Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 815
But plain as it is, there are people who can spoil even that story by saying that the Wabash through-train goes through Buffalo at about 3.30 a m. — and then saying, ‘No, not the Wabash — the other one — that line up from, you know, no, not the Lehigh — anyway, it doesn’t matter — Oh, yes, of course, the Lackawanna. Well, this feller had a lower berth, or say, anyway a berth on the Lackawanna for Chicago due in Buffalo...’ and so on — till the next bump.
I recommend to any student of humour, next time he is listening to a funny story, to observe how much extraneous matter it contains, which has nothing to do with the point.
Even before the extraneous matter is reached, the story is apt to be damaged by the speaker’s interpolation— ‘Have you heard this?’ — followed a little later by— ‘You haven’t heard this?’
Now just as a matter of critical study note some of the commonest ways of damaging or destroying a funny story.
1. Moving backwards instead of forwards; sample:
My father used to tell a good story about the darkies. Father, you know, was born down in Georgia. He only moved up here later on. In fact he was out West for years and years in between. That was where he met mother. Her old man, I may have told you, was one of the forty-niners... and so on, back to the Louisiana Purchase.
2. Too many narrators; sample:
I heard a good story from a feller on the train who was telling me that he’d been out camping with a feller, and this feller had a great yarn about two fellers... Six, so far, isn’t it? Or is it ten?
3. Many people, and in this case especially genial and easy-going, remember the fun they got out of a story but forget the point. Such a man will begin, with a laugh of appreciation:
.. I heard old Doc. Noble get off a darned good one the other night. Jim Thompson — you know Jim — always comes dropping into the surgery but he’s never sick, just wants to borrow a dollar. But the other night he came in and said, ‘Doc, I’m a sick man’... And the old doctor says — story teller begins to laugh — What the hell was it he said?... Darned good anyway....
4. But more complete havoc can be made by mishandling the point of the story, especially when the story depends entirely on the final ‘point.’ Humorous narration, as we shall see in detail later, may be made amusing all through, or lead up to an amusing end without being amusing till it gets there. This laughable ending, this ‘nub,’ as it has been called, is all there is in most funny stories as related by ordinary people. Most of them, modestly enough, struggle towards it as fast as they can. They want to get to it and have the fun of hearing people laughing at it.... But a certain infernal type of story-teller holds it off, loves to keep it in suspense to pile up the expectation — regardless of the strained faces and the suffering minds of the listeners.
Example: Here is, I imagine, one of the best known stories in the world. It is a story with a ‘nub’ in it, and utterly dependent on the nub, without which there is nothing in it. Plainly told, it reads:
A miserable man, evidently in poor health, came to the con- suiting office of a Parisian doctor. The doctor examined him pretty thoroughly and then said reassuringly, ‘Well, my dear sir, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you except overstrain and worry. What you need to do is forget your work, enjoy yourself, have a good laugh. Why not go and see this new comedian Coquelin what they’re all talking about?’... ‘Pardon me’ said the patient sadly, ‘I am Coquelin.’
Now, one type of story-killer could spoil this by letting the cat out of the bag at once and beginning:
It seems that this fellow Coquelin, the great Trench funny actor, was a pretty miserable specimen to look at. Anyway he went in one day to a doctor’s office, etc etc.
But the other type of story-teller holds the cat so tight in the bag that it’s dead when it gets out.
Thus:
A fellow came into a French doctor’s office one day and looked pretty tough, not exactly ill, but, oh, sort of run-down and mean looking, though you couldn’t say... etc etc etc. (Help.)
So the doctor looked him all over, and punched him up and down and tried the stethoscope on him, and tapped his chest... etc etc etc. (Help.)
So at last he said, ‘Well, I tell you, there’s nothing really the matter with you, you’re run down, of course, and in bad shape, and your blood-pressure is perhaps a little bit high, but, take it all in all, you’re not in any way ill in the real sense...
What the narrator deserves, and sometimes gets at this point, is that someone should break in, quite innocently, thinking the story all over:
‘Well, that’s often the way. I knew a fellow out home that was just like that always complaining and yet...’
