Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 655
Joke No. 1
An Oxford undergraduate, showing some friends round the colleges, said, “Now this is Oriel College, and those windows up there are the Provost’s study.” Then taking up a handful of gravel from the walk he threw it up at a window, and added, “And that’s the Provost coming to his window.”
Put into a syllogism this reads:
Let it be granted that gravel brings people to windows.
A Provost came to his window.
Therefore gravel brought the Provost.
In other words we have the incongruity that such a low thing as a handful of gravel commands such a high thing as a Provost.
Joke No. 2
An absent-minded professor came home late one night and knocked at his door for admission. A servant put her head out of an upper window and called, “The professor has not yet come home.” “Very good,” he answered, “I’ll come back later.”
The syllogistic analysis of this joke runs as follows:
People who knock at doors go away if someone is out.
The professor went away because someone was out.
But he was out himself — which is absurd.
In other words we have produced an utter incongruity by taking the hypothesis that professors are absent-minded and following it to its logical consequences.
Joke No. 3
It is sometimes difficult to say what should be the hypothesis or major premises of the syllogism. As an illustration: —
A Scotchman visiting London on government business was asked on his return how he liked English officials. “I saw nothing of them,” he said, “I was dealing only wi’ heads of departments.”
Perhaps it runs:
English officials are English.
Heads of Departments are English officials.
Heads of Departments are Scotchmen.
Thus all Englishmen are Scotchmen. Which is absurd.
Other jokes and their syllogisms turn on similarities — let it be granted that two things are more or less the same thing and then see what absurdity happens.
We recall from the pages above the two deaf men in the train: — one looking for his station asks the other —
“Is this Wemsley?”
And gets the answer, “No, Thursday.”
Let it be granted that Wemsley and Wednesday are much the same thing: then the difference between them (A-B) ought to be practically nothing. But it isn’t: it’s Thursday!
Which is absurd. The similarity of the two names opens up the incongruity of an absolute change of topic.
Nearly all verbal jokes follow the above pattern of the deaf men and turn on the wrong use of a word: something happens — either the ‘frustrated expectation’ when it means too little, or the exultation over incongruity when it means too much. Most ‘child’ jokes are of this sort, arising out of beginner’s mistakes in learning language:
“Auntie, can you change me half a crown?”
“Yes, darling, what do you want it changed into?”
“Into a sovereign, please.”
The joke is on the word change which is made to mean more than what it should, or rather is made to live up to what it should mean. Few people would realize that, in form, many of the propositions of geometry as written by Euclid are jokes. Till a few years ago all schools in England and America used the formal text of Euclid, and even though the text is now revised and replaced, the form is still familiar to most people as Euclid’s method. Condensed, it runs, as in such an example as this. If two triangles have two angles of each equal to two angles of the other, each to each, then must the third angles be equal each to each. For if not, let one be greater than the other. Then the three angles of one are greater than of the other. But the three angles of each are equal to two right angles. Therefore two right angles are greater than two right angles — which is absurd! At which point Euclid and his friends are supposed to go into roars of laughter.
But apart from this philosophical analysis of a joke into a reductio ad absurdum, there is much more to examine in the technique and construction of jokes. There is a broad distinction to be made between jokes that proceed by telling the truth and thus landing us in a sort of impossibility, and jokes that proceed to state an impossibility and land us in a truth. These contrasted types correspond very much to the formal aspect (not the inner) of typical British and typical American jokes. Here is a true British joke: A professor in a Scottish university (many of us could supply the name of the professor, as the story is true) paused in his lecture to say to a student, “Why do you not take any notes?” The young man answered, “I have my father’s.” But this is American: “Why is this whole street blocked like this, constable?” “The chess club are moving, sir.”
Compare the two cases. The boy did have the lecture notes, but it seems impossible. It is impossible that the street was blocked, but a chess club does take a long time to move.
