Another practise is that of keeping a commonplace book, and transcribing into it what is striking and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or subdivision. This is an excellent practise for concentrating your thought on the passage, and making you alive to its real point and significance.
ARE WE SURFEITED WITH WIT AND HUMOR?
Jerome K. Jerome Says that the American
Sense of Humor Has Been Overfed
by Brilliant Humorists.
More great humorists have arisen in the United States during the last seventy-five years than in any other country. Among the professionals are, or have been, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain, and George Ade. Who of these have been and who still are there is no need of saying. But certainly the constellation is brilliant with these names alone, though the lesser stars have been many.
Have we had too much humor? Are we sated? Jerome K. Jerome, after several months of personal observation, answers yes. Near the end of his recent tour of the country he said:
It seems to me that the American people have been surfeited with humor. So many brilliant men have written their jokes for so long that they have become jaded. I thought at first that the American sense of humor was radically less subtle than ours in England, but now I know better. It is simply overfed.
Mark Twain is, I think, the only living humorist of the old American school, and he, like Falstaff, is growing old. But the subtle touch that England likes still and America liked once is still his. You laugh with him now, I think, more from a sense of duty than a sense of the ridiculous. You have grown tired and need coarser fare to stimulate your appetite. And I've discovered the cause of it, too. It is the comic supplement of the Sunday papers.
The New York World takes exception to Mr. Jerome's remarks, and answers him as follows:
In the name of Punch and the Prophet, figs! The history of American humor is a chronicle of development to a present pitch of refinement and subtlety with which the work of the earlier humorists suffers by comparison. It is the history of the evolution of the pun into the witticism.
Could Petroleum V. Nasby get a hearing to-day? Or the Danbury News Man, or "Peck's Bad Boy"? Would not a Burdette writing for the more exacting twentieth-century perception find his occupation gone? Even an Artemus Ward and a Josh Billings appealing to latter-day readers would perceive the essential need of a purification and refinement of method if they were to hold their audience under anything like the old spell.