Ring W. Lardner
HUMOUR
With the aid of a competent bibliographer for about five days I believe I could supply the proof to any unreflecting person in need of it that there is no such thing as an American gift of humorous expression, that the sense of humour does not exist among our upper classes, especially our upper literary class, that in many respects almost every other civilized country in the world has more of it, that quiet New England humour is exceedingly loud and does not belong to New England, that British incomprehension of our jokes is as a rule commendable, the sense of humour generally beginning where our jokes leave off. And while you can prove anything about a race or about all races with the aid of a bibliographer for five days, as contemporary sociologists are now showing, I believe these things are true. Belief in American humour is a superstition that seldom outlasts youth in persons who have been exposed to American practice, and hardly ever if they know anything of the practice elsewhere. Of course I am not speaking of the sad formalism of the usual thing as we see it in newspapers and on movie screens or of the ritual of magazines wholly or in part sanctified to our solemn god of fun. I mean the best of it.
In the books and passages collated by my bibliographer the American gift of humour would be distributed over areas of time so vast and among peoples so numerous, remote, or savage, that no American would have the heart to press his claim. The quaintness, dryness, ultra-solemnity with or without the wink, exaggeration, surprise, contrast, assumption of common misunderstanding, hyperbolical innocence, quiet chuckle, upsetting of dignity, éclat of spontaneity with appeals to the everlasting, dislocation of elegance or familiarity, imperturbability, and twinkle—whatever the qualities may be as enumerated by the bacteriologists who alone have ever written on the subject, the most American of them would be shown in my bibliographer’s report to be to a far greater degree un-American. Patriotic exultation in their ownership is like patriotic exultation in the possession of the parts of speech. Humour is no more altered by local reference than grammar is altered by being spoken through the nose. And if the bibliography is an ideal one it will not only present American humour at all times and places but will produce almost verbatim long passages of American humorous text dated at any time and place, and will show how by a few simple changes in local terms they may be made wholly verbatim and American. It will show that American humorous writing did in fact begin everywhere but only at certain periods was permitted to continue and that these periods were by no means the happiest in history. I have time to mention here only the laborious section that it will probably devote to Mark Twain in the Age of Pericles, though for the more active reader the one on Mr. Cobb, Mr. Butler, and others around the walls of Troy might be of greater contemporary interest.
Mark Twain, according to the citations in this section, would seem actually to have begun all of his longer stories, including “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” and most of the shorter ones, essays, and other papers, at Athens or thereabouts during this period, but not to have finished a single one, not even the briefest of them. He started, gave a clear hint as to how the thing would naturally run, and then he stopped. The reason for this was that owing to the trained imagination of the people for whom he wrote, the beginning and the hint were sufficient, and from that point on they could amuse themselves along the line that Mark Twain indicated better than he would have amused them, had he continued. Mark Twain finally saw this and that is why he stopped, realizing that there was no need of his keeping the ball rolling when to their imaginative intelligence the ball would roll of itself. He did at first try to keep on, and being lively and observant and voluble even for a Greek he held large crowds on street-corners by the sheer repetition of a single gesture of the mind throughout long narratives of varied circumstance. In good society this was not tolerated even after supper, and there was never the slightest chance of publication. But the streets of Athens were full of the suppressed writings of Mark Twain.
Every man of taste in Athens loved Mark Twain for the first push of his fancy but none could endure the unmitigated constancy of his pushing of it, and as Mark Twain went everywhere and was most persistent, the compression of his narrative flow within the limits of the good breeding of the period was an embarrassing problem to hosts, unwilling to be downright rude to him. Finally he was snubbed in public by his friends and a few of the more intimate explained to him afterwards the reason why.
The gist of their explanation was evidently this: The hypothesis of the best society in town nowadays is that the prolongation of a single posture of the mind is intolerable, no matter how variegated the substance in which the mind reposes. That sort of thing belongs to an earlier day than ours, although, as you have found, it is still much relished in the streets. If all the slaves were writers; if readers bred like rabbits so that the pleasing of them assured great wealth; if the banausic element in our life should absorb all the rest of it and if, lost in the external labour process, with the mechanism of it running in our minds, we turned only a sleepy eye to pleasure; then we might need the single thought strung with adventures, passions, incidents and need only that—infinitudes of detail easily guessed but inexorably recounted; long lists of sentiments with human countenances doing this and that; physiological acts in millions of pages and unchanging phrase; volumes of imaginary events without a thought among them; invented public documents equalling the real; enormous anecdotes; and all in a strange reiterated gesture, caught from machines, disposing the mind to nod itself to sleep repeating the names of what it saw while awake. But the bedside writer for the men in bed is not desired at the present moment in our best society.
All these things are now carried in ellipsis to the reader’s head, if the reader’s head desires them; they are implied in dots at ends of sentences. We guess long narratives merely from a comma; we do not write them out. In this space left free by us with deliberate aposiopesis, a literature of countless simplicities may some day arise. At present we do not feel the need of it. And in respect to humour the rule of the present day is this: never do for another what he can do for himself. A simple process of the fancy as in contrast, incongruity, exaggeration, impossibility, must be confined in public to one or two displays. Let us take the simplest of illustrations—a cow in the dining-room, for example—and proceed with it as simply as we can. If by a happy stroke of fancy a cow in the dining-room is made pleasing to the mind, never argue that the pleasure is doubled by the successive portrayal of two cows in two dining-rooms, assuming that the stroke of fancy remains the same. Realize rather that it diminishes, and that with the presentation of nine cows in nine dining-rooms it has changed to pain. Now if for cows in dining-rooms be substituted gods in tailor shops, tailors in the houses of gods, cobblers at king’s courts, Thebans before masterpieces, one class against another, one age against another, and so on through incalculable details, however bizarre, all in simple combination, all easily gathered, without a shift of thought or wider imagery, the fancy mechanistically placing the objects side by side, picked from the world as from a catalogue—even then the situation to our present thinking is not improved.
“Distiktos,” said they, playfully turning the name of the humourist into the argot of the street, “we find you charming just at the turn of the tide, but when the flood comes in, ne Dia! you are certainly de trop. And in your own private interest, Distiktos, unless you really want to lead a life totally anexetastic and forlorn, how can you go on in that manner?”
Frank Moore Colby