Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 816
But this extract shows the problem as presented to writers of to-day. What kind of spelling are you to use for the speech of people who don’t talk academic English? If you write a story about Noranda miners, or deep-sea fishers, lumberjacks and hi-jackers, How do you make them talk? Not like divinity students, certainly, and even apart from profanity, as discussed in an earlier chapter, something has to be done to convey their peculiar speech and accent.... But make it as little as possible. Such a little goes such a long way. Any form of dialect or odd talk spelled out in crooked spelling gets tiresome to a degree — as bad as Esperanto or simplified spelling or basic English.
The true method is to suggest peculiar talk rather than to do it out in detail... a touch here a touch there.... See how wonderfully Mr. Montague Glass manages the speech of his “Potash and Perlmutter: inserting with it here and there such verbal gems as tchampanjer wine... and such phrases as... ‘That depends on what you call it sick, Abe; I don’t got to see no doctor exactly.’
When special accent and dialogue are thus artistically suggested the reader quite unconsciously carries it along all through, quite unaware that the bulk of the language is plain straight English. That’s the way to handle your deep-sea fisher, let him say ahoy! and ‘abeam and ‘awash one or twice and he’ll run straight the rest of the time.
Thus far we have been mainly concerned with explaining what not to do, what to avoid. Having ruled out puns and bad spelling and play upon words generally as at best mere incidental things in the expression of humour we naturally ask for some guidance in the opposite direction. By what method and in what way can a writer train himself towards the perception and expression of humour? Now humorous literature is of varying grades. Such things as puns and bad spelling are at the very bottom. Above them comes the broad field of burlesque writing, and above that field again a charming ground where humour rises above nonsense to present amusing scenes (not burlesque but actual), amusing episodes (not upside down but right side up), and above that again the presentation of character in the light of humour, and highest of all, the sublime humour that reflects through scene or character the incongruity of life itself.
The humour of character, in its simplest form, gives us some odd or peculiar individual, distinctive and attractive, who then becomes a medium for talking about things in general. Such characters run all the way from the Sam Slick of one century ago, past Mr. Dooley of half a century ago, to Charlie Macarthy (most peculiar of all) on next Sunday’s radio.
But on a far higher plane, as no doubt Charlie Macarthy and Mr. Dooley wouldn’t admit, are the great characters which stand of themselves in the world’s library of humour, represented by such master-presentations as those of Sir John Falstaff, Monsieur Jourdain le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, The Vicar of Wakefield, Mr. Pickwick, Tatarin and Huckleberry Finn. When humour reaches this height it blends laughter and tears so intimately together, in its view of the contrast of life’s little yesterday and unknown to-morrow, that it becomes, not the lowest, but the highest form of literature.
Through this extended range where can instruction or precept come in? Is there any way of telling anybody how to do it, or of helping instinctive art to better itself? Undoubtedly a lot of things. Read and ponder on good models. Read them not once but again and again. Notice, if you like, where the author falls down — where Dickens begins to cry, and Mark Twain gets prosy. But still more heedfully note where the writer does not fail — does it just right. Is there any distinctive attribute that we can trace out in this wide field to imitate, any sort of quality that runs all through this gamut from the bottom rung of burlesque to the top platform of sublimity? This first. All humorous writers — even more so than writers at large — have to learn an extraordinarily nice usage of words. Other writing sometimes gets so exciting, as to what is happening, that it ceases to be dependent on single words and phrases. When good old Edgar Wallace used to get his sleuth-hound shut by the villain in a cellar with the water rising and the temperature falling and hope fading — it wasn’t a matter of words. The fellow has to do something. Such wonderful story-tellers as Mrs. Belloc Lowndes can hold their readers (I know of one anyway) enthralled, without doing so by the power of single words or chosen phrases. The single sentences all seem ordinary. With the humorist it is different. If he wants to hold the reader he’s got to do it with his words and they must be exactly the right ones.
Let us consider some examples:
Mr. Pickwick meets on a coach a boring fellow-traveller, a Mr. Peter Magnus, who calls his attention to the curious nature of his initials.
‘You will observe — P.M. — post meridian. In hasty notes to intimate acquaintances, I sometimes sign myself ‘afternoon.’ It amuses my friends very much, Mr. Pickwick.’
‘It is calculated to afford them the highest gratification,’ said Mr. Pickwick.
One might search the universe for a more apt phrase, for bringing out the contrast between the size of the expression and the triviality of the object.
Now here is Mark Twain in that extraordinary make- believe story, Cannibalism in the Cars. Readers may recall that it arose out of the incident of certain Western congressmen getting snowbound in a train and getting very hungry. Mark Twain builds this up; makes out that they got so hungry that they turned cannibal. But they did everything by legislative procedure, even the choice of their victim.
Mr. Harris was substituted on the first amendment. The balloting then began. On the sixth ballot Mr. Harris was elected.
.. There was some talk of demanding a new ballot... but the happy announcement that Mr. Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds....
Next morning we had Morgan of Alabama, one of the finest men I ever sat down to.
