I have not gone out of my way to search for these excerpts in the cheaper class of American comic publication. Nor have I been at special pains to search for blemishes through the files of the ten cent “high class journal” which is laid under contribution. In point of fact, I find them in the first number of that journal which came to my hands, namely, its latest issue obtainable in London. How really foolish and vulgar these samples are! The first set of verses is about being sick; the second set is slangy, ill-expressed and contains a childish mistake in grammar; the first piece of prose is objectionable because of its reference to “a ten-pound tumor,” and the second piece is sheer banality, meaning nothing that is worth a smile.
The plain fact is that humour in America is the humour of fatty degeneration of the intellect. America’s funny man was at one time a fairly clean, healthy creature, with a droll outlook on the facts of life. That he was a trifle over-devoted to rye whiskey and effusive practical jokes, and had a tendency to rank irreverence, were among the defects of his qualities. The great American people speedily learnt to vote him slow, and into his shoes they hurried the hard-faced, terrier-toothed, cigarette-smoking, anæmic, fleering decadent. And at long and last they have set up for their humourous god the sheer hoodlum or larrikin, whose sense of what is comic is even more degraded than that of a Chinaman, and whose view of morality is the view of a naughty parrot. There can be no possible hope for a country whose risible faculties are exercised only at squalid moments or excited only by squalid writing.
No matter how wealthy and hard-headed your man, and no matter how beautiful or accomplished your woman, they are spiritually and morally topsy-turvy if they laugh at the wrong things, and I maintain that the twentieth-century American is consistently laughing at the wrong things, and quite incapable of appreciating the right and proper humour even when you have explained it to him. The Scotch cannot see a joke, the Americans can see only bad jokes.
Nearly all the vilest and most offensive jokes that creep into the third-rate English comics are of American origin. The Weary Willie and Tired Tim business is purely American, so are the Buster Brown and grinning Pup futilities, so are the idiotcies associated with the patronymic Newlywed; so are the disgusting buffooneries about whiskers. The English have learnt that American canned meat is a dubious viand. The sooner they learn that the current American humour is even more noxious the better it will be for the English.
CHAPTER IV
The American Woman
The abounding gentleman from Idaho, or Cincinnati, or Nahant, will tell you that the American woman is a dream of beauty and goodness. If I am to credit the American he would not take eighty thousand dollars for her—no, sir! At least, he doesn’t calculate that he would. The American woman, sir, is a peach. The American man believes in her down to the soles of his store boots, and has been educated to regard her as a being of angelic antecedents and destiny. Far be it from a simple scribbler to pluck from her, unless it were by way of a memento, one single angel feather. But at time and time I have seen a considerable deal of her, and I shall venture to put her down here as she seems to me, who am no judge and do not matter anyway.
In the first place I shall assert, though it were at the risk of my life, that the American woman is not always beautiful, and that even the beautiful American woman is not always beautiful. I shall go further and say that for one beautiful woman per thousand head of the population in America we can produce at least three in England and four or five in Ireland. Furthermore, the English or the Irish beauty will last you three times as long as the American variety, and in point of fact it seldom really wanes, whereas, in America, feminine beauty nearly always passes, and passes quickly.
It should be clearly understood—and I say it with my hand on my heart—that this is not the fault of the American woman, with whom I have no quarrel, and upon whom I desire to pass no aspersion. The vulgar commentators on the American woman’s physical blemishes and shortcomings have assured us that they are the direct result of her diet, which is said to consist of pea-nuts, griddle cakes, oysters, pie, turkey, stewed terrapin, tinned mushrooms, fat ham, cheese, chocolates, and ice cream. As is usually the case, however, the vulgar commentators are entirely wrong. The real enemy of the American woman’s beauty is the American climate. In the process of time it is climate that makes and mars everything. It is climate that has made the African black and the European white. It is climate that is rapidly transforming the American man into a sort of ignoble red man or Kickapoo Indian, and it is climate that may eventually make the American woman resemble a squaw. The American climate produced the American Indian. The American climate is modifying the physique of the American man and marring and obliterating the great and undeniable beauty of the American woman.