‘Well, this fellow...’
‘Same sort of case; old Doc. Ryckert said himself..
‘No, but I hadn’t finished!’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Did he die in the office?’
As with poetry, everybody knows what humour is until he tries to define it. The difficulty is all the greater because we use the word in two senses, sometimes to mean something in ourselves, our ‘sense of humour,’ and at other times to mean the ‘humour of a situation,’ as if it were something outside of ourselves. The fact is it means both, for the two conceptions are like the clapper and the bell, the hammer and the anvil. To put it in the academic language of philosophy, one term is subjective, the other objective.
It is hard to think of a sense of humour in a vacuum with nothing to get humorous about. It sounds like being crazy. It is equally hard to think of ‘funny happenings’ in a purely physical sense. Euclid may have roared with laughter when a perpendicular fell on a line, but no one else could have. Hence comes our in-and-out use of language, by which humour means either a human quality or the outside contacts that bring it into play.
The best definition of humour that I know is: Humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof. I think this the best I know because I wrote it myself. I don’t like any others nearly as well. Students of writing will do well to pause at the word kindly and ponder it well. The very essence of humour is that it must be kindly. ‘Good jests,’ said King Charles the Second, that most humorous and kindly king who saved monarchy in England, ‘ought to bite like lambs, not dogs; they should cut, not wound.’ The minute they begin to bite and wound that is not humour. That is satire, and as it gets more and more satirical the humour dries out of it leaving only the snarl and rasp of sarcasm. To quote from a poem from which I am never tired of quoting, Bret Harte’s ‘Society on the Stanislaw.’ We remember that when Jones claimed that the fossil bones reconstructed by Brown into a palaeozoic animal were only one of his lost mules, Brown retorted by apologizing for having trespassed on Jones’s family vault.
‘He was a most sarcastic man this kind Mr. Brown.’
Here we have it exactly. Sarcastic, as intended to rasp Jones’s feelings — the derivation of the word is a hoe or rasp. Yet observe that though Mr. Brown is sarcastic the poem itself is humorous. There’s nothing unkind in that — seen as it were in a far-away focus.
Hence the more you look at it the more you will see that all truly great humour, all the great humorous characters, are portrayed through a medium of kindliness. Falstaff is really a despicable creature: give him all the world and he’d take it: but, after all, he asks nothing at the moment but a bellyful — a large bellyful — of sack, a plate of meat, and somebody to talk at. The humour of him lies in our forgiveness of him. Our higher selves take a broader view. Don Quixote, the Vicar of Wakefield, Rip Van Winkle, Mr. Pickwick — each one is surrounded by an atmosphere of kindliness. Life seems a better thing in their society.
The fundamental basis, then, for writing humour is to share in this human kindliness, to develop to the full extent what native share we have of it, and to look in that direction for our judgment of our fellowmen.
Humour probably began with pretty primitive stuff. So did laughter. Most likely it was some kind of triumphal grunt or shout of exultation over victory.... And humour probably began as a similar sense of triumph in seeing something knocked out of shape, or offering a sort of contradiction of nature, such as a cow with two heads. The Greek gods — their intelligence was very low — thought it funny when Hephaestus (or somebody) fell out of Heaven and broke his leg and walked with a limp. Heaven echoed with the laughter of the gods. It must have been a hell of a heaven.
Human beings, not being gods, found, as they themselves devloped, that their sense of enjoyment of this kind of disaster must depend on its being really harmless, the disaster only an appearance. On these terms it is still ‘funny’ to us when a man’s hat blows off and he chases it out in the street. To a Greek god it would be funnier still if a bus ran over him.
Here again, as everywhere, children repeat individually the development of the race collectively. Nursery humour is full of slaughter, disaster and sudden death. Welsh giants are fooled by Jack the Giant Killer into ripping their stomachs open. Suitors seeking the Sleeping Beauty die spiked on thorn hedges. People get boiled in pots, chopped in little pieces — all sorts of fun.
