This Subject is best reached from the point of reflecting that, of all
the animals, man alone appears to be capable of laughter. If, as so
many naturalists now claim, man has ascended by successive evolutions
of varieties from a lower animal type, we ought to be able to find
some germs of the laughing propensity among our ancestors. The first
witness we summon on this question is the anatomist, because the
physical expression that accompanies an act of laughter depends upon
the connection of the respiratory nerves with the diaphragm below
and the orbicular and straight muscles of the mouth above. But these
muscles are not perfectly developed in the animals. When dogs are
fondly gambolling about you, there is "a slight eversion of the lips,"
which is a rudimentary hint of man's facial expression in an act of
mirth. The dog has been the associate of human moods in all countries,
and for thousands of years; yet, although we are told that "the little
dog laughed to see the sport," he has not yet made up his mouth for any
thing more emphatic than a simper.
Some kinds of monkeys have established a facial expression, accompanied
with a laughing noise, which is so like the human that we might charge
them with being entertained at the practical jokes which they pass
upon each other, or over some obscurer sense of sylvan incongruity.
We can see, at least, that Nature was preparing in them the nervous
connections which men employ to transmit their pleasurable emotions; as
the flexible plants which dangle by the streams and chasms of the Andes
are woven by his after-thought to span the intervals, and the good
cheer of humanity passes to and fro.
The respiratory nerves radiate from their centre in the medulla
oblongata, the place to which the brain must transmit the first shock
of the surprise which ends in smiling and laughing. Thence it is
transmitted to the heart and diaphragm, quickening the action of the
one, and setting the other in motion, at the same instant climbing
to engage the facial nerves in sympathy; then the orbicular muscles
retract, forcing the cheek up towards the eye, and tightening the
muscles which surround the eyelid.
All our passions appear to claim the respiratory nerves for outward
expression. They are a signal corps which communicate by hoisting the
blush, the smile; by letting fall the tear, by the exhalation of a
sigh, by the explosions of laughter. The life-breaths of joy and grief
tend primitively to the lungs, and they voice the mother-tongue of all
emotions.
I have often wondered how animals can avoid being struck with the
differences which exist among themselves, so much more salient and
intrusive than among the races of men, in shape, gestures, tones, and
habits. What a wide range of Nature's curious freakery a forest has, or
a district of country like those plains and thickets of Africa, where
the natives dig their great pit and organize a monster drive! Into it
falls every thing which cannot escape to either side. The giraffe,
elephant, gnu, antelope, hartbeest, zebra, jackal,--think of the
commingling of strange discrepancies thus suddenly collected! Were it
not for the panic which prevails, and the accidents to life and limb,
one would suppose that they ought to be aware of Nature's whims in
themselves, and to narrowly escape inventing amusement. But curiosity
and aversion probably exhaust the speculative possibilities of animals
in this direction.
It is true, we occasionally hear of happy families, like that of the
prairie-dog who has an owl and a rattlesnake to share his housekeeping,
which they do with zest; for they have established a taste for the
young of the prairie-dog, and they hire his tenement only with an eye
to business.
When a great freshet takes possession of a country, and evicts the
tenants of every hole, thicket, and burrow, there is an indiscriminate
stampede of the animals for the driest and safest places: hares,
rattlesnakes, mice, cats, and the carnivora cling together to the tops
of trees, or wait in terror on the highest hills. So a prairie fire
startles all the wild creatures with its sweep into a promiscuous
race towards some spot that cannot be tenanted by flame. There they
might observe the strange traits which shun each other in ordinary
times or seek each other only when hunger demands its toll. While
the fright and the dread of death are beginning to pass off are these
creatures insensibly attracted to notice each other? Probably only
as a curious deer observes a man. The danger has not established any
sympathy between them. And they separate without any better opinion of
each other, nor approach to geniality. Even men who are strangers, and
in general dissociated by the distinctions of society, will be thrown
together by some stress of the moment, part with a mutual feeling of
relief, and resume their predilections. Yet man only is endowed with
the magnanimity to welcome the emergencies which abolish superficial
differences. They can be invaded by a circumstance which comprises them
under an idea different from those which keep them asunder; and this
new congruity can make the forced society congenial. It is Nature's
witty rendering of the text that declares all men of one blood. The
effect is grave, and under some conditions it may reach an heroic
stature, but the root of wit is the nourisher; and only those creatures
who are capable of annihilating capricious distinctions by a feeling
of common humanness are capable of enjoying the union of heterogeneous
ideas.
