VIII
The Humour of the "Man on the Cars"
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections." So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the American. John Bull's downrightness appears in his jests also. His jokes must be unmistakable; he wants none of your quips masquerading as serious observations. A mere twinkle of the eye is not for him a sufficient illumination between the serious and the comic. "Those animals are horses," Artemus Ward used to say in showing his panorama. "I know they are—because my artist says so. I had the picture two years before I discovered the fact. The artist came to me about six months ago and said, 'It is useless to disguise it from you any longer—they are horses.'"[16] This is the form of introduction that John Bull prefers for his witticisms. He will welcome a joke as hospitably as a visitor, if only the credentials of the one as of the other are unimpeachable.
Now the American does not wish his joke underlined like an urgent parliamentary whip. He wants something left to his imagination; he wants to be tickled by the feeling that it requires a keen eye to see the point; he may, in a word, like his champagne sweet, but he wants his humour dry. His telephone girls halloo, but his jokes don't. In this he resembles the Scotsman much more than the Englishman; and both European foreigners and the Americans themselves seem aware of this. Thus, Max O'Rell writes:
De tous les citoyens du Royaume plus ou moins Uni l'ami Donald est le plus fini, le plus solide, le plus positif, le plus persévérant, le plus laborieux, et le plus spirituel.
Le plus spirituel! voilà un grand mot de lâché. Oui, le plus spirituel, n'en déplaise a l'ombre de Sydney Smith.... J'espère bien prouver, par quelques anecdotes, que Donald a de l'esprit, de l'esprit de bon aloi, d'humour surtout, de cet humour fin subtil, qui passerait à travers la tête d'un Cockney sans y laisser la moindre trace, sans y faire la moindre impression.
The testimony of the American is equally explicit.
The following dialogue, quoted from memory, appeared some time since in one of the best American comic journals:
Tomkyns (of London).—I say, Vanarsdale, I told such a good joke, don't you know, to MacPherson, and he didn't laugh a bit! I suppose that's because he's a Scotsman?
Vanarsdale (of New York).—I don't know; I think it's more likely that it's because you are an Englishman!