseplay, discomfiture, drubbing and ducking which runs down our literature like a strand in a rope. The tendency is stimulated by the need, or at least the demand, in the drama at any rate, for ‘comic relief,’ the protection afforded by laughter against tears, by amusement against horror. To what extent the ‘comic relief’ is a sound principle of art is a question. The Greek drama, the tragedies, knew nothing of it. The Greeks liked to ‘take it straight’ just as people in Kentucky never dilute their whisky. The Greek notion of a tragedy was that once it began it never stopped: it went on at the same place and in the same continuous duration till it was all over. Similarly when the Greeks wanted comedy they sat down to laugh, not to cry. But the major tendency in the development of literature and drama for two thousand years has been towards the dual aspect, this Janus mask of tears and laughter. Shakespeare in his grimmest scenes has funny people. Graziano is there to take the agony out of Antonio’s approaching dissection, and Lancelot Gobbo comes on and off as a tear-mop.
Many of our games originated in whole or in part out of this humor of discomfiture. There were in them certain elements that came from elsewhere, for example the development of skill and dexterity arising out of the need of learning to fight, and the element of gambling, meaning trying to get something for nothing, a tendency as old as humanity itself. But games like Blindman’s Buff, and Hunt the Slipper are games of humorous discomfiture: as opposed to boxing, which was a derivative that came down from murder, and chess which rose up from gambling (on squares) to mathematics.
When you get to the days of Scott and Dickens and the Victorian novel, the funny people and the serious people, the crying people and the laughing people come off and on in regular alternation like Box and Cox or the two Cuckoos of a Swiss clock. It was this rapid confusion of alternating tears and laughter which led the vociferous French critic Jules Janin to make (1842) his famous denunciation of the art of Charles Dickens,— “a mass of childish inventions in which everything that is horrible alternates with everything that is simple: here pass, in a flood of tears, people so good that they are absolutely silly: further on, rushing round and blaspheming, are all sorts of robbers, crooks, thieves and paupers, so repulsive that one cannot conceive how any society containing them can last for twenty-four hours. It is the most sickening mixture you can imagine of hot milk and sour beer, of fresh eggs and salt beef, rags and embroidered coats, gold sovereigns and penny pieces, roses and dandelions. They fight, they kiss and make it up, they swear at one another, they get drunk, they die of starvation. Do you like stale tobacco, garlic, the taste of fresh pork and the noise of a tin pan beaten against a cracked copper saucepan? Then try to read this last book of Dickens.”
When we reach the ‘melodrama’ — the ‘ten-twenty-thirty’ that grew out of the Victorian literature — comic relief has become a convention, rigid as a frame. The hero of a play has reached, let us say, the very acme of tragedy — as when the Silver King (anno domini about 1880) lifts up his hands and exclaims, “Oh God! turn back the Universe and give me yesterday!” We know that the moment he makes his exit, in will come the ‘comic coachman’ or the ‘comic butler’ with a ‘comic tag’— “Now, then, this wy (way) for Paddington,” or some such gag, funny only by its repetition, and the house goes into a roar.
We have the same thing to-day in the slightly different form of a ‘mixed program.’ The Grand Guignol Theatre of Paris is the chosen home of horror, undiluted while it lasts. They will put on a lynching scene in a way to make a Negro glad to get back to Mississippi. In their little theatre people are burnt alive, die of thirst on rafts and fall dead from fright in mausoleums. The mortality is very high. But in between the deaths, short intervals of convulsive merriment relieve the strain. No Guignol could be for ever ‘grand.’
The moving picture has fully taken over the convention. The muse Cinematographia is the sunken sister of the arts, beautiful but wicked. She will do anything for money. Hence she mixes up tears and laughter as a barmaid mixes a gin fizz: all she wants to know is, not what the public wants or needs, but what the public will pay for. This is not to say a word against such a situation: in the long run the world must live or die on what it is and what it wants and what it will pay for. You can’t control it from above, and if you could you would have first to be very sure which direction was above and which was below. Government control of art, in that sense, can’t live: it would end in a stagnation like that of China. In the old days when art was the art of a single man — who made up a song or painted a picture and needed only a bit of paper, or not even that, all was different. Art for art’s sake could follow its own prompting. But the huge machine apparatus of the ‘pictures’ and the ‘radio’ are an utterly different case. Hence we find them taking over without question the ‘mixed program’ idea, the mingling of tragedy and fun, of wisdom and foolishness. “The public,” I once heard a moving picture authority say, “won’t stand for more than a thousand feet of education in one evening.”
All of this discussion, I must not say digression, has been intended to bring out the point of the ‘humor of situation,’ or, if we like, of ‘situation-humor’ as a recurrent, a continuous element in the development of the world’s literature. One turns again to the main thread of the argument to speak of the ‘practical joke’ as a parallel development. This too comes down from the ages, losing, as it comes, its earlier brutality. Compare with Apollo’s joke on Marsyas when he took his hide off, the jokes of Till Eulenspiegel. This name is that of a legendary German peasant joker of the fourteenth century who went about the country playing pranks. He may, or may not, have existed, but his tricks were gathered together into a sort of chap-book printed and reprinted for generations. He was thus, as it were, the Homer of the practical joke. He is said to have died about 1350, probably of the Black Death which thus had its brighter side and was not as black as it was painted. Till’s pranks were played against all classes, priests, noblemen, inn-keepers, good and bad indifferently. There was no Robin Hood about him. Yet dimly he stands for the revolt, the upheaval of the peasant, serf and villein class, by the economic changes of the day, against nobles and townspeople. We see here, with hushed reverence, the beginning of the influence of the ‘people.’ “Till’s pranks,” says a biographer, “were often pointless, more often brutal.” He is a long way from the pleasing rascality of Molière’s Scapin or of Dickens’s Alfred Jingle.
Here is one of the more respectable and presentable of Till Eulenspiegel’s tricks. Till happened to meet a group of blind beggars who held out their hands to ask for alms. “Here, my good fellows,” said Till, making a clink of money but giving none, “are twenty florins. Go into the inn over there and dine and this will pay for it.” The blind beggars, deeply grateful, hurriedly stumped into the hotel, each thinking another had the money. A sumptuous dinner was eaten but when the time came to pay for it, the blind men were beaten up by the enraged landlord.
It is said that this story is the origin of the phrase ‘blind man’s dinner.’
Contrast with this an American version which has floated down the stream of literature to the journals of to-day, shaking out the dirt of cruelty as it moved; as follows:
A man of benevolent appearance and quiet dress collected on the street half a dozen little boys of assorted sizes, invited them all to come and have a nice dinner in a restaurant. The dinner was ordered and eaten with great gaiety. As it got near the end, the host beckoned to the waiter and said, “Give the boys some ice-cream and coffee, and I’ll run across to my office and be back by the time they’ve finished.” He left amid grateful bows and smiles from the management. When he failed to return in half an hour, the proprietor came to the table and said, “Where is your father’s office, boys, and I’ll telephone to him?” “He ain’t our father,” chorused the children. “He just asked us in for a feed.”