What mutual impression do a dog and a duck make? He runs around with
frolic transpiring in his tail, and barks to announce a wish to
fraternize; or perhaps it is a short and nervous bark, and indicates
unsettled views about ducks. Meantime, the duck waddles off with
an inane quack, so remote from a bark that it must convince any
well-informed dog of the hopelessness of proposing either business or
pleasure to such a doting and toothless pate. He certainly must have
overheard the conversation of his betters, when the Shallows, Slenders,
and Silences are near. What a prompt retreat human beings make, and
what wariness is expended in steering clear of them for the future!
Yet I never feel quite sure that the dunces are not amused at the
manœuvre. Is there a human being permitted to live without wit enough
to know when he is avoided? Even this duck has a twinkle in that bead
of an eye, as it rejoins the other ducks, that seems to convey to us
its sense of the absurdness of a creature so caninely exuberant. Or
was it a duck which I noticed? I am sure I have often seen creatures
who are hopelessly posed or scandalized waddle away from some superior
extravagance.
What vague auroral flittings of human perception pass beneath that
horrid crest of the gorilla, as he elevates it in astonishment at
encountering a creature of matchless symmetry like the wild ass, of
picturesqueness like the zebra, of remote rarity like a beautiful
woman! As for cockatoos, parrots, and macaws, I am convinced they are
an endless source of amusement to the monkey tribe, who pelt them with
nuts to make them scream and scold. Monkeys have a great flow of animal
spirits: this, with their imitative talent and quick observation,
renders them capable of entertaining ludicrous impressions. But one
must be very closely related to the anthropoid ape, if not quite
recently derived from it, to tell what they are.
There are many well-attested cases of an absolute enjoyment among
animals that sometimes rises to the pitch of mirthfulness. One day,
Dr. Kane came across a long, icy, inclined shoot, like the artificial
coasting-places made by the Russians, down which a long file of white
bears went sliding on their hams: at the bottom they jumped up like a
crowd of boys, with evident delight, to carry their sleds back to the
top of the hill. He says that the signs of pleasure among them were
unmistakable.
The Canadian fish-otter (_Lutra Canadensis_) loves to do the same
thing. He climbs to the top of a snow-ridge in winter, or of a slippery
bank in summer, lies on his belly, with the fore feet bent backward,
then, pushing with the hind legs, down he goes. So the Russians, with
their ice-slides, are only imitating the sport of their own arctic
creatures. I suppose that long ago the pleasure derived from an
involuntary and accidental slide originated the habit.
Lieutenant Dall says that the beavers in Alaska engage in gymnastics
for fun. If they find a smooth, miry bank, they betake themselves
to sliding down it. And the Californian gray whale loves to play in
the shoals where the surf breaks; keeping a wary outlook, so that it
continually escapes being beached. Its pleasure is enhanced by the
peril. Seals do the same thing when they find a heavy surf. They turn
from side to side with half-extended fins, moved apparently by the
heavy ground-swell; at times making a playful spring with bended flukes
that throws the body clear out of the water, to come down with a heavy
splash: then, giving two or three spouts, they settle again under
water, to appear perhaps the next moment rolling over in a listless
manner with the heavy swell, plainly full of intense enjoyment.
If the sea-otter of Siberia escapes into the water from its hunters,
it expresses joy and derision by marked gestures, one of which is
the putting a paw up over the eyes, as if shading them to regard the
hunters. It would seem to be a very slight natural variation when the
thumb slips to the point of the nose, and the rest of the paw executes
that vibratory sarcastic gesture highly approved by boys.
