The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I | Page 2

There was a rule in our school that any boy marring his desk, either with pencil or knife, would be chastised publicly before the whole school, or pay a fine of five dollars. Besides the rule, there was a ruler; I knew it because I had felt it; it was a darned hard one, too. One day I had to tell my father that I had broken the rule, and had to pay a fine or take a public whipping; and he said:
"'Sam, it would be too bad to have the name of Clemens disgraced before the whole school, so I'll pay the fine. But I don't want you to lose anything, so come upstairs.'
"I went upstairs with father, and he was for-giving me. I came downstairs with the feeling in one hand and the five dollars in the other, and decided that as I'd been punished once, and got used to it, I wouldn't mind taking the other licking at school. So I did, and I kept the five dollars. That was the first money I ever earned."
The humorous story as expounded by Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Robert J. Burdette, is purely American. Artemus Ward could get laughs out of nothing, by mixing the absurd and the unexpected, and then backing the combination with a solemn face and earnest manner. For instance, he was fond of such incongruous statements as: "I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head," here he would pause for some time, look reminiscent, and continue: "and yet he could beat a base-drum better than any man I ever knew."
Robert J. Burdette, who wrote columns of capital humor for The Burlington Hawkeye and told stories superbly, on his first visit to New York was spirited to a notable club, where he told stories leisurely until half the hearers ached with laughter, and the other half were threatened with apoplexy. Everyone present declared it the red-letter night of the club, and members who had missed it came around and demanded the stories at secondhand. Some efforts were made to oblige them, but without avail, for the tellers had twisted their recollections of the stories into jokes, and they didn't sound right, so a committee hunted the town for Burdette to help them out of their difficulty.
Humor is the kindliest method of laugh-making. Wit and satire are ancient, but humor, it has been claimed, belongs to modern times. A certain type of story, having a sudden and terse conclusion to a direct statement, has been labeled purely American. For instance: "Willie Jones loaded and fired a cannon yesterday. The funeral will be to-morrow." But the truth is, it is older than America; it is very venerable. If you will turn to the twelfth verse of the sixteenth chapter of II. Chronicles, you will read:
"And Asa in the thirty-ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great; yet in his disease he sought not the Lord, but turned to the physicians--and Asa slept with his fathers."
Bill Nye was a sturdy and persistent humorist of so good a sort that he never could help being humorous, yet there was never a sting in his jokes. Gentle raillery was the severest thing he ever attempted, and even this he did with so genial a smile and so merry an eye, that a word of his friendly chaffing was worth more than any amount of formal praise.
Few of the great world's great despatches contained so much wisdom in so few words as Nye's historic wire from Washington:
"My friends and money gave out at 3 A.M."
Eugene Field, the lover of little children, and the self-confessed bibliomaniac, gives us still another sort of laugh--the tender, indulgent sort. Nothing could be finer than the gentle reminiscence of "Long Ago," a picture of the lost kingdom of boyhood, which for all its lightness holds a pathos that clutches one in the throat.
And yet this writer of delicate and subtle humor, this master of tender verse, had a keen and nimble wit. An ambitious poet once sent him a poem to read entitled "Why do I live?" and Field immediately wrote back: "Because you sent your poem by mail."
Laughter is one of the best medicines in the world, and though some people would make you force it down with a spoon, there is no doubt that it is a splendid tonic and awakens the appetite for happiness.
Colonel Ingersoll wrote on his photograph which adorns my home: "To the man who knows that mirth is medicine and laughter lengthens life."
Abraham Lincoln, that divinely tender man, believed that fun was an intellectual impetus, for he read Artemus Ward to his Cabinet before reading his famous emancipation proclamation, and laying down his book marked the