Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 647
Now here there is no brutality. No one imagines the little creatures getting ‘beaten up,’ though no doubt Till Eulenspiegel would think that the best ending. Even the landlord has lost nothing but a little food. The pleasing ingenuity — which lies in the juxtaposition of the incongruous — a fond father feeding his children and a crook getting a free dinner, excites our sense of humor.
It is this element of the comic rogue which runs all through the so-called picaresque romance, the mixed rambling adventures of a Francion or, in dramatic form the ‘fourberies’ of a Scapin. It helps, as will be developed later, to convert the humor of situation into the humor of character, or rather it begins to combine the two. Even to-day we find it in actual life when criminality, entirely dissociated from cruelty and suffering and not directed against the poor, often excites a laugh for its sheer ingenuity. I remember one actual case of the ingenious theft of a clock from a mantelpiece of the lounge of a large Canadian hotel in broad daylight at a time when it was full of people coming and going. A man entered the room, as if he knew exactly what he was doing, carrying a large sheet of paper and various small apparatus. He went over to the clock, lifted it two or three feet aside and measured the wall behind it with a tape, entering the measurements in a book. Then he spread out the paper on the floor, wrapped the clock up in it and walked away with the clock. He had stolen it.
One must not, however, be too pious about the humor of our age. Even now perhaps we can still appreciate a Till Eulenspiegel story, though it has to have with it some special saving grace. Let the student consider this example, at once modern and mediæval. The scene is laid in Chicago, the home and hearth of hold-ups, forty years ago. It became at that period the practice of certain thugs to hang round the old Dearborn Station, out of which led dark and shut-in railway tracks, to wait till a likely looking victim appeared, with ‘farmer’ written all over him. When he found the right man, the thug would come running past the farmer and call to him, “Come on down the track! There’s a whole carload of wheat bust and it’s all over the track.” The farmer would start at a run and when he got down far enough among the box cars, the thug sandbagged him, took his money and came back to wait for another. The humor of the story lies in the peculiarity of the bait: a car of grain! A farmer who has just come in from a grain farm to see the sights of the city will take a run to look for grain! So we get the effect that the thug did not catch just one farmer, but caught farmers just as people catch fish. Now if it had been a professor, the thug would have called, “Come on down the track! There’s a first edition of Confucius fallen off a flat car!”
Of common parentage with Till Eulenspiegel and the comic rogue is the more modern ‘practical joke.’ It is amazing now to realize how dead and gone is the practical joke as compared with its extraordinary vogue of a hundred years ago. “The Prince Regent,” says Agnes Repplier (In Pursuit of Laughter), “loved practical jokes. They reached the level of his intelligence. When King he played one on the old Duke of Norfolk plying him with drink at table, driving him round and round the Pavilion lawn at Brighton when he thought he was returning to Arundel and finally tucking him into a Pavilion bed where he awakened in the morning.”
In the same book we are reminded of Theodore Hook (1788-1841) who left a meteoric track in the sky of Georgian England, followed, as meteors are, by complete darkness. Hook was a writer of ballads and comic operas, a mimic, was treasurer for a while of the Island Mauritius, had a close shave of prison for stealing the Island’s funds, was a magazine writer and editor, a prisoner for debt for two years and left behind him nearly fifty volumes of Sayings and Doings, squibs, stories and sketches, or rather, he took them away with him, for there is no trace of them now. In this eccentric setting he developed a phenomenal propensity for practical jokes. On the street one day (Berners Street) he pointed out to a friend a neat but inconspicuous house. “I’ll lay you a guinea,” he said, “that in a week I’ll make that house the most conspicuous in London.” To win the bet Hook sent letters (four thousand, so it is said) to four thousand tradesmen ordering for the Berners Street address inconceivable quantities of coal, wine, books, potatoes — anything. Then he summoned all kinds of exalted personages to go to the house on all kinds of pretexts — the Lord Mayor of London to take a death-bed statement, the Commander-in-Chief, the Bishop of London, the head of the East India Company — on various convincing appeals. The street was blocked. Rows and fights started. Several horses were killed. Hook enjoyed it all from a side window.