The same sea-otter will mourn itself to a skeleton over the loss of
its young. If animals can be capable of grief, as innumerable facts
testify, mirth ought to endow them with a finite compensation.
Lady Barker, in her book called "Station Life in New Zealand,"
describes a favorite cockatoo, whose amusement consisted in imitating
a hawk. "He reserves this fine piece of acting until his mistress is
feeding the poultry; then, when all the hens and chickens, turkeys
and pigeons are in the quiet enjoyment of their breakfast or supper,
the peculiar shrill cry of a hawk is heard overhead, and the bird is
seen circling in the air, uttering a scream occasionally. The fowls
never find out that it is a hoax, but run to shelter, cackling in
the greatest alarm; hens clucking loudly for their chicks, turkeys
crouching under the bushes, the pigeons taking refuge in their house.
As soon as the ground is quite clear, the bird changes his wild note
for peals of laughter from a high tree, and finally, alighting on
the top of a hen-coop filled with trembling chickens, remarks, in a
suffocated voice, 'You'll be the death of me.'"
If we are disposed to think that such accounts of originality are only
cases of accidental coincidence, what shall we say to the following
story, which comes to us from an authority upon which we may rely:--
A long-tailed paroquet, which had been a pet of an English barrack in
India, where it had picked up all kinds of oaths and slang, passed into
the possession of a lady in England, who, one day, receiving a visitor
endowed with a very decided squint, took her into the room where the
bird was kept. No sooner did the bird see this lady than it cried,
"Twig her eye! What a beauty!"
How many human beings get immortality discounted for themselves upon a
capital of sprightliness hardly more extensive than this parrot's!
There is also a well-authenticated story of a parrot belonging to an
English carpenter, who undertook to make it say a long word in several
syllables, that had no particular meaning. All at once the parrot
declined to use any of his usual phrases, and remained entirely mute
for a year, at the end of which time he suddenly pronounced the word,
and then talked as before. The story is parallel to the Roman one, of
the parrot which heard for the first time the note of a trumpet, became
silent for several months, and then suddenly began to imitate the note.
It is remarkable that no rehearsals or prelusions of the difficulty to
be overcome were ever heard in either case.
The naturalist has lately found a monkey of the Gibbon family, which
has a voice that is divided into distinct notes that correspond to
our scale and run an octave or more, clear, musical, and firm. What
an invaluable prize this would be for M. Offenbach and his opera
bouffe! for the creature has all the flexibility and briskness, all
the parody of human nature, and all the lubricity which this style of
art requires, with the caudal emphasis appended; and great economy
would be gained in exempting more expensive human performers from
moral degradation. We would all pay our money for such an exhibition,
rejoiced to see the drama recovering from its decay.
But, as yet, no cosey couples of clever apes have been discovered
in paroxysms of laughter over the last sylvan equivoque; nor have
elephants been seen silently shaking at a joke too ponderous for their
trunks to carry. Everybody has observed how ducks will gather into a
corner of the farm-yard and stand still, and apparently breathless,
as if listening to a jocose tale fished out of their Decameron of a
gutter, then break into hearty quacking, which reminds one of the
wheezing of snips of fellows over their muddy jest. But probably the
ducks are only holding a caucus on the question of food, to nominate
the next pool to be dredged, and make it unanimous.
But when we consider that the higher animals can compare objects and
make selections, exercise a memory and have association of ideas
concerning each other and the outer world, we come near to that human
quality which is the ground of the function of laughter. These mental
traits are the buried roots of the consciousness which blossoms into
smiles in the sun of wit and humor. For the power to combine or to
contrast two or more objects, to remember one absent object by another
present one, to experience a feeling that two objects are associated,
leads to the highest manifestations of wit. In the delicate structures
of men and women, which are bequests to them descending through the
whole inviolate entail of Nature, refined by it and amplified till they
entertain keenly the pathos of life, all mental traits accumulate into
the faculty of imagination, upon which every thing that is laughable
depends.
