"'O, soon thou will be gonested away.'
"I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested.
"They said, 'Doth not like us?'
"I said, 'I doth—I doth.'
"I also said, 'I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone child—my parents being far—far away.'
"They then said, 'Wilt not marry us?'
"I said, 'O no, it cannot was.'
"When they cried, 'O cruel man! this is too much!—O! too much,' I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined."
It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and another, or of one nation and another. It can be felt and can be illustrated by quoting examples, but scarcely described in general terms. It has been said of that class of American humorists of which Artemus Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence. But all these qualities have characterized other schools of humor. There is the same element of surprise in De Quincey's anti-climax, "Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to publish a joke now and then." The violation of logic which makes us laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if he had never been born;" or in his advice, "Always live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;" or, again, in his announcement that "Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his own contracting." A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual collocation of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he says of Brigham Young, "He's the most married man I ever saw in my life;" or when, having been drafted at several hundred different places where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says that if he went on he should soon become a regiment, and adds, "I never knew that there was so many of me." With this a whimsical understatement and an affectation of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to sacrifice "even his wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against orthography, he pronounces that "Chaucer was a great poet but he couldn't spell," or where he says of the feast of raw dog, tendered him by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It don't agree with me. I prefer simple food." On the whole, it may be said of original humor of this kind, as of other forms of originality in literature, that the elements of it are old, but their combinations are novel. Other humorists, like Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings") and David R. Locke ("Petroleum V. Nasby"), have used bad spelling as a part of their machinery; while Robert H. Newell ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), and more recently "Bill Nye," though belonging to the same school of low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of these the most eminent, by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has probably made more people laugh than any other living writer. A Missourian by birth (1835), he served the usual apprenticeship at type-setting and editing country newspapers; spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam-boat, and seven years more mining and journalizing in Nevada, where he conducted the Virginia City Enterprise; finally drifted to San Francisco, and was associated with Bret Harte on the Californian, and in 1867 published his first book, The Jumping Frog. This was succeeded by the Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; A Tramp Abroad, 1880, and by others not so good.
Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of innocence and surprise as Artemus Ward's, and there is a like suddenness in his turns of expression, as where he speaks of "the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces." If he did not originate, he at any rate employed very effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper "funny man," of putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he says of a man who was hanged, that he "received injuries which terminated in his death." He uses to the full extent the American humorist's favorite resources of exaggeration and irreverence. An instance of the former quality may be seen in his famous description of a dog chasing a coyote, in Roughing It, or in his interview with the lightning-rod agent in Mark Twain's Sketches, 1875. He is a shrewd observer, and his humor has a more satirical side than Artemus Ward's, sometimes passing into downright denunciation. He delights particularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing cant. He runs atilt, as has been said, at "copy-book texts," at the temperance reformer, the tract distributer, the Good Boy of Sunday-school literature, and the women who send bouquets and sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical anecdotes, such as the story of George Washington and his little hatchet; burlesques the time-honored adventure, in nautical romances, of the starving crew casting lots in the long-boat, and spoils the dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying of a discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, "He wanted fresh shad." The fun of Innocents Abroad consists in this irreverent application of modern, common sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to the memorable places and historic associations of Europe. Tried by this test the Old Masters in the picture galleries become laughable, Abelard was a precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the guide-books are parodied without mercy. The tourist weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa he drives the cicerone to despair by pretending never to have heard of Christopher Columbus, and inquiring innocently, "Is he dead?" It is Europe vulgarized and stripped of its illusions—Europe seen by a Western newspaper reporter without any "historic imagination."