It appears to be the habit of every age to lament its own dearth of
humor, and in our own time we have not been exempt from the charge that
we have no humorists. It is my own candid opinion in respect to this
matter that we are confronted by a paradox in that we have so many
humorists that in effect we seem to have none; so much of humor that in
the very surfeit of it its brilliance does not appear; in short, that
because of the trees we cannot see the wood.
A period that has produced a Dooley, and an Ade, and an Irvin Cobb, and
a Bert Leston Taylor, is surely not poor in humorous possessions of a
scintillating character, whether we demand that our humor shall be a
product of pure fun or of profoundly serious thinking. J. Montgomery
Flagg in picture and in text is as much a master of effervescent foolery
as ever was either John Phoenix or Artemas Ward; and in the humor that
is designed to interpret life itself I find an endless store of it in
the works of Wallace Irwin, of Montague Glass, of Miss Edna Ferber, and
of Mrs. Alice Regan Rice; the last two, by the way, forming a complete
refutation of the preposterous notion that women are devoid of the
sentiment that cheers but does not inebriate. And as for the wits, if
Oliver Herford were as lonely among wits as he is unique, I should still
feel that we were rich beyond measure in that form of humor which is for
the most part intellectual, of the mind rather than of the emotions.
But even if the charge were true--which of course it is not--that we no
longer have any purveyors of humor of the first class upon whom we may
rely for a service as regular as is our supply of milk, butter, and
eggs, we could still lay the flattering unction to our souls that
American life is full of humor. If any one doubts the fact, let him
throw himself headlong into the Lyceum Seas and find out from personal
contact. To me it seems to crop up everywhere, and whether I travel
north, south, east, or west I find it in great abundance--humor
conscious, and humor unconscious; humor of the mind, and humor of the
heart, or pathos; humor of situation, and the humor involving a mere
play upon words; humor in all its infinitely varied qualities, and of a
character most appealing. Writing a short while ago of an alleged
similar condition in another field of letters, that of lyric poetry, I
permitted myself the following rather sentimental reflections:
No singers great are here to-day?
Perhaps! Let the indictment stand.
I hear no strong voice on the way,
No lilt from some immortal hand;
And yet as on the silver mere
I float, and towering hillsides scan,
Deep in my heart I seem to hear
Again the merry pipes of Pan.
No lyrics worthy of the name
Are sung to-day by living men?
Perhaps! Yet naught is there of shame
That we have not old Herrick's pen,
For as I wander 'neath these skies
As fairly blue as skies can be
And gaze into two special eyes,
All life a lyric is to me.
With equal truth and sincerity I could say much the same in respect to
humor, and indeed I might properly even go further. I could not perhaps
say that all Americans, or even many Americans, are lyrists; but I
should not fall far short of the mark were I to say that most Americans
are humorists. In my travels I come across occasional "nonconductors,"
as a clever woman of my acquaintance once called a certain social light
who was as impervious to wit as is the rhinoceros to the sting of a
gnat; but they are few and far between. For the most part I have found
natural born humorists on nearly every bush.
In a previous chapter I have confessed to some disappointment in the
quality of the humor of the negro as I have encountered it in Southern
climes; but there have been, nevertheless, delightful rifts in that
cloud. I recall an aged son of Ethiopia who called for me one wintry
morning at four o'clock to drive me from my hotel at Greenville, South
Carolina, to the railway station. He was a ragged old fellow, and with
his snowy, wool-covered head composed a study in black and white worthy
of the brush of any of our best limners of character. He was as
communicative as he was ragged, and confided to me at the very beginning
of our acquaintance that he had moved away from Charleston to become a
resident of Greenville because down in Charleston he couldn't eat
"pohk" (which I took to be pork) without having to take to his bed;
while in the more salubrious climate of Greenville he could "swaller a
whole ham at a settin', an' nebber hyear a woid from dat old ham
forebber after." His name, he told me, was "mos' gin'rally George"; but
he "warn't biggetty" about what people called him, since he was willin'
to come "ef dey on'y jes' whistled."