You can see this upward progress of humour all through the ages. Here we have the humour of primitive cruelty replaced by the practical jokes of the Middle Ages. This itself was pretty rough stuff. In the castle hall someone is beguiled to — no, someone is fooled into — putting his head outside to see what sort of night it is and someone else drops a turnip on his head from an upper window. The practical joke died hard. It is, indeed, not quite dead. Schoolboys still put bent pins on masters’ chairs. But here is not so much humour as retribution.
The simplest attempts at humorous, or call it comic, writing consist of trying to get fun out of words themselves. This includes such things as pun-making, bad spelling, comic dialect and so on. The humour is supposed to lie in the oddity of the sound and sense, the incongruity of the verbal forms thus created, as differing from the ‘correct’ forms. With this goes in some measure, as with the pun- maker, the attraction of ingenuity. This is the same impulse that leads people into strenuous effort over crossword puzzles. The man in a railway car who murmurs ‘a river in ancient Greece,’
‘a curved sword in seven letters,’ is the same man who would have made puns when Queen Victoria was young....
Puns on the American side of the Atlantic have lost almost all literary, social and commercial value. People generally greet a pun with a groan. In England the pun refuses to die, or at least to stay dead. A pun means putting two different meanings that belong to the same word or phrase into unexpected juxtaposition. The clash of sound and sense is supposed to excite our sense of humour by its incongruity, a thing similar to the ‘funny’ effect of a clown in a tiny round hat.
Very likely in its origin the pun was perhaps not so much a funny effect as a serious one, a way of calling attention. The famous pun of Pope Gregory on the fairhaired Anglo-Saxon children in the Roman slave-market — Gregory’s mixture, as someone once called it, when there was a Gregory’s mixture — this pun, I say, was meant in seriousness, almost in sadness. ‘These are not Angles,’ he said, ‘they’re angels’ The play upon words was not play, but earnest, as if to say, ‘What do you know about that?’ So, too, I imagine with the famous puns of Shakespeare, like the well-known words of John of Gaunt:
Old Gaunt indeed and gaunt in being old....
But if the pun ever had such an exalted status it lost it entirely in Victorian England, when puns became the order of the day as the stock-in-trade of funny men and comic papers. The technique of illustration at that time was quite inadequate for the delightful humorous cartoons of our present press and the merry fun of the comic strips. Hence all burlesque and comic writing relied greatly on puns. Even the Houses of Parliament and the Ministry appreciated a pun. Witness the famous example in 1843 when all official and academic England roared with laughter when Sir Charles Napier ended his message about his conquest of Sind with the Latin word ‘Peccavi,’ I have sinned. Later on, but not till everybody was dead, it was disclosed that Napier didn’t mean to make a pun at all. He just meant that he admitted having exceeded his authority, and he said it with a familiar schoolboy term, Peccavi, I’m in the wrong. British schoolboys then and long after used Latin tags such as Peccavi! and Pax! etc. Napier himself hadn’t noticed the pun. But the story, true or apocryphal, illustrates the period.
Consider the case of Tom Hood (1799-1845). His Song of the Shirt, published in Punch, Christmas 1843, is one of the memorials of English social history. But Hood had to publish it without his name for fear people might think it funny. For Hood was an incurable pun-maker, pouring forth his puns in the Comic Journal that he carried on. Punch, of course, at that time just starting life (1841), was not a funny paper. It was in its origins, as its biographer and brilliant contributor, Mr. Charles L. Graves, has said, ‘a radical and democratic paper, a resolute champion of the poor, the desolate and the oppressed.’ Its early pages are grim with the pictures of hunger and misery and want. The Song of the Shirt was just right for Punch, but not its punning author. Later on, as Punch grew wiser, being unable to set all the world right, it replaced biting satire with mellow humour and puns blossomed on its pages. Nor have they ever died out. Even the heroic war numbers of the present hour carry their proper ration of puns.
Hood himself tried to claim that puns were a legitimate form of literary expression.
However critics may take offence
A double meaning has double sense.