The literary counterpart of the practical joke is what some may call the ‘humor of discomfiture’ which flourished mightily in England in the Georgian era and even when Dickens and Queen Victoria came to the throne, still blossomed unchecked. This turns upon the blunders and misadventures and minor miseries of which the characters concerned are the perpetual victims. The laugh is at their ineptitude and distress. Their misfortunes are never serious and never permanent or the fun would be out of it. This basis of discomfiture, as all students of Charles Dickens’s works know, was to have been the original idea of the Pickwick Papers. So at least were the ‘papers’ vaguely planned by the publishers and the first drawings made by the unhappy suicide Seymour. “There was a notion,” wrote Dickens afterwards, “of a Nimrod Club the members of which were to go out shooting, fishing and so forth and getting themselves into difficulty by their lack of dexterity.” Dickens, not being a sportsman, altered the plan to a travelling club, but Mr. Winkle and his opening adventures are part of the original plan. Probably it would not have gone far. As it was, the Pickwick Papers had a close shave of collapse. But Dickens had unconsciously opened the gate of a new and wonderful garden in which he presently moved about, unconscious of art or plan.
As I have elsewhere written, “The banging guns of the rook-shooting, the balking horses and the awkward riders were soon forgotten and left behind. Mr. Pickwick and his friends are carried away on the flood-tide of life.” It was this change from the original humor of discomfiture to the larger humor of character which altered Mr. Pickwick from an amiable nincompoop to a genial philanthropist, and Mr. Winkle from a zany to a gentleman. Dickens, with the childish egotism of genius, always bitterly resented any imputation of this, yet the change is there. Indeed, Mr. Pickwick almost goes into ‘reverse gear’ to become ‘Foxy Grampa,’ a pictured character who delighted children two generations later.
But even as it is, the Pickwick Papers, especially in the earlier chapters, contain a good deal of the humor of discomfiture apart from the question of the Nimrod idea of awkwardness at sport. An excellent example is found in the scene where Mr. Pickwick and his friends get mixed up in the tumult and parade of a military review at Chatham. “‘We are in a capital situation,’ said Mr. Pickwick. He had hardly uttered the word when the whole half-dozen regiments levelled their muskets as if they had but one common object and that object the Pickwickians, and burst forth with the most awful and tremendous discharge that ever shook the earth to its centre, or an elderly gentleman off his. . . . A hoarse shout of command ran along [the line], and the whole of the half-dozen regiments charged at double quick time down upon the very spot where Mr. Pickwick and his friends were stationed . . .” After which the Pickwickians to complete their discomfiture are caught between two lines of conflicting troops, and Mr. Pickwick is rolled over upside down.
Nor have blunders and discomfiture even now faded out of the foreground of written humor, where they still play a certain part as an admixture or ingredient no longer the main element. It is the difference between a horn of brandy and brandy with Christmas pudding.
In America also the humor of discomfiture filled a considerable place during the same period though it was never the leading feature of the famous ‘American humor’ of those whom one might reverently call the ‘old masters’ — Mark Twain and such. But it flourished as a lesser form of humor much in vogue at popular readings and school entertainments. In such a typical book as The Blunders of a Bashful Man, we have, as with Mr. Pickwick and Foxy Grampa, a sort of reverse gear of the comic rogue business. The comic rogue gets ahead of everybody and always wins out. The ‘bashful man’ is always in discomfiture and always the victim.
In American humor of the hour the discomfiture business plays but little part except where combined into those quick-fire verbal effects which make up the new tabloid humor. In the United States a tale of woe must be short and snappy if it is to get listeners. An example from a contemporary source:
A judge, noted for his gentleness to defendants, asked the contrite and broken man before him, “ ’Have you ever been sentenced to imprisonment?’
“‘No, your Honor,’ said the prisoner, and burst into tears.
“‘There, there, don’t cry,’ said the judge. ‘You’re going to be now.’”
Here is another type:
“The farm youths of the Vermont countryside are of great strength. If a wagon is stuck fast in the mud, a young farmer by putting his shoulder against the wheel and giving one good heave, can easily break his shoulder bone.”