Or here is J. M. Barrie in My Lady Nicotine in a burlesque sketch about the killing of an editor by a contributor. In the police court evidence is given by a policeman that Mr. So-and-so came hurriedly down the stairs from the editorial rooms and said, ‘I have killed the editor.’ The policeman answered, ‘Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’... Look again round the globe for an answer for the policeman and you will hardly beat that.
Nowhere is the need of the ‘right word,’ the ‘mot propre,’ more pressing than in the section of humorous writing represented by comic verse. This form, a sub-division of burlesque writing, flourished mightily in the nineteenth century and never dies. One thinks of James Russell Lowell’s matchless:
John P. Robinson he, Says they didn’t know everything down in Judee.
Or of Bret Harte’s immortal Heathen Chinee:
Ah Sin was his name,
And I will not deny,
In regard to the same,
What that name might imply.
Or one crosses the ocean to hear W. S. Gilbert in his Bab Ballad:
.. Strike the concertina’s melancholy string, Blow the loud-voiced harp like anything.
.. and so on down to the brilliant and satirical verses of our day — with Gillett Burgess, Guiterman, G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc....
Now if you examine comic verse with a view to writing it you will see that the essence of its literary appeal lies in the extraordinary correctness, aptness and simplicity of its words and phrases. It rhymes in an effortless way. There must be none of the painful carpentering, the poetic licence, which shifts accents and distorts pronunciations to make a stanza fit together. Compare:
The sons of the Prophet are warlike and bold, And quite unacquainted with fear....
So sings the bard of Abdullah Bulbul Ameer, or more commonly, Abdul the Bulbul Ameer. How neatly and smoothly the verse runs: and the happy phrase ‘quite unacquainted with fear,’ instead of ‘afraid of nothing.’ It reminds one of the ‘highest gratification’ of Mr. Peter Magnus mentioned above.
Or let Captain Harry Graham recite for us his verse about the baritone singer:
Will no one tell me why he sings
Such doleful, melancholy lays,
Of withered summers, ruined springs,
Of happy bygone days;
And kindred topics more or less
Designed to harass or depress.
The virtue lies in the more or less designed to harass or depress... the peculiar prosaic phrase more or less, as if fair-minded measurement was needed; and the (apparently) quite accidental wayin which more or less happens to rhyme with depress.
Anybody can easily test his ability and his inclination to write comic verse. The starting-point is found in the aspect of some tiresome or over-affected individual, or in some odd incident.
This Captain Harry Graham, let us say, suffered repeatedly in evening drawing-rooms, from the dreadful after-dinner baritone, with his ‘low-necked collar,’ his ‘fancy evening vest’ and his ‘bloated hand’ that holds, as he sings, his ballad about ‘faded flowers,’ and ‘brave kisses.’ Anybody can visualize him, or kick him, but it took Harry Graham to put it into verse. Or again — the writer I99 of Abdul the Bulbul Ameer (it dates from the days of the 1870 when Afghans and Russians filled the diplomatic foreground) — the writer, I say, presumably got ‘fed up’ with visions of terrific Russians in fur, of scowling Afghans in sheep-skin, overshadowing peaceful people in business suits. The thought struck him, ‘I wish they’d go and choke one another!’ And the joyful afterthought, ‘Perhaps they will.’ Or say that Bret Harte played a poker game with one or two of the ‘boys’ and a little Chinaman, just arrived at the diggings, took a hand in it, and to the merriment of all present cleaned out the pot.
Or imagine that James Russell Lowell got sick of hearing all the prosy discussion round election times repeating, ‘Waal! John P. Robinson, he says, “... this and that, for ever...”’ and the idea flashed into his mind, ‘Let’s use that back and forward, as a sort of see-saw of village argument.’ Let me now give an example taken from actuality on which a student may work as an exercise. I take an incident which sent a ripple of fun and column comment across the surface of the American and Canadian Press but, so far as I know, was not turned into verse. A local newspaper (I know the town very well but must not name it) carried an item that read:
The town council last night adopted a cordial and unanimous expression of appreciation of the services of Mr. James Morris, who is retiring at the age of eighty from the post of town-clerk, after forty-five years of service. The council also voted to Mr. Morris a pension of five hundred dollars a year for life, but not for more than five years’
The proviso at the end was only a clumsy reference to the fact that the council had no power to vote more than five years at a time. But the opportunity for the genial fun-makers of the columns was too tempting. They quoted the vote and added such friendly comment as:
Now this is fine, Jim! Five hundred a year for life. But remember, Jim, fair’s fair; don’t overdo it — don’t push a good thing too hard, etc etc.
Good enough fun with no malice in it; and I can certify that the venerable recipient of the pension laughed with the rest.
Now turn it into burlesque verse. You would probably find that your instinct would be to make it into a parody of some already known poem.
Grow old along with us, Jim,
But only for five years....
You are old, Bather Morris, the councillor said,
And your hair is exceedingly white,
But if in five years you consent to be dead
We will vote you a pension to-night.
And so on.
That’s all very well. But parody after all is only a second best, parasitic thing. One observes that none of the celebrated poems quoted above are parodies. I think that in this case the proper line of approach would be to use the contrast between the formal language of council procedure and the warm sentiment of gratitude....
A rather odd example of the value of single words in comic verse is offered by the type called the limerick. This means a five-line stanza in the familiar form, such as:
There was an old man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a bee,
When they said, ‘Does it buzz?’
He replied, ‘Yes, it does;
He’s a regular brute of a bee.’
Now those who reduce limericks to the rule and line of metrical propriety divide them into ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ limericks. An ‘impure’ limerick does not mean what the reader thinks it does. Indeed the one just quoted is an ‘impure’ one, and there is nothing wrong with it. A ‘pure’ limerick follows this model:
There was an old man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a bee.
When they said, ‘Does it buzz?’
He replied, ‘Yes, it does.’
That observant old man in a tree.
It will be seen that the last line is a sort of repetition of the first, or perhaps of a later line, with a slight variation. The ‘point’ is supposed to lie in the variation, for example, in an amusing or ridiculous use of a single word like observant. This was the form given to the limerick by its greatest exponent, Edward Lear, in his Book of Nonsense of 1846. Many people recall, indeed many nurseries still retain, Lear’s picture book — people with noses incredibly long, and arms to reach anything desired. But ordinary people, not experts, began to find this repeating line rather flat, even if at times the added epithets were particularly apt and amusing. So the last fine was changed to allow of a wider range, in fact to represent the main point of the argument. Everyone knows Kipling’s limerick:
There was an old man of Quebec,
Who was stuck in the snow to his neck.
When they said, ‘Are you friff?’
He replied, ‘Yes, I is,
But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.’
Now if Lear had taken up the pen he would have reflected for a minute and changed the last line to read:
‘That truthful old man of Quebec.’
It is an odd example of literary formality. No doubt the French Academy of Richelieu’s day would have laid down a ‘correct’ form of the limerick.
CHAPTER TWELVE. HOW TO WRITE MORE HUMOUR
SHAKESPEARE RE-SHAKEN — Botanizing for ranunculus — Humorous narrative — Misadventure — The everlasting John Gilpin — Mistaken identity — Jones is really Brown — Stories funny at the end or funny from the start — My short theatrical career — The humour of dialogue — Bob Benchley revisits college humorous characters — All you need is to see them — Dickens was so lucky.
WE may speak further of burlesque writing, for although really only the lower range of humour, it coincides, for many people, and especially for schoolboys and the young, with humour itself. We may try to indicate here, for people wish to practise it, how burlesque writing comes into being, and in what direction they may look for a start. The basis of it is the apprehension of the resemblance of two things nominally quite different, or on a different plane of dignity. The likeness of one to the other enables one of them to be set in a new light, and its peculiar defects turned into incongruity and laughter.
Let us suppose that a law student with a sense of humour, meaning a quick appreciation of the contrasts and incongruities, is reading over, wearily enough, the verbatim reports of a criminal law case. He gets weary of the everlasting, ‘I object,’
‘Answer the question, please, “Yes”, or “no”,’
‘Did you or did you not?’ and all the peculiar jargon that arises out of the rules of evidence. Suddenly it strikes him that this is very different from the law court in the Merchant of Venice, the play he read at college and saw acted only the other night. Portia’s eloquent and rounded periods — then all at once it strikes him that it would be funny to write up the trial scene in the Merchant of Venice as it would be transacted in a criminal court of to-day. This would be indeed:
SHAKESPEARE RE-SHAKEN
LAW REPORTS
Central Criminal Court, Venice A.D. 1598
Shylock v. Antonio
before Doge, J.
THE COURT (addressing PORTIA, of Portia and Bellario, attorneys for the defence). Come you from Padua, from Bellario? PORTIA. From both, my lord.
THE COURT. You can’t come from both. Answer the question, please.
PORTIA. I did, my lord.
THE COURT. Answer the question, please, yes or no. Do you come from Padua? PORTIA. Yes.
THE COURT. I thought we should get to that. PORTIA. Which is the merchant here and which the Jew? THE COURT. Antonio and Old Shylock both stood forth. PORTIA (to ANTONIO). YOU stand within his danger, do you not?
ANTONIO. Ay, so he says.
PORTIA. Answer the question, please, yes or no. Do you stand within his danger? ANTONIO. Yes.
PORTIA. Ha! I thought we should get to something. Do you confess the bond?
ANTONIO. I do.
PORTIA. Then must the Jew be merciful. SHYLOCK. On what compulsion must I? Tell me that? THE COURT. Silence! Don’t speak out of your turn. The court will strike from the record the words On what compulsion... to... that.
PORTIA. The quality of mercy is not strained. It drop- peth...
STATE ATTORNEY {rising). I object. The quality of mercy is not any part of the case.
THE COURT. The objection is sustained. Strike that out. Go on.
PORTIA. Therefore, Jew, though justice be thy plea —
STATE ATTORNEY. I object. She must address the Court.
THE COURT. The objection is sustained. You must address the Court, please.
PORTIA. This bond is forfeit and lawfully by this the Jew may claim a pound of flesh.
THE COURT {to ANTONIO). What have you to say? ANTONIO. I am the tainted wether of the flock. STATE ATTORNEY. I object; there is no evidence before the Court that he’s a tainted wether.