With this faculty man makes shift to relieve the moments when
existence, with its incessant toil and merciless persistency of
routine, threatens to become insupportable. One day is not exactly like
another, if hearty laughter loosens its handcuffs and lets the prisoner
stretch his frame and have a little run. Every laugh reddens the blood,
which goes then more blithely to dissipate the fogs of a moody brain.
Multitudes of our American brains are badly drained in consequence
of a settling of the wastage of house-grubbing and street-work into
moral morasses which generate many a chimera. So there is something
positively heroic in the hilarity which braves, light-armed as it is,
our brood of viperous cares, and attacks their den. One flash of a
smile shears off Medusa's head with impunity.
No creature that is not capable of being bored can be capable of
laughing at its own incongruous circumstances. The more simply
constructed the brain and nervous system are, the less liability is
there to that misfortune of _ennui_. We cannot imagine that a turtle's
head gets tired of lying around, decapitated, for a week or more; or
that a toad imprisoned in a rock or tree for one or two thousand years
should become jaded by its close confinement. When the miner's pick
releases him, his hop is as alert, and his appetite for the next fly
as keen, as before his prison stole upon him. The lower animals are as
contented as the forests and waters in which they pass an instinctive
existence. Continually cheerful we may suppose they are, even when
the larder is empty and the springs run low. Their monotonous round
of hungering, feeding, and procreating sympathizes with the reposeful
temper in which the whole of the inanimate nature discharges those
functions, as we see the flower absorb, fructify, and exhale. But
as the brain becomes more complicated, and capable of breeding more
positive ideas and feelings,--such as the questing of a greyhound,
the tact of setters and retrievers, the attachment of dogs for
persons,--we may expect to observe a liability to suffer tedium. How
plainly a good dog can show his disappointment when he goes out with a
green sportsman, or with one who is so abstracted in his mood that he
neglects the chances to shoot! The dog's natural language is that he
will not tolerate such an irreligious abuse of providence: he will soon
begin to sulk and not put up any more game.
If an animal is capable of having a consecutive dream, as Miss
Mitford's greyhound was, who regularly every year, just before the
coursing season began, used to dream of going out, and quested in
his sleep, such an animal can feel the torment of _ennui_. He is not
blindly indicating that a season has come around,--as a wound made by
the bite of a lion will gape anew in the same month of the following
year, and the juice of the grape is agitated in remembrance of its
vintage,--but the animal is conscious that the time has come for him to
resume his talent.
Such dogs become tired of waiting if their masters are absent, and
are disquieted if their day's routine be changed. And you will notice
in a zoölogical garden many of the better-educated animals to whom
the monotony of their life is a positive sorrow, till, like opium, it
stupefies their spirits. They have not the resource of man, who is also
devoured with _ennui_, but, furnished with imagination, can dissipate
its most tragic moods by heart-shaking and sky-splitting laughter. His
most climbing grief is like an Alpine flower that sits close to the
snow-line and takes its color; but near at hand are hillsides sprinkled
with winking wild-flowers, and the blue succory stands amid the corn.
There is but a step from one to the other.
That step is taken, and the gravity of life upset whenever any of our
ideas can suddenly and for a moment join an object or another idea,
and appear to belong to it, though essentially different in every
respect, and only capable of seeming like by the imagination starting
a pretence of it. Things that are incongruous are forced to touch at
one point, and for one moment to feign congruity. The surprise to the
mind is a laughable one, because it is in the habit of regarding ideas
and objects as they naturally cohere or differ. Sanity and business
depend upon this habit. The understanding is at home in the ordinary
congruities of things, and is not prepared to admit that two things
which are absolutely incongruous can be ever made for a single instant
to agree. Such a result cannot be soberly contemplated: the order of
the world and the mental consistency which pays the butcher for his
meat and the milkman for his refreshing dash of the hydrant forbid it.
It becomes laughable precisely because this gravity of order is against
it. If a thing cannot be done soberly, and yet _