[21] “S’il tient sa langue, il tient la clé qui de ses chaînes le délivre.”—Frederic Mistral, a poet friend of Daudet’s.

[22] Note.—Any good psychology is likely to help you understand the nature of emotion in general.

IV
HUMOROUS STORIES

The Ransom of Red Chief.—O. Henry

The Courting of T’Nowhead’s Bell.—J. M. Barrie

Sydney Smith uses this word [humor] to cover any thing that is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithet comic is quite indiscriminately applied. But we ought not to submit to this loose application; for there are plenty of other words to make proper distinctions for us amid our pleasurable moods, and permit us to reserve humor for something which is neither punning, wit, satire, nor comedy. Humor may avail itself of all these mental exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock company to set forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, for instance, represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows them without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material for laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is collared just in time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for a stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other; and they all pay penalties of a light kind which God exacts smilingly for the sake of keeping our disorders at a minimum. Comedy also finds a great deal of its charm in the unconsciousness of an infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each one is perfectly understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and vapor through an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently with advertisements of our price and quality.—John Weiss, Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare.

HUMOROUS STORIES

There are as many kinds of humorous stories as there are kinds of humor, ranging from gentle mirth, comedy, fun, and farce, to burlesque, ridicule, satire and irony. Some stories are typically humorous in their central situation, as Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”; others abound in a whole series of funny situations, as “The King of Boyville,” by William Allen White; others, again, are rich in the humorous sayings by the writer, rather than revealed in humorous plot, as in Artemus Ward’s sketch, “Horace Greeley’s Ride to Placerville”; still others put the humor into the speech of the characters, as in “The Phonograph and the Graft,” by O. Henry; while yet others exhibit two or more of the foregoing kinds, and are by turns gay, or whimsical, or satirical, as the characters and happenings may permit, mingling humor of plot with mirth of word and incident.

The two chief ingredients of humor—though for the most part it defies analysis—are surprise, and a feeling of incongruity. But these must be accompanied by no higher emotion. It would surprise us to meet the incongruous sight of a half-clad child struggling in the snow, but the vision would not be humorous—the higher emotion of pity would preclude that. But to see an arrogant fop stripped of his finery and floundering and spluttering in a snow drift into which he had been tossed, would be funny—to others.

Merely for a story to possess humor would not warrant our classing it as a humorous story, for humor is a sunny ray gleaming often through literature and life, but when the typical spirit and prevailing treatment of the story are humorous, it may properly be so entitled.