Mark Twain says there are only seven original jokes in existence and he ought to know, yet out of them has come an output that is incomparable, in proportion, except to the evolution of the entire English language, by varying the changes on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.
The demand for laugh-making gives employment to many who might otherwise be in far worse business. These men are the founts of inspiration for the newspapers and the stage. The press and the footlights are ever clamoring for new fun and numberless are the attempts to supply the demand and incidentally utilize it in the form of cold cash. This stimulus has produced the humorist pure and simple, the paragrapher, the comic versifier, the compounder of burlesque and the maker of witty dialogue to spice the works of serious playwrights. There is also the humorous artist; when there isn’t, there can always be found half a dozen tipsters who can’t draw a line unless they have a yardstick to help them but who have enough funny concepts on tap (and for sale) to make fame and money for all the artists in the land.
The clever impromptu you hear in a vaudeville sketch, the delicious eight line dialogue you chuckle over in the morning paper, the flashing contest of wit you enjoy in a society drama often represent the labor, not of one but of a half dozen intellects trained to the elaboration of humorous conceits.
If all the humor which appears daily in print and on the stage could be clipped and put into scrap-books, it would fill forty large volumes in a year, yet nine-tenths of it—yes nine hundred and ninety-nine one thousandth would consist of variations of old facts, personalities, situations and plays upon words.
“The latest jeux d’esprit of Chinatown.”
Besides all these clever fellows and their works, there are specialists in many other lines. Even a language serious enough in itself, may be so twisted as to make people laugh, especially if the twist can be nicknamed “dialect”; so we have the purveyor of German humor (so called) the manufacturer of Irish “bulls,” the sedlac of French jokes, the broker in Italian bon-mots, and a few days ago I heard of a cosmopolitan individual with a high sounding Celt-Iberian name, who offered to supply a prominent comedian with the latest humor of Portugal and Brazil. I don’t doubt that before long some enterprising Mongolian will be trotting around among vaudeville managers with a stock of the latest jeux d’esprit of Chinatown, Canton, and Hong-kong, or that some one will put them in good enough shape to make people laugh. Good luck to them, for after all, the laugh is the thing. No one joke will be equally amusing to everybody, for each person has his own ideas of fun. For instance on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the country, a lot of good healthy minded folks will munch red winter apples and gather round the piano and sing “Happy Day,” and other Sunday-school songs, and look as full of fun as any comedian’s audience. And the grab-bag at the church fair! Around it there is more fun visible in human faces, than some great men get out of the cleverest jokes ever cracked. There is no end to fun, no more than there is to the melodies that keep rising, like birds from the eight keyed home of song, that octave that reaches from “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” to “Tannhäuser.”
And there is no need of it all, for “mirth is medicine and laughter lengthens life.” That is what my good friend Colonel Robert Ingersoll wrote under his picture which adorns my wall. The Colonel was one of us entertainers, though not professionally. Our merry champion he! The spirit of his tender epigram seems to haunt the dim twilight ways of men, looking with cheery solicitude for those who are weary, to take them by the hand and tell them tales full of dawn and breaking day, and rush of rosy life in rising sun. It stands on the side of light and love along the paths where flowers bloom and birds are glad in song. And it is needed, for from the start, there has been a fight between merriment and misery and the latter has its stout advocates. The gloomster and the jester have ever been sparring for paints and sometimes the jester has gone down under swinging right-handers; then, something that its enemies call Puritanism, probably because it hates all purity not of its own peculiar brand, has clapped its hands, all smeared with brimstone, until you could see the blue flames of the place that Ingersoll said didn’t exist.