The early morning hours were cold and dreary, and I found my fur-lined
horse blanket, as I have come to call my faithful winter overcoat, none
too warm. Noting George's rather inadequate provision against the chill
winds, I advised him to wrap his dilapidated old lap-robe about his
shoulders.
"Ah'm all right, Boss," he replied. "Don't yo' worry erbout me. Dis yere
old obercoat o' mine ain't much to look at; but hit's on de job jes' de
same." He gave a most amusing chuckle. "Yo'd ought to hyear mah fambly
takin' on erbout dis yere old obercoat!" he said. "Dey's kind o' proudy
folks, an' dey don't like it. Dey says hit don't look neat; but Ah tell
'um Ah'm a gwine t' wear hit jes' de same, neat er no neat--_de
undahtakah, he mek yo' look neat_!"
From which I deduced that George was not only a humorist, but in a fair
way to qualify as a philosopher as well.
Two days later I happened to be at Atlanta, Georgia, over Lincoln's
Birthday, and it pleased me beyond measure to find printed on the first
page of one of the prominent daily newspapers of that beautiful city a
three-column cut of Abraham Lincoln, with a suitable tribute in verse
from one of America's leading syndicate poets. I had myself for reasons
of taste, and in order to give no offense to my kindly hosts throughout
the Southland, omitted from my discourse passing references to certain
great figures of the Civil War; but on seeing this very notable
recognition by his old-time adversaries of the great virtues of our
martyred President, I hesitated no longer in respect to these
references, and from that time on reverted to the original form of my
talk.
After eating my breakfast on this morning of the eleventh I dallied for
awhile in the office of the massive Georgian Terrace Hotel, smoking my
cigar, and glancing over the news in the paper. As I was about to toss
the paper aside a fine old type of your Southern gentleman seated
himself on the divan alongside of me, and in the usual courteous
fashion of the country gave me a morning salutation. I responded in
kind, and then tapping my paper observed:
"That is a fine picture of Lincoln."
"Yes, suh, a verruh fine picture, suh," he replied. "I never had the
honah of seein' Mistuh Lincoln, suh; but from all I hyear, suh, he must
have resembled that picture pretty close, suh."
"It is a delight to me to find it in one of your Southern newspapers,"
said I, "especially in one so influential in the South as this."
"Yes, suh," he answered. "It shows that the South is not slow to
recognize genius, suh, wherever it is found, suh. But," he added, "there
is no occasion for surprise, suh. We have always appreciated Mr.
Lincoln's greatness down hyear, and we have admiahed him, suh; _though
we have had reason to believe that durin' the late onpleasantness, suh,
he was consid'rable of a No'thern sympathizah, suh_."
Conspicuous in my memory for both his conscious wit and his unconscious
humor is a strapping negro I encountered at a junction down in Alabama
last winter. I was marooned there for five weary hours, receiving at
the hands of its natives as high a courtesy and as fearful food as I
have ever yet had presented to me. The colored porter at the hotel had a
face as black as the ace of spades, and as childlike and bland as it was
black. He seemed to take a tremendous interest in me, especially in my
fur overcoat, which he appeared to think must "ha cost as much as eight
dollahs," and he plied me with questions as we stood on the railway
platform waiting for my train into Birmingham for a full hour that
nearly drove me to despair. I have not space for that illuminating
interchange of ideas in all its verbal fullness; but part of it ran in
this wise:
"Whar yo' come from?"
"Maine," said I.
"Maine?" he repeated. "What's Maine?"
"Why, Maine--Maine is a State," said I. "And it's a nice one too," I
added.
"Oh, yaas," he said. "Hit's ober yander, ain't it?" he continued, with a
wave of his hand sweeping enough to take in the whole universe.
"Yes," said I, "away over yonder. It's down East."
"Got any children?" he queried.
"Yes," said I, "I've got two sons in Detroit, and--"
"Dee-troit, eh?" he interrupted. "Yaas, suh, Ah've heerd o' Dee-troit.
