Thus, to begin at the lowest degree of this subject, the simply ludicrous has its origin in the surprise caused by something which interrupts or modifies an ordinary procedure: the latter is thus joined for a moment to an idea not belonging to it. Why do we laugh when a person tumbles upstairs? or when some respectable female struggles with an umbrella which has shamelessly turned its bare ribs upon her and sails jauntily with her down the street, or flounders in the gutter, an inebriated wreck of usefulness? Because an erect position is the normal one for man, and a protecting umbrella the helpmeet for woman. If it were not so, we should laugh to see the most revered person succeed in controlling her gingham dome, and stemming the tide as easily as the whale which furnished it with bones. There is nothing essentially ludicrous in seeing a man chase an animal: on the contrary, if you are trying to head off your favorite pig and persuade it to taste again your bounty, it is one of the saddest spectacles in existence. But when a man is in full hue and cry after his own hat we laugh, because a hat is inseparable from a head in idea, but becomes separated in fact. A hatter's shop is full of the larvæ of this idea, but they would never hatch there into hats. The conjunction of a head to each is needed to make a perfect notion of a hat.
If we could be sure of preserving our own scalps, we should like to have been near enough to watch the expression of the first Indian who ever killed a man wearing a wig. For the wig is a sudden violation of the logic of scalping, and the astonished Indian would have raised a laugh as he raised the artificial hair.
General Sherman's body-servant was a German who went with him through the war, but could never realize the idea that the war at last was over. One day the General, having travelled from the South to Chicago, was on the point of leaving, and ordered this man to pack a valise. The one he selected was so enormous that the General remonstrated, and examined what could be within. It was filled with hotel towels that had been looted from Atlanta clear through, in company with table-spoons of the Milledgeville Hotel; the German plundering on every route as if we were still marching through Georgia. This incongruous behavior has all the effect of a ludicrous incident.
Whatever accidental infirmity deposits us in positions incongruous with our ordinary state generates a ludicrous impression. When the obese lover, encased in corsets and tightly-strapped pantaloons, fell plump upon his knees before a lady to make his declaration, she was embarrassed, and besought him to arise; but he, fast anchored in the stiffest of costumes, whimpered out, "I can't, madam," and she had to ring for a servant. That is simply ludicrous. But suppose I should say that his suit had been rejected,—it would be an execrable remark, but still would modify the ludicrous impression, and raise it into a higher region of the pleasurable by making the first step of a pun towards the peculiar element of wit.
If a pun is good, the pleasure is sometimes purely mental and scarcely gets beyond a smile; for it constrains two different ideas into an accidental relation with one word, and the clever feat surprises us. We are not looking for it, as our life is plain-spoken, does not twist its intention nor its language, and passes for what it is. A friend, really wanting to know if Foote the comedian had ever been in Cork, in good faith asked him. "No," said he; "but I have seen a good many drawings of it." So the new conundrum finds us unprepared: "Which goes the quicker,—a full minute or a spare moment?" That pleases the mind, but it does not make us laugh as when Abraham Lincoln, in his attack of small-pox, said, "Now I am willing to see the office-seekers, for at last I have something I can give 'em all." We laugh because the play upon the word "give" betrays and yet relieves the moral annoyance of that class of beggars.
Punning can enhance its quality by lurking in the quotation of well-known and esteemed lines; as when a man who is importuned to subscribe to something, on the score of the virtue there is in giving, should quote the tender George Herbert,—
"Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives."
In this way Mr. Thackeray made one of his best puns. Some one was talking to him of a man of talent, who was prodigiously addicted to beer; saying what a pity it was, for they hardly knew his equal. "Yes," said Thackeray, "take him for half-and-half, we ne'er shall look upon his like again."
So Douglas Jerrold, referring in one of his plays to the English habit of scrawling names and lines with diamonds upon window-panes, makes one of his characters say: "One man goes to foolscap, another to a pane of glass. They may be very different people; but, well considered, I doubt if the motive hasn't the same source." "At least, the same effect," is the reply; "for, as my friend Laman Blanchard sings,—