"No, mum."
"Then what is it makes you so tired, sonny?"
"It's the questions, mum."
And this of the little boy, who was asked by his mother as to what he would like to give his cousin for a birthday present.
"I know," was the reply, "but I ain't big enough."
Many of our humorists have maintained a constant geniality in their humor, even in the treatment of distressing themes. For example, Josh Billings made the announcement that one hornet, if it was feeling well, could break up a whole camp meeting. Bill Nye, Artemas Ward and many another American writer have given in profusion of amiable sillinesses to make the nation laugh. It was one of these that told how a drafted man sought exemption because he was a negro, a minister, over age, a British subject, and an habitual drunkard.
The most distinctive flavor in American humor is that of the grotesque. It is characteristic in Mark Twain's best work, and it is characteristic of most of those others who have won fame as purveyors of laughter. The American tourist brags of his own:
"Talk of Vesuve—huh! Niag'll put her out in three minutes." That polished writer, Irving, did not hesitate to declare that Uncle Sam believed the earth tipped when he went West. In the archives of our government is a state paper wherein President Lincoln referred to Mississippi gunboats with draught so light that they would float wherever the ground was a little damp. Typically American in its grotesquerie was the assertion of a rural humorist who asserted that the hogs thereabout were so thin they had to have a knot tied in their tails to prevent them from crawling through the chinks in the fence.
Ward displayed the like quality amusingly in his remark to the conductor of a tediously slow-moving accommodation train in the South. From his seat in the solitary passenger coach behind the long line of freight cars, he addressed the official with great seriousness:
"I ask you, conductor, why don't you take the cow-catcher off the engine and put it behind the car here? As it is now, there ain't a thing to hinder a cow from strolling into a car and biting a passenger."