Dee-troit's a nice State too--a mighty nice State--a nice State to have
two sons at, Ah reckon. So yo' was born in Dee-troit, was yuh?"
"No," I replied, "I wasn't born at Detroit; I was born at Yonkers--"
"O-o-oh! So yo' was born at Yonkers, was yuh? Yaas, suh--Yonkers! Ah
don't know much erbout Yonkers; but Ah guess Yonkers is a nice State
too, ain't it?"
"Well," I laughed, "yes--Yonkers is a pretty nice State too--what you
might call a Comatose State; but--"
"Yaas, suh--Ah've heern tell dat Yonkers was one o' dem cummytoe States,
an' Ah guess dat's a pretty good kind ob a State to be bohn in. What yo'
sellin'?" This with a hasty glance at my suitcase.
"Brains," said I.
"Lawsy me! Sellin' brains, eh?" said he. "Waal, suh, Ah'm sorry. Yo'
look so kind o' set up Ah thought yo' was a-sellin' seegyars. Yaas,
suh--Ah'd hoped yo' was." He gazed wistfully along the shining rails.
"Dem seegyar drummahs is mighty free wid deir samples, suh," he
continued, "and Ah been a hopin' yo'd be able to spar' me a han'ful like
de res' ob 'em does. But ef yo're dealin' in brains, hit ain't _likely
yo' got enough to gib any away_."
I may add that his disappointment was short-lived; for before we parted
I took him across to the general store that fronted on the railroad
track, and by the judicious expenditure of a quarter bought him a supply
of his favorite brand large enough to last him a week. A single one of
them would have done for me forever.
Repartee has always been a characteristic gift of the American people,
due no doubt to a political system that turns almost every community
into a debating society at least once a year, and sometimes oftener.
Readiness of verbal retort has thereby become an inheritance that grows
richer in the squandering of it. It has been a quality so conspicuous
that it has led a great many people, justly or otherwise, to assert that
there are more really good jokes to be found in the course of a year in
the columns of the "Congressional Record" than in the cleverest of the
world's comic papers. However this may be, I know that one of the
zestful things about a lecturer's life is the jestful thing that lurks
at his side almost everywhere he turns.
I have had many proofs of this in my own wanderings; some direct, and
some at long range. An amusing instance of the long-range retort
occurred some years ago when I found in my mail one morning a letter
from a gentleman living in Wyoming, an entire stranger to me, who said
that he had heard from a friend that I wrote after-dinner speeches for
others as part of my professional work.
Somehow or other [he continued] I have managed to get a reputation
as a wit which I don't deserve; but I've got to live up to it, or
go under. Now it has occurred to me that since you are in the
business of writing after-dinner speeches for others you might turn
out three crackajacks for me.
[Illustration: "If yo're dealin' in brains, hit ain't likely yo' got
enough to gib any away."]
So, without beating about the bush any longer, I want to ask you
what you would charge me for three ripsnorters lasting about a half
an hour each, speaking at the rate of a hundred and fifty words a
minute, on the subjects of "Our Glorious Commonwealth," "The
Star-Spangled Banner," and "The Ladies." If your terms are not too
high, I shall be glad to give you the order.
I cannot say whether my sensations upon reading this delightful
communication were more of amazement or of amusement, but after due
deliberation I decided to answer the letter in a facetious spirit.
I have your esteemed favor of Thursday last [I wrote], and beg to
say that my regular charge for a single speech such as you require,
suitable for delivery before a mixed gathering of ladies and
gentlemen, has invariably been $1,000 in the past; but since your
proposition is more or less on a wholesale basis, and business is
slack, I will make an exception in your case and give you the
special terms of $750 per, F. O. B. I must insist, however, that
you regard these terms as strictly confidential; for it might
involve me in serious complications if Mr. Choate, and Gen. Horace
Porter, and Senator Blank were to learn that I was cutting rates.
