It happened to Lord Lundy then,
As happens to so many men:
Towards the age of twenty-six,
They shoved him into politics;
In which profession he commanded
The income that his rank demanded
In turn as Secretary for
India, the Colonies and War.
But very soon his friends began
To doubt if he were quite the man:
Thus, if a member rose to say
(As members do from day to day),
"Arising out of that reply...!"
Lord Lundy would begin to cry.
A hint at harmless little jobs
Would shake him with convulsive sobs,
While as for Revelations, these
Would simply bring him to his knees
And leave him whimpering like a child.
This genial idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps the most characteristic qualities of his [freest] humour elsewhere. Take, for example, the flavour of this singular remark from The Four Men. Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, in a most serious fashion the story of his first love. He says:
"I learnt ... that she had married a man whose fame had long been familiar to me, a politician, a patriot, and a most capable manufacturer.... Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature, I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose name she had mingled her own."
Myself. "What did he [manufacture]?"
Grizzlebeard. "Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you, that no one could compete with him."
Let the reader explain, if he can, the comic effect of that startling irrelevance; we cannot, but it is characteristic.
It is some effect of dexterity with words, some happy spring of inconsequence, which produces this particular kind of joke. A certain exuberance in writing which plainly intoxicates the writer and carries the reader with it, is at the bottom of humour of this sort. What is it that causes us to smile at the following passage, a disquisition on the aptitude of the word "surprising"?
An elephant escapes from a circus and puts his head in at your window while you are writing and thinking of a word. You look up. You may be alarmed, you may be astonished, you may be moved to sudden processes of thought; but one thing you will find about it, and you will find out quite quickly, and it will dominate all your other emotions of the time: the elephant's head will be surprising. You are caught. Your soul says loudly to its Creator: "Oh, this is something new!"
One might suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite common and human. The philosophical rules of laughter do not explain it: but it is funny.
Something of the same attraction rests in a quite absurd essay, wherein Mr. Belloc describes how he was waylaid by an inventor and, having suffered the explanations of the man, retaliated with advice as to the means to pursue to get the new machine adopted. The technical terms invented for both parties to the dialogue are deliciously idiotic, a sort of exalted abstract play with the dictionary of technology.