Another (with apologies for technical language): “The ball game in Jones’s cow-pasture last Saturday afternoon ended in violent altercation when William Van Nostrand, a visitor from the city, took a long body slide into what he had understood to be third base.” To people who do not understand about baseball and cow-pastures, always rough with stones, it may be explained that Van Nostrand in making his ‘body slide’ must inevitably have hit a stone.
A milder shade of the humor arising out of discomfiture is found in the humor of confusion. The humor here turns on incongruities arising out of ‘a mix-up,’ a misunderstanding or a mistake in identity. In its simplest forms this is as old as literature appearing in the mythologies and the farces of the Middle Ages and the Thousand and One Nights of Arabia. It turns to either comedy or tragedy. The King mistaken for a beggar or a beggar for a King, is a primitive thing that never ends. But in modern humor much higher effects are got than in the mere humor of misadventure. Mistaken identity, in one form or other, has been the chief motives of some of the greatest comic success of modern literature and the modern stage. One thinks of the immortal Charlie’s Aunt. Here the fun turns on a university undergraduate being driven by stress of circumstance (viz. to supply a chaperone for an otherwise unaccountable girl) to dress up as his fellow-student’s (Charlie’s) aunt. Exquisite also is the confusion of persons in the delightful little drama The Man from Blankley’s by F. Anstey (the late Anstey Guthrie) published about fifty years ago in Punch. In this case a guest arriving at a dinner-party and going to the wrong house is assumed by his hostess to be a young man whom she had engaged (unseen) from the universal provider Blankley to fill the place of a missing guest. Anyone can see at once the delightful possibilities — the whispered asides as to what he may eat and drink, etc.
These mistaken or double identities and so on can be used for other purposes, for romantic adventure, as in Mr. Oppenheim’s Great Impersonation, as in the grim tragedy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the mysticism of Jerome K. Jerome’s Passing of the Third Floor Back. Students of literature will observe how easily the Jeykll-Hyde idea might have occurred to Robert Louis Stevenson as a funny concept (although it didn’t), and in its execution might have later turned serious. Thus again and again one realizes that the humor conception and the serious conception are just the two Janus faces of the same truth.
Ever so many jokes and funny stories turn on people being mistaken for someone, or something, else. One of the best in the world, too familiar to bear citation, is the story of the man who by mistake was ‘put off at Buffalo.’ Another — told of any great comedian from Coquelin to Chic Sale — is the story of how a melancholy-looking man, consulting a doctor, was told that what he needed was not medicine, but cheering up. “Go and see Coquelin this evening and have a good laugh.” The man shook his head, “I am Coquelin,” he said.
It will be realized that in all these cases of humor arising out of situation, the particular character of the persons concerned does not enter, or only in a secondary degree. The man without his trousers in the ballroom is just ‘the man.’ Till Eulenspiegel’s blind victims were just blind men. Theodore Hook’s joke only needs a bishop (any bishop, size and age indifferent), a commander-in-chief (of anything) and so on. At best the characters are ‘stock characters’ — a ‘witty abbé,’ an ‘old maid,’ an ‘Anglo-Indian colonel,’ a ‘club-man,’ etc. Even for Mr. Pickwick in this limited case we can read ‘elderly gentleman’ and for Charlie and his aunt we can read ‘undergraduate and English spinster.’
But this humor keeps merging towards and suggesting the higher humor that turns on character: in which the situation is rendered ‘funny’ (to use our simplest word) because of the person concerned. Thus in the Pickwick Papers, when the soldiers chased Mr. Pickwick it was funny as the vision of an elderly gentleman being chased. Mr. Pickwick, as yet, we hardly know: neither did Dickens, or only by intuition, not yet by acquaintance. “I thought of Mr. Pickwick,” he wrote, as the sole explanation of the origin of that illustrious gentleman. Later on in the book if Mr. Pickwick were chased it would be funny because it was Mr. Pickwick. When Tartarin to save his life cuts the Alpine rope that holds Bompard (who is doing the same thing), the situation is not only funny but doubly funny because it is ‘just like Tartarin.’ Of course the situation must first show the character, but as this develops, the character reacts on it. Such amusing creatures as Mr. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, and Mr. Harry Leon Wilson’s Ruggles, once created, carry an atmosphere of amusement with them: just as Sherlock Holmes sitting with Watson in Baker Street spells mystery before he even speaks. It is the art of genius to ‘create’ — or rather, ‘to put over’ — a character quickly. Observe how Mr. Harry Leon Wilson writes one opening page, and out steps Ruggles. Take then the humorous character, place the personages in humorous situations, use for its transmission all the art of words and verbal technique, and you have the work of humor in its fully developed form. To produce it is not an easy task. Writing sermons is play beside it.
