Experiences as an Editor
“In the Ortum of 18— my friend, the editor of the Baldissville Bugle, was obleged to leave perfeshernal dooties & go & dig his taters, & he axed me to edit for him doorin his absence. Accordinly I ground up his Shears and commenced. It didn’t take me a grate while to slash out copy enuff from the xchanges for one issoo, and I thawt I’d ride up to the next town on a little Jaunt, to rest my Branes which had bin severely rackt by my mental efforts (This is sorter Ironical) So I went over to the Rale Rood offiss and axed the Sooprintendent for a pars.
‘You a editer,’ he axed, evinebtly on the point of snickerin.
‘Yes, Sir,’ sez I, ‘Don’t I look poor enuff?’
‘Just about,’ sed he, ‘but our Road can’t pars you.’
‘Can’t hay.’
‘No Sir—it can’t.’
‘Becauz,’ sez I, looking him full in the face with a Eagle eye, ‘it goes so darned slow it can’t pars anybody!’ Methink I had him thar. It is the slowest Rale Road in the West. With a mortified air, he tole me to get out of his offiss. I pittid him and went.”
The essence of this excursion into the realms of the Comic Spirit is about as cheap and small a thing in essences as one is likely to come across. Mr. Ward had made or heard somebody make a punning retort of an ultra-feeble quality, and straightway he rushes off to turn it into humourous lucubration. The Americans believed it was “darned funny,” it raised “gales of laughter” among them, and they shouted about its excellences till the English also began to recognise them. At best Artemus Ward is humour of the “Wot-the-orfis-boy-finks” order, and as such it has always been eschewed by persons blessed with a trifle more than the milk-maid order of intellect.
And lest I be accused of raking up what the Americans themselves choicely term “dead dog” I will ask your attention for the space of a paragraph or two to the brand of the New Humour generally consumed by the inhabitants of the United States in the present era of grace. In this connection it would be easy for one to take a distinctly bitter line; inasmuch as the books of humour as distinguished from the humourous periodicals, nowadays published in America are not really books of humour at all, but aggregations of acrid and wicked cynicism. The authors of them either do not intend to be funny or have no conception of the meaning of fun. Sourness of spirit, meanness of thought, and savageness of expression are their principal standby. In the humourous periodicals, however, you discover a well-defined intention to be funny—though the cynicism and the vitriol are not of course forgotten.
I believe that these periodicals are nicely adjusted to the public requirements, for the American is not out to produce even comic papers “for his health,” and being nothing if not practical, he gives his public exactly “what they want.” Here are some samples of “exactly what they want,” published so recently as May of the present year. First as to verse: