Jokes For All Occasions | Page 6

it was an Irishman who, on being overtaken by a storm, remarked to his friend: "Sure, we'll get under a tree, and whin it's wet through, faith, we'll get under another."
Naturally, we Americans have our own bulls a plenty, and they are by no means all derived from our Irish stock. Yet, that same Irish stock contributes largely and very snappily to our fund of humor. For the matter of that, the composite character of our population multiplies the varying phases of our fun. We draw for laughter on all the almost countless racial elements that form our citizenry. And the whole content of our wit and humor is made vital by the spirit of youth. The newness of our land and nation gives zest to the pursuit of mirth. We ape the old, but fashion its semblance to suit our livelier fancy. We moralize in our jesting like the Turk, but are likely to veil the maxim under the motley of a Yiddish dialect. Our humor may be as meditative as the German at its best, but with a grotesque flavoring all our own. Thus, the widow, in plaintive reminiscence concerning the dear departed, said musingly:
"If John hadn't blowed into the muzzle of his gun, I guess he'd 'a' got plenty of squirrels. It was such a good day for them!"
And in the moralizing vein, this:
The little girl had been very naughty. She was bidden by her mother to make an addition to the accustomed bedtime prayer--a request that God would make her a better girl. So, the dear child prayed: "And, O God, please make Nellie a good little girl." And then, with pious resignation, she added:
"Nevertheless, O God, Thy will, not mine, be done."
At times, we are as cynical as the French. So of the husband, who confessed that at first after his marriage he doted on his bride to such an extent that he wanted to eat her--later, he was sorry that he hadn't.
Our sophistication is such that this sort of thing amuses us, and, it is produced only too abundantly. Luckily, in contrast to it, we have no lack of that harmless jesting which is more typically English. For example, the kindly old lady in the elevator questioned the attendant brightly:
"Don't you get awful tired, sonny?"
"Yes, mum," the boy in uniform admitted.
"What makes you so tired, sonny? Is it the going up?'
"No, mum."
"Is it the going down?"
"No, mum."
"Then what is it makes you so tired, sonny?"
"It's the questions, mum."
And this of the little boy, who was asked by his mother as to what he would like to give his cousin for a birthday present.
"I know," was the reply, "but I ain't big enough."
Many of our humorists have maintained a constant geniality in their humor, even in the treatment of distressing themes. For example, Josh Billings made the announcement that one hornet, if it was feeling well, could break up a whole camp meeting. Bill Nye, Artemas Ward and many another American writer have given in profusion of amiable sillinesses to make the nation laugh. It was one of these that told how a drafted man sought exemption because he was a negro, a minister, over age, a British subject, and an habitual drunkard.
The most distinctive flavor in American humor is that of the grotesque. It is characteristic in Mark Twain's best work, and it is characteristic of most of those others who have won fame as purveyors of laughter. The American tourist brags of his own:
"Talk of Vesuve--huh! Niag'll put her out in three minutes." That polished writer, Irving, did not hesitate to declare that Uncle Sam believed the earth tipped when he went West. In the archives of our government is a state paper wherein President Lincoln referred to Mississippi gunboats with draught so light that they would float wherever the ground was a little damp. Typically American in its grotesquerie was the assertion of a rural humorist who asserted that the hogs thereabout were so thin they had to have a knot tied in their tails to prevent them from crawling through the chinks in the fence.
Ward displayed the like quality amusingly in his remark to the conductor of a tediously slow-moving accommodation train in the South. From his seat in the solitary passenger coach behind the long line of freight cars, he addressed the official with great seriousness:
"I ask you, conductor, why don't you take the cow-catcher off the engine and put it behind the car here? As it is now, there ain't a thing to hinder a cow from strolling into a car and biting a passenger."
Similar extravagance appears in another story of a crawling train. The conductor demanded a ticket from a baldheaded old man whose face was mostly hidden in a great mass of white whiskers.
"I give it to