It is impossible to go anywhere in American society, no matter how high nor how serious the subject under consideration may be, without encountering, generally to the hearer’s benefit, the American spirit of humor. Congress may be in session and the country almost convulsed by some grave discussion which is going on, nevertheless on the floor of the House and far more in the committee-rooms and in the lobby one is sure to hear the strongest arguments advanced in humorous form. They are called jokes, but some new word should be coined to give them the dignity which their usefulness has enabled them to attain.
The most serious man in appearance in the United States, excepting none of the early Puritan divines, was probably the late President Lincoln. His visage was not only earnest and solemn but positively mournful whenever it was in repose. He was a debater of high order, he was a logician whom men who had held him in contempt for his homely ways and awkward manner learned to respect as soon as they crossed verbal swords with him, but Lincoln’s strongest argument was always a joke. He said and wrote many things which were grand in their day, but which seemed to have been entombed in printed pages and diplomatic papers, for one seldom hears them quoted now-a-days; yet his jokes still live. They are perennial, not merely those which were attributed to him, but those which he really made. “To clinch a point,” which was one of his own favorite expressions, he tried the patience of his Cabinet severely at times by persisting in joking upon serious subjects—matters of great moment at the time; and it is said upon good authority that once he opened the Cabinet meeting called specially with the hope of averting great disaster to the Union cause by reading the last printed letter of “Petroleum V. Nasby on the Democratic doings at Confederit X Roads, State ov Kentucky.” Before the meeting was over, however, Mr. Lincoln read his Emancipation Proclamation. While Mr. Seward, as able and adroit a man as ever held the portfolio of Secretary of State, would be wondering how to reply to an annoying committee or deputation which had come from some one of the Northern States to instruct the Government how to carry on the war, Mr. Lincoln was quietly constructing a little joke or recalling one from his past experiences which would be appropriate to the occasion, and after the joke was inflicted upon the committee Mr. Seward was sure to find that his own carefully prepared speech was entirely unnecessary.
But it is not only in political circles that humor has been made to serve the cause of good government, good morals and the highest degree of righteousness in the United States. The members of the Supreme Court of the United States are all practical jokers; that is, they all are fond of avoiding a long-winded argument by telling a story illustrative of the question at issue. Ministers do the same. A meeting of clergymen of any denomination is likely to result in some very sharp discussion which closely approaches to ill temper, but in such cases some one may always be depended upon to get up and tell a humorous story which gives point to the proceedings, and also gives them a new direction and acts like oil upon the troubled waters. Humor is tolerated even in the pulpit. The late Henry Ward Beecher frequently made his congregation laugh on Sunday, and some of the newspapers criticised him severely for it, but he seldom lost a parishioner on that account, and thousands of people—who never otherwise would have heard him—were brought under his spiritual influence by appreciation of a faculty that drew them into closer sympathy with him as a man. A preacher of a very different stamp, the Rev. Sam Jones, of Georgia, never hesitates to tell funny stories, always illustrative of his subject, while delivering his talks, and Sam addresses larger congregations than any other American preacher of the present time.
Humor makes its way everywhere in the United States. Newspapers are full of it, and the most high-toned and serious of them find it necessary to supply their readers with jokes. A New Yorker recently held a neighbor to account for reading habitually a very serious and almost bilious daily newspaper. “I don’t read it much,” said he, “but I buy it because its funny column contains a better assortment of jokes than any other paper in the city.” The principal editorial writer of a large New York daily paper, a paper of wide circulation and great influence, once complained to the managing editor that all the point of a leading article to which he had devoted two days of thought had been expressed in the paragraph column by a joke one line long.
The public meeting is the truest, the fairest expression of American opinion in any given locality, but in the public meeting it is always the humorist who sways the audience and carries the day. He may be one of the stated speakers, a man of great wisdom and force, for wisdom and wit are closely allied in the American nature, however the celebrated couplet of the late Alexander Pope about “great wit and madness” may seem to indicate the contrary. In the great political discussions, now historic, which once were conducted by Abraham Lincoln and Senator Douglas, when both were comparatively young men, and the Democratic champion got his adversary into a corner, as occasionally he did, Lincoln always got out of his predicament with a joke—never with an argument—and the audience never failed to see the point. This shows the universality of the American sense of humor. In any other country of the world the peasantry, who are the nearest possible parallel to the farmers of America, are stupid and dull of comprehension, but an American crowd, no matter how far away from the centres of civilization, nor how solemn, and serious, and weary, and dull of comprehension their faces may seem, can always be depended upon to take the point of a joke. They are equally quick to resent an attempt at humor which is not correctly and sharply pointed. They are all humorists themselves. Get a seat on the wagon of a farmer driving along a country road and engage the man in conversation, and you will hear more sharp, pithy, humorous sayings than you are apt to get from any professed wit in polite society. Let the man meet a brother farmer coming from the opposite direction, and, although the conversation will naturally turn on the crops, and the taxes, and local government, and family or individual misfortunes, the conversation is sure to be spiced with humor. In other countries it seems to require a jolly fellow, a man of high spirits, to say funny things; but here, if you chance not to expect the man of solemn visage, the man bowed down with care, to break out humorously, you are sure to be agreeably disappointed.
