Wit can also be enhanced by a droll incompetence of understanding on the part of the listener. Sydney Smith, complaining of the heat, told a lady that he wished he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones. The wit consists in extending the congruity of taking clothes off to the flesh, and there is an electric instant of mental possibility. But it is enhanced to us when we recollect the shocked and puzzled look of the lady, who saw only an indelicacy in a remark which was really delicate to the pitch of ghastliness,—stripped, in fact, of every rag of that most indelicate of all things, prudery. Thus the raillery of Falstaff owes half its excellence to Dame Quickly's consistent misinterpretation, for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making a capital match. "Go to! you are a woman: go." "Who, I? No! I defy thee. God's light! I was never called so in mine own house before." "You are a thing to thank God on." "I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou should'st know it." And the grim irony of Hamlet, who, after killing Polonius, replies to the king that the old man is at supper, has grown upon us through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know he is killed as well as we do, and have been sent to find the body, but cannot take the point of Hamlet's answers.
In a play of Douglas Jerrold, an old sailor gets a box on the ear while trying to snatch a kiss. "There," cries he, "like my luck! always wrecked on the coral reefs." When the manager heard the play read he could not see the point, and increased the wit for us by making Jerrold strike it out.
Perhaps the best modern instance of this kind is the colossal stupidity of some foreign critics, who gave such an exquisite flavor to Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" by blaming his ignorance and misapprehension of places, pictures, and traditions.
The Beaufort negroes are unconsciously witty when, perceiving that an idea is dawning upon them, they say they feel their head "growing thinner." A premium for involuntary wit must be conferred upon the old lady in New Bedford, who heard about the cheapness of the manufactured oils and the great increase in the use of them, which threatened to drive sperm-oil out of the market: "Dear me, the poor whales! What will they do?"
There must also be complete unconsciousness in the perpetrator of a bull. "The pleasure," says Sydney Smith, "arising from bulls proceeds from our surprise at suddenly discovering two things to be dissimilar in which a resemblance might have been suspected;" but ordinary wit creates a sudden surprise at a resemblance which could not have been suspected between two things. Perhaps the best bull was practically perpetrated by the old lady in Middlebury, Wis., who crossed over a bridge that was marked "Dangerous" without seeing the sign. On being informed of the fact on the other side, she instantly turned in great alarm and re-crossed it.
The wit which produces laughter cannot be analyzed without a mental process: but that is an after-thought and laughter anticipates it; as when Mark Twain, writing upon Franklin, says, "He was twins, having been born simultaneously in two houses in Boston." There is an unconscious organic assumption that both houses, since people insist upon both, must have been the spots of his birth. If so, the births in two houses must have been simultaneous, but the two Franklins not identical. Of course, then, they must have been twins. At least, this is the best that can be done with the historical material. But I am reminded of a famous wit, who, after viewing the Siamese Twins for a while, quietly remarked, "Brothers, I suppose."
If wit ever unmasks a moral feeling it performs its noblest function and imparts a complicated pleasure; as when Abraham Lincoln, in defending a fugitive slave before a court, said, "It is singular that the courts will hold that a man never loses his right to his property that has been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost the right to himself if he was stolen."
When wit creates a temporary congruity between an idea and an object which are essentially incongruous on all points, the shock dissolves in pleasure, because the oppressiveness of life results from its ideas; and yet one of them opens to us an escape from it. We find a way of eluding for a moment a task-master, and it makes us smile. It is not a moral revolt, for that would be a deepening of the seriousness till it became too pathetic; but it is a momentary beguilement, and we are cheated into the presumption that there is no care in the world. We return to the care refreshed by this electric bath of wit, which has a tonic quality and saves us from despair.
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