Let us illustrate this difference by a more extended citation of what may be called a typical English joke and one of a typical American. For the English joke we must go to Punch, a journal that many of us think unequalled in humor in all the world and certainly the most representative of English humor. In its early life, nearly a hundred years ago, Punch was somewhat different: it had more of the impatient temperament of youth, was more inclined to improve England by swearing at it than by smiling at it: but with years has come that mellower wisdom which realizes that humor and anger cannot go together, that even ‘righteous indignation’ belongs elsewhere. At what he cannot remedy the Mr. Punch of to-day may shake his head in sadness, but from his pen flows nothing but the ink of human kindliness. It is this genial and mellow quality which lends the chief charm to his pages.
Now the typical Punch joke, illustrated or written, must be something that really happened, related as it happened, or, what is the same thing, something which is made up but which could have happened just as stated: indeed the point lies in the very likeliness of its happening. Here we have a picture of a Harley Street physician, everything exactly drawn to life, the consulting-room, the wide table at which he sits, his dignified dress, the very action of his hands in pressing his fingertips on the table — a gesture without which no Harley Street physician could collect a fee. Even the uncomfortable patient, half-squirming in his chair on the opposite side of the table as he awaits his sentence, is drawn precisely to the life.
“Now, Mr. Pettigrew,” the doctor is saying, “we have to remember that our heart is in very poor condition, that we have had a shock, a severe shock, and that another such shock might kill us.”
This is beautiful. The doctor’s professional use of ‘we’ instead of ‘I,’ is a usage that must have grown up as an expression of sympathy, misery liking company. But when it is carried to the point of sharing Mr. Pettigrew’s death, it becomes incongruously contrary to the fact. The syllogism and the reductio ad absurdum set up by this joke is as follows:
Let it be granted that the Doctor and Mr. Pettigrew are one person.
Mr. Pettigrew is likely to die.
Therefore the Doctor is likely to die.
Which is absurd.
Now place beside this a typical American joke. Here we find that a queer twist of phrase, an impossible use of language, suddenly turns out to have meaning, and lots of it. An orator in voicing the thanks of a meeting to a political leader said: “I hope that this distinguished gentleman may long be spared to continue his political career, and that even when he’s dead he’ll turn into a cigar.”
Perhaps a word of explanation is needed for British readers. It has long been the custom in the United States for the makers of tobacco to name cigars after bygone statesmen — the Henry Clay cigar, the Stonewall Jackson cigar. Hence ‘turning into a cigar’ becomes synonymous with obtaining immortality.
Put as a syllogism it reads:
All great statesmen are cigars.
This man is a great statesman.
Therefore he must be a cigar too.
Which is absurd.
The attempt to analyse jokes is at least useful in helping us to know how to tell a joke and how to relate a funny story. To make up a joke is another matter, a rare and peculiar gift. In the technical sense the commercial jokes or gags are made up, or rather remade, from the Ancient Greek or Egyptian, by professional specialists. Occasionally an outsider stumbles on a joke and is able to reduce it to form. But the knack is a special one involving a quick sense of finding a new picture for an old frame. So far as I know, none of the greater humorists of the last fifty years wrote jokes. When we talk of a joke of Dickens’s or of Mark Twain’s we imply a context. Mark Twain’s joke, quoted elsewhere in this book, about the old man “who had never touched liquor in his life unless you count whisky,” is part of a little essay on a grand old man.
It may sound a little malicious to say that our jokes of the present hour are remade from the ancient models. But no harm is meant. We could hardly expect them to be ‘original.’ Somebody said in despair about two hundred years ago, “tout est dit.” Even the most brilliant and lively joke has its ancestor. Turn to the Greek witticisms of Hierocles and we read:
A simpleton who heard that parrots live for two hundred years brought one to see if it was true. This becomes a type thought — the fact that presently a person will be dead and hence won’t be on the spot to see, or enjoy the thing in question. “When the day comes,” says Ko-Ko, the Lord High-Executioner of The Mikado, in trying to persuade Nanki-poo to act as substitute at a public execution, “there’ll be a grand ceremonial — you’ll be the central figure — and when it’s all over, general rejoicings and a display of fireworks in the evening. You won’t see them, but they’ll be there all the same.”