Even in stated religious meetings this quality of the American nature frequently displays itself unexpectedly, but always with effect. As solemn and religious gathering as can be seen in the United States is the camp-meeting in the far West, where people come from many miles around to listen to the only form of religious service which they have the privilege of attending. The sermons and prayers are intensely earnest. The speakers have an immense sense of responsibility of the duties incumbent upon them, but in sermon, and even sometimes in prayer, expressions break forth which show that in no circumstances can the native American be free from the domination of his sense of humor. The most powerful individual influence that ever existed in the Western camp-meetings, according to historians sacred and profane, was a man named Peter Cartright, a Methodist preacher. He would move audiences to tears and sometimes to groans by the eloquence and earnestness of his preaching, yet suddenly, at the most unexpected times, he would say things that would put his entire congregation into paroxysms of laughter. The purpose of the meeting never was disturbed by these discursive efforts. They were as much to the point as the most earnest statements and exhortations which he had previously made, and were entirely in keeping with the general intentions of the service.
Passing from conversation to printed utterances, it may be safely said that the humorous writings of Americans have been more read than any other literature which has appeared from our press. We have many able editors in the United States, but those most read are those who say the funniest things. There never was a more influential editor in the United States than the late George D. Prentice, who for a long time managed the newspaper which now is the Louisville Courier-Journal. Prentice was a Whig, but probably half of his readers were Democrats. They didn’t like his politics, but they couldn’t get along without his fun. His paper was published in a Southern State, a slave State, but more than half of its circulation was in the free States of the North. While Prentice lived there was scarcely a post-office in the Mississippi or Ohio Valley which did not receive copies of it by mail. Its influence extended as far North as Chicago and the North-western States, and the local paper which didn’t repeat his humorous bits was likely to be informed by its readers that there must be a reform in that direction. For many years the most popular portion of the very good editorial page of one of the most prominent daily papers of New York was its humorous editorial. The topics of the writer were seldom those of the great interests of the day, yet people read it, turned to it the first thing, talked about it to their friends, compelled them to read it, and felt lost when the writer of those articles was transferred to a different field of labor.
We have some popular poets in the United States, but it is doubtful whether the works of any of them have been as much read as Mr. Lowell’s “Bigelow Papers.” Mr. Lowell is no mean poet himself; there are critics who insist that he has not an equal among American versifiers, but the humorous verses just alluded to have made him better known than all of his more serious efforts, and it is believed by intelligent men of all parties that it had immense effect in bringing about the political changes which immediately preceded the late civil war.
During the civil war there were many editors who used to say, with some evidence of annoyance, that they wished they could be read as much as Nasby. Nasby was an Ohio editor who invented a scene and some characters in the South, and wrote about them so persistently and with such a realistic air that his effusions were copied regularly in almost all of the Republican papers of the land. Another man who was more read than any editor of the day was Artemas Ward. He did not go into politics to any great extent, but what he did say was so accurately satirical that nearly everybody read it and was the wiser for it. The mistakes of our generals, the blunders of our government and the crimes of many of our contractors were the subject of a great deal of vigorous editorial writing, but no one succeeded in bringing them so forcibly to the attention of the public as a wit who wrote under the nom de plume of Orpheus C. Kerr. During the same period there were facts in the local history of New York extremely uncomplimentary to one great political party, and the opposing party lost no opportunity to disclose them and criticise them in editorial columns and news columns, but one man was more read than all others combined. It was the man who wrote the satire entitled “The New Gospel of Peace,” in which the doings of the alleged Peace Party were set forth in humorous style.
At the present time the men whose writings are most read are not the historians, editors, essayists, or even novelists. They are the humorists. Bill Nye is more read than any novelist in the United States. So is James Whitcomb Riley. In Chicago there are a number of able journalists, but the one most quoted by name not only in his own city but throughout the Union is Eugene Field, whose humor finds no subject too great or too small to dwell upon. A little while ago an edition de luxe of his humorous prose and verse was published at a very high price, and some of the later would-be subscribers found to their disgust that the list was full and no more books could be supplied. Is there any poet or novelist in the United States who has had a commercial experience like this?