They have been among my best customers for many years, and for
their own sakes, as well as for my own, I do not wish to lose their
trade.
This letter, which I felt tolerably sure would end the matter once and
for all, was mailed, and within a week brought me the following
telegraphic response:
_If you write Senator Blank's speeches, I don't want one from you
at any price._
It added not a little to the poignancy of this retort that the telegram
was sent "collect."
Another example of ready American facetiousness cheered a dull day for
me last year in Tennessee. I was booked to lecture before a charming
collegiate community at Blue Mountain, Mississippi, and to get there
from Memphis was required to make a railway connection at a curious
little town called Middleton. Middleton was an amazing concoction of
piccaninnies, waste paper, inactive whites, and germ suggestion. Mr.
Goldberg, the cartoonist, would probably have referred to it if he had
been along with me as the town that put the Junk in Junction, and upon
its dilapidated railway platform I was compelled to wait for six mortal
hours, hungry and thirsty, but fearing to assuage the one or quench the
other for fear of internal complications beyond the reach of medical
science. If I had never believed in the hookworm before, I became an
abject coward in the fear of it then.
Middleton's chief excuse for being appeared to be that it was the
terminus of a featherbed affair called the New Orleans, Mobile &
Chicago Railway, possibly in ironic reference to the fact that as far as
I could learn it did not touch any point within two hundred miles of any
one of those cities. I imagine that the mileage of the New Orleans,
Mobile & Chicago Railway, or at least that particular section of it, was
somewhere between thirty-seven and thirty-eight miles linear measure;
though in the matter of jolting, careening, sliding, skidding, and
galumphing along generally, its emotional mileage was incalculable, and
the effect of a ride from Middleton at one end to New Albany at the
other on the liver surpassed that of all the great transcontinental
systems rolled into one.
From what I could gather in casual conversation with such bureaus of
information as were available at Middleton its trains ran anywhere from
twenty-seven hours to a year and six months late. I will say on behalf
of its management, however, that after trying it once I concluded that
it was a miracle it ran at all. Three or four times in the course of my
waiting I decided to give up the quest of Blue Mountain altogether and
to return to Memphis; but hope has always sprung eternal in my breast,
and each resolution to quit the game was superseded by some kind of
optimistic spiritual reassurance that held me true to my obligations.
Ultimately my optimism was justified, and a panting little combination
of whirring wheels and iron rust wheezed into view, dragging a passenger
car of I should say the vintage of 1852, and a shamefully big and modern
freight car after it. A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Locomotives would have had everybody connected with the institution
indicted then and there, and I was again strongly inclined to give up my
effort to get through. It seemed the very height of inhumanity to ask
that poor little engine to carry my added weight. I should have much
preferred to lift it tenderly in my arms from the track, and put it into
the freight car, and pull the train to Blue Mountain myself; at any
rate, that seemed the most reasonable and the only really kind thing to
do at the moment.
Nevertheless I boarded the train, having first invested fifty cents in
twenty-fours' worth of postal card accident insurance at the ticket
office window and mailed it to my executors. In a couple of hours we
were sliding and bumping down grade through an oozy morass over tracks
ballasted with something having the consistency of oatmeal mush
liberally diluted with skim milk. We slid over the first half-mile in
about fifteen seconds, thanks to the weight of that shameless freight
car at the rear, which pushed the rest of us along at a terrific rate of
speed; but things were averaged up when we came to an upgrade, which, on
a rough estimate, I should say we accomplished at the rate of about a
mile a week. After awhile the conductor appeared--a nice, genial, kindly
soul, who inspired me with a confidence I had not yet managed to acquire
in the road itself. He was so smiling and serenely unaffected by what
loomed dark as dangers to me that I was soon feeling rather ashamed of
myself for being so full of coward fears, and it was not long before in
my mind I was singing those beautiful lines of Browning:
The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!
And as I was humming this comforting assurance to myself there broke
upon the silence of the car the following colloquy:
"Howdy, Sam!" this from a fellow traveler sprawled comfortably in the
seat just back of me.
