In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter.
When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”
The elder Sothern took an unsuccessful comedy of H. J. Byron’s, the ‘Prompter’s Box,’ renamed it the ‘Crushed Tragedian’ and rewrote it so that he might himself appear as a broken-down old actor, fallen upon evil days but forever puffed with pride in his own histrionic achievements. He comes in contact with a banker, who, when he learns that Sothern is an actor, makes the remark that “It must be ten years since I was in a theater.” Whereupon the crushed tragedian, drawing himself up and draping himself in imaginary robes, delivers the annihilating retort, “It must be at least as long since I was in a bank!”
It is a little difficult to decide whether these two examples illustrate the mot de caractère or the mot de situation, since they illuminate both character and situation. But the mot de situation can exist independently, relying for its effect solely upon the moment in the action when it is spoken. In a forgotten farce called ‘French Flats,’ Stuart Robson was warned to keep out of the way of a certain tenor, who was fiercely and fierily jealous. A little later we saw him venture into a room wherein we knew the operatic Othello to be concealed; and when he reappeared with his clothes torn from him and with a woe-begone expression, we waited expectantly for him to explain,—“The tenor was behind the door.” This sentence, innocent of all humor when taken by itself apart from the situation, was only the eagerly looked for explosion of a bomb fired by the long fuse which has been sputtering in full sight of the spectators.
V
Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to draw a hard and fast line between qualities which are closely akin, between talent and genius, for example. We are told that “talent does what it can and genius does what it must”; and this sounds impressive, no doubt, but it does not get us any forwarder. It implies a distinction in kind which is difficult to prove. So it is with the corresponding attempts to distinguish sharply between wit and humor. We can see clearly enough that many of Sheridan’s clever things are wit, beyond all question; and we can also see that most of Molière’s clever things are humor; but there remain not a few laughter-provoking effects which it is almost impossible to classify. Perhaps some of them cannot fairly be entitled either witty or humorous; they are just funny.
In one of Charles Hoyt’s unpretending farcical comedies, all of them unhesitatingly American, new births of our new soil, there was a droll creature who found it amusing to purloin a succession of articles from a certain house, crossing the stage again and again at intervals bearing out the objects he was appropriating, the last of these being nothing less than a red-hot stove. On one of his earlier marauding expeditions he came before the audience with a huge ostrich egg in one hand and with a tiny bantam chicken in the other. He came down to the footlights and stood for a moment looking first at the egg and then at the hen, with growing amazement. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t believe it!”
Now, I cannot call the remark witty in itself, and I am not at all sure that it is humorous; but it is funny,—at least this was the unanimous opinion of the joyful audience. Equally funny was a brief scene in another of the nondescript spectacles of Weber and Fields. There was on one side of the stage, not too near the footlights, the portico of a house, over which was a ground glass globe with an electric bulb inside it. Weber and Fields came on together; and Weber remarked, as they faced the audience: “This is his house. I know it because he told me it had a white light over the door.” (For the benefit of my readers I shall spare them the dialect which intensified the flavor of the ensuing dialog.)
“A white light?” said Fields. “I didn’t see a white light.” At that moment the globe became red just as Fields turned to look at it. “That isn’t a white light,” he asserted when he again faced the audience. “It’s a red light!”
“I tell you it’s a white light. I saw it,” said Weber; and when he twisted his head to steal a glimpse of the globe it had again changed its color. “I bet you five dollars it is a white light!”