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

said:
"Yes, Marsh, it was at school. All boys had the habit of going to school
in those days, and they hadn't any more respect for the desks than they
had for the teachers. 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