Chapter V. THE HUMOR OF CHARACTER
AS THE INTRODUCTION to this chapter I permit myself to narrate a personal experience. Just before I ceased being a professor, one of my colleagues, running his hand through what remained in fluff of what had been his hair, and speaking in the bleating voice acquired by long lecturing said to me, “My! My! there used to be some queer old characters among the professors when we came here thirty-five years ago! There are none now!” And he shuffled off with his head wobbling like a mantelpiece ornament.
This illusion is shared by many people, that there were queer characters when they were young, queer characters in the little village on Cornwall where they spent last summer, terribly queer old characters at Llandydd in Wales or at Saucisson-sur-Marne in France — but none here and now.
The truth is that the queer people are all around you, plenty of them, if you have the eyes to see them. If you are lacking in sense of humor, or in that angle of it, you won’t know that they are there. If you have a commonplace mind absorbed in things rather than people, and in money rather than imagination, people will look all pretty much alike. If you have a serious mind, full of some particular content of purpose, you will classify them on different lines. A missionary sees people as Christians, heathens, Presbyterians, etc.; an insurance agent sees them as ‘prospects,’ and so on. The divisions, which are really infinite, correspond to what you want or need to see. It is a patterned grating that you yourself lay on the surface.
So it is not likely that you will of yourself be fully aware of all the odd differences and incongruities that make up ‘character.’ But if you have any kind of reasonable and intelligent mind it will happen sometimes that you open the magic pages of an enchanted book by a Charles Dickens. The whole world changes around you and is full of ‘characters.’ Later when you sink down again with the dead weight of your own individuality, you say to yourself, “Those are not real people, they are just caricatures.” But you’re quite wrong.
By outstanding characters we mean individuals in whom some particular quality or eminence is developed beyond those of his fellow-men. Chang, the Chinese giant, was 8 feet, 2 inches high; Isaac Newton knew Euclid without learning it, and Emerson was so good that he wrote essays about it. But these are not what are meant by ‘characters’ in the humorous sense, nor is it in connection with them that we speak of the ‘humor of character.’ By this is meant differences and oddities in character of a nature to involve an incongruity, contradiction or paradox, and thus set up that ‘frustrated expectation’ which we have seen to be the basis of all humor. Thus it is contrary to expectation that a huge man should have a tiny voice as huge men sometimes have, or that a meek little rat should have a ferocious moustache. These are appearances only. But it is equally incongruous, let us take simple examples, that a man full of swagger should run away like Mr. Dowler in Pickwick; that a college professor should be as simple as a loon; and a peasant (an age-old example) as shrewd as a cardinal. Even oddities of speech or gait or dress make ‘character’ because they break a rule and so set up an incongruity — or, as it were, start an exultation.
It is a principal theme of this treatise that all humor everywhere can be reduced to the same basic elements, as all physical forces are reduced to the same law of gravitation. So with the humor of character; a man who has the habit of keeping on repeating some phrase or form of words— “Yes, yes, yes,” or “Very good, very good,” becomes ‘funny.’ Women’s fashions, when they first come out, ought to look funny and do look funny to children or Negroes. But for the most of us, the sense of oddity has worn thin by the very expectation of it. ‘What next?’ is all we ask. It takes a terrific effort to make a comic or burlesque costume for a woman. In fact it can only be done by taking one that was all the rage a few years ago and now is not; that opens up a new ‘exultation.’