The originality of joke-making consists in being able to maintain one’s mind as a sort of mould in which the type-ideas and root-forms stamp and restamp themselves in shifting outline.
But joke-analysis can help us to retell the jokes we hear, no easy thing to do properly. Some jokes are ‘fool-proof,’ and can hardly be spoiled by bad narration, but such are rare. Few amateur narrators learn the value of brevity — the thing which leaps to the eye on analysis. People tell jokes with an introduction as to how they heard it (a matter of no consequence), or with unnecessary material of time and place (things immaterial to the point), and when they’ve told it, they retell it as corroboration. The real psychological trouble is that if told straight out the joke would sound too short and sudden. It would sound like “When we lived at Henley, Barnes’s gander was stolen by tinkers.” Yet the short and sudden effect is just what the stage comedian wants.
When we pass from the mere repetition of a joke as a friendly transaction, like passing the bottle to a friend, to the deliberate narration of a funny story of some length, we move on to different ground. To tell stories is to undertake a serious social responsibility: many a dinner-party is spoiled and many an evening is disturbed by the story-teller. His challenge arouses others. Dinner becomes a succession of rival efforts punctuated with what Sydney Smith called “brilliant flashes of silence,” in which Bill Nye professed to hear nothing but “the dull rumble of a thinker.” The original charm of whist and bridge was that people didn’t talk. After the babble of a comic man, silence is as sweet as a green wood. Most people should realize once and for all that story-telling is not for them. Let them talk about Mussolini, and whether communism is coming and whether Lulu Goo-Goo is truly great in her last picture or only half-sized. You can have a wonderful dinner talking on these topics with the right person: and let older people talk about the Home Rule Election of 1892 and whether Parliament has degenerated. But don’t tell stories. And for those who can tell them, be reasonable: a dinner-party is not a show, and above all don’t tell them twice to the same people. In fact better keep quiet.
But if, in spite of this wise caution (which recalls Punch’s advice to those about to marry), you still insist on telling funny stories, then perhaps a word of advice, even instruction, is not out of place.
In starting to tell a story never ask a listener if he has heard it before. That’s his business, not yours. He’s got to suffer anyway, if he’s a gentleman: and if he’s not, he will stop you.
In telling a funny story you must distinguish between telling it from a platform or stage to an audience, and telling it in ordinary society. On the stage you can be as unnatural and as unlike yourself as you like: you can assume an entirely artificial manner. It doesn’t matter. The people don’t know you. What you are seeking for is artistic effect. But in ordinary society you must tell a story as yourself. The art consists in appearing entirely yourself, entirely at your ease. Otherwise you make your hearers uncomfortable. You may be — or ought to be — deeply concentrated on what you are telling: but it must be deeply, not painfully.
Always be certain that you really remember the story you are going to tell and have got it right and don’t have to stop in the middle and make corrections. Thus, if you have said that the thing happened in Aberdeen, keep it there and don’t move it to Perth: if you say that you read it in an American paper, don’t check yourself to remark that it may have been a French paper. Perhaps it was in a Dutch paper — who cares?
Here is another small piece of advice, or entreaty, which I am sure will appeal to many people, though it is only a point of grammar. Do not use the word this unless it has something in front of it to refer to. This is properly supposed to refer to some antecedent noun. Yet many people begin a story, “This Scotchman came to London . . .” Query: What Scotchman? Worse still when the story-teller makes it two of them: “This Scotchman met this Englishman . . .” I do not think that any amount of usage can ever make this seem right, as the logic of words is against it. ‘This’ would have to drift off into the meaning of ‘a certain’ (the Greek ΤΙΣ) before the usage could be consolidated.
A whole volume could be written on telling stories, on after-dinner speaking, and on the professional task of being a humorous entertainer. At the present time people no longer demand, or tolerate, the ‘comic lectures’ of two generations ago. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818-85) toured northern Missouri in 1878 giving a lecture entitled “Wit, Philosophy and Wisdom.” ‘Giving it’ meant reading it, the lecturers of those days using a manuscript and sparing the audience not a word of it. This lecture had thirteen parts all disconnected: 1. Remarks on lecturing; 2. The Best Thing in Milk; 3. The Summer Resort; 4. Josh on Marriage — and we may say with the Bellman of Hunting the Snark, ‘Skip the rest.’ “It was an hour of short paragraphs,” says Mr. Cyril Clemens in his book Josh Billings (1932), a valuable ‘period’ book for students, “of short paragraphs, every one worth its weight in gold. The humorist-philosopher always wore long hair and sat down when he lectured.” Picture the scene, in a little Missouri ‘hall’ or ‘schoolroom’ in winter, overheated by a hemlock-stove, and you’d think the lecturer would fall asleep behind his hair.
At any rate, those who wish to qualify must realize that this would not do to-day. The unbroken ‘comic lecture’ has been put out of business by the brilliant work of stage entertainers. A humorous lecturer must at least seem to be lecturing about something: the humor becomes the method, not the matter. Artemus Ward had a prescience of this when he labelled his public lecture Africa and never mentioned the place. What is needed nowadays is a lecture on the Gold Standard, ‘punctuated with roars of laughter,’ or on the Religions of the Orient ‘relieved by the speaker’s delightful sense of fun.’ Those who can’t give such lectures had better keep off the platform.
It would be only too easy for anyone who has lectured for twenty years with the understanding, by contract, that the lectures were humorous, to hand out all sorts of didactic instructions on how to lecture. But I refrain. To teach public speaking out of a book reminds me of Mr. Ellis Parker Butler’s ‘correspondence-school’ detective; or of a little Scottish boy once in my employ who ‘had learned the motions of swimming’ in a Glasgow day school. He fell off my motor boat, and when we fished him up he said he ‘found the motions hard to put into practice.’ So they are with public speaking. Hence I will confine myself to one canon of advice. Begin your lecture with the words ‘Ladies and Gentlemen.’ Don’t begin— ‘Ladies and Gentlemenwhen I knew I was to speak,’ etc. In other words, say everything as if it was the last thing you would ever say. But with that, don’t dawdle. The same is equally true of the attempt to put into words without pictures the humor of drawing and its execution.
All that has been said about the technique and craft of humor could be said in a paraded form of the expression of humor in drawing. In particular it would be interesting to study the method and effect of caricature drawing, the line drawing in which humor best expresses itself. One would find here the same canons of contrast and incongruity as with the written word. One would find also the same differences of technique as between English and American work. English caricature line drawing runs to literalism, it is marvellous in its truth. Here again, as in writing, Punch has set a pattern for the world, and such work as that of Mr. Bernard Partridge is part of our legacy to the future. But American drawing runs to exaggerations, to glorious symbolism, to magic discoveries such as that the portrait of President Roosevelt the First could be reduced to a set of teeth, that a man can be drawn a hundred times in a hundred attitudes but without a chin: or take the marvellous methods of Mr. George McManus, creator of Mr. Jiggs, in conveying motion — the sense of being up at a great height, seasickness in two strokes of a sloping deck, or French ducal aristocracy done with a beard like a beaver’s tail, fit to flatten a mud dam. Both arts are wonderful. But such discussion lies outside the scope of this volume. It could only be profitably undertaken with a pencil and paper, with illustration, and with a complete change of writer. But students of humor may revel in Mr. H. R. Westwood’s collection of Modern Caricaturists (1932): see also Caricature of To-day (1928), edited by Geoffrey Holme: and students of art may derive great profit from the studies offered as prefaces of these works by Mr. David Low and Mr. Randall Davies.