But this is only true when it is true. A double meaning may leave nothing more than its jangle of sounds without adding anything to the sense.
Take some of Hood’s own:
Ben Battle was a soldier bold
And used to war’s alarms,
But a cannon ball took off his legs
And he laid down his arms.
There is absolutely nothing in this but words and sounds. Very different is the case where the use of a pun suggests, or seems to suggest, some further meaning, as when a witty householder called his gas bill, the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade.’
Hood lived up to his creed. He died with a pun, if not on his lips, at least on his pen. He had fallen into illness and poverty and Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, contrived for him a small pension of which he only lived to receive a first instalment. Hood, dying, wrote his thanks. ‘It is death that stops my pen, you see, not a pension.’
We may quote again the Latin proverb which tells us that we may throw nature out with a fork, but it is bound to come back sooner or later. So it is with play upon words. We no sooner expel it in the form of puns than it comes back in a new shape. Thus we get the ‘nearly-alike’ and the ‘only a little different’ pairs of words which make amusing nonsense even to our present-day eyes. The little book of burlesque British history, 1066 and All That (1930), which met such an uproarious success, owed much of it to the new verbal forms.
One may quote a few among the hundreds of these wilful confusions of verbal forms: The Saxons worshipped dreadful gods of their own called Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.... There came waves of Danes accompanied by their sisters, or sagas.... The pheasants revolt, to find out which was the gentleman when Adam delved and Eve span (the answer being, of course, Adam).... Napoleon’s armies always marched on their stomachs, shouting ‘Vive l’Intérieur.’
This is marvellous stuff, and we can laugh over it as our grandfathers laughed over puns and bad spelling. As mere method it would in time become as stale as puns themselves. But a lot of it contains an underlying basis of real significance, on which humour can still stand when mere method has worn tattered. It is the difference between a statue and a scarecrow.
Along with British puns there flourished at the same epoch American bad spelling. This made no hit in England, as over there people mostly couldn’t spell. We recall what was said in the first chapter about the 66 per cent, of English brides of that day who signed their ‘mark’ instead of their names in the marriage register. But in America the little red schoolhouse brought spelling everywhere and the ‘spelling bee’ turned it to diversion. Hence bad spelling was ‘funny’ as a sort of take-off of good spelling. It was, so to speak, a laugh on the spelling book. It is so completely gone now that it makes Artemus Ward and Orpheus C. Kerr (Office Seeker) tough reading for the present generation.
It is proper also to distinguish between bad spelling used for bad spelling’s sake and bad spelling when used to indicate the bad pronunciation of the characters concerned. Herein lies the difference between Bill Nye and Josh Billings and Artemus Ward on the one hand and such writers as James Whitcombe Riley and Eugene Field on the other. Here, for example, is Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818-1884) writing on Laughter and speaking in his own person, not quoting the talk of a character:
In konclusion i say laff every good chance yu kan git, but don’t laff unless yu feal like it, for there ain’t nothing in this world more harty than a good honest laff.... When you do laff open yure mouth wide enuff for the noize tew git out without squealing, thro jure hed hak as thoyu was going tew he shaved... etc.
But compare Eugene Field (1850-95) not spelling badly because he thinks it funny but because he wants a transcript of the way his characters’ speech sounded. One of these characters is telling a story:
It seems that in the spring of’47 — the year that Cy Watson’s eldest boy was drownded in West River — there come along a book agent sellin’ volyumes ‘nd tracks f’r the diffusion of knowledge, ‘nd havin’ got the recommend of the minister and ‘uv the select men, he done an all-fired big business in our part of the country. His name wuz Lemuel Higgins ‘nd he wuz — likely a talker ez I ever heerd... etc.
But observe that there is no need for ‘nd since we all use it, more or less, and only say and out in full when it fits to do so. Nor is there any need for ‘wuz,’ as that is practically what we all say, at least half of the time, in North America. ‘Was’ is only used, I imagine, in the Court of St. James — and perhaps even there they say ‘wuz’ when by themselves.