[Illustration: "A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Locomotives
would have had them indicted then and there."]
"Howdy, Jim!" this from the smiling conductor.
"How long you been with this hyere road, Sam?" asked the fellow
traveler.
"Seven years last March, Jim," replied the conductor.
"_My Gord, Sam!_" cried the fellow traveler, sitting up. "_This must be
your second trip!_"
As for subtle humor of a rather sly sort, perhaps the best example I
know of was a little jest perpetrated at the expense of one to whom I
shall refer as my Only Muse, who, I rejoice to say, accompanies me upon
most of my trips. She was with me once in Iowa when we were stranded at
an interesting little railway crossing for several hours. The place
consisted wholly of some stock-yards, a general store, and a small
wooden cot which passed for a hotel, in which we found every comfort
that courtesy could provide, even if some of the rather material
necessities of life were lacking.
We took dinner at the hotel. Seated opposite us at table were two
farmers, one a handsome middle-aged man, and the other a man wizened and
gray, with a weather-beaten face, and a kindly eye; seventy years old, I
imagine, but still as active and as interested in life as a boy, as all
Iowans, irrespective of foolish years, seem to be. One or two little
courtesies of the table started an acquaintance, and naturally enough I
was asked my business in the State.
"Oh, I am out here lecturing," I said.
"Well, we're farmers," said the old man.
Now the Only Muse takes a great interest in farming. She raises herself
most of the vegetables we consume at home, and one of my ambitions has
always been to set her up as the presiding Deity over a real farm some
day when the lure of the platform no longer operates to drag me off into
distant scenes. She had taken a course of lectures on farming at
Columbia University, and was enthusiastically full of the subject at the
time. Wherefore it happened that when my vis-a-vis announced that he was
a farmer it was the best kind of opening for the conversational powers
of the Only Muse--which to say the least are generally adequate--and she
made the most of it. She talked of apples, corn, cows, and bees. She
dilated eloquently upon the value of persistent "cultivation," and as I
sat listening admiringly to her evidently masterful handling of her
varied subjects I suddenly became conscious of the old man's eye
twinkling across the table at me, and then, as the Only Muse paused to
catch her breath for further disquisition, he leaned forward, and with
seemingly innocent curiosity asked:
"_Which one o' ye does the lecturin'?_" I trust that the outburst of
merriment that greeted his query conveyed to his mind with perfect
clarity the fact that there are no professional jealousies in my
household.
At any rate this, with the wonderfully witty response of a distinguished
railway president to certain reflections I had made in an after-dinner
speech on his road, appeals to me as one of the most delicately subtle
bits of wit I have encountered anywhere in real life--which life on the
road undoubtedly is.
That the reader may judge for himself if the railway president was
wittier than the Iowa farmer or not, I will close this chapter with a
short narration of that incident.
The gentleman in question was Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore
& Ohio, who on an occasion in New York listened courteously to some
facetious observations I had to make on the subject of the wonders of
the B. & O., and two days later heaped coals of fire upon my head by
sending me by mail a pass over his railroad. I was of course delighted;
but before using it decided to read carefully the "conditions and
limitations named on the reverse side," under which it was issued. I
turned the treasure over and read the following:
This pass will be accepted for transportation WHEN ACCOMPANIED BY
CERTIFICATE of Company's Agent, attested by office-stamp, that the
bearer has presented evidence of being HOPELESSLY INDIGENT,
DESTITUTE, AND HOMELESS, or an INMATE OF A CHARITABLE OR
ELEEMOSYNARY INSTITUTION, a SOLDIER or SAILOR about to enter either
a NATIONAL HOME or "A HOUSE BOAT ON THE STYX," or otherwise
qualified as entitled to free transportation under Federal or State
Laws.
I do not remember whether or not I ever thanked Mr. Willard for this
courtesy; but if I did not I do so now, and beg to assure him that I
would not exchange that little document to-day for a controlling
interest in his road. I am not much of a business man, but I have a keen
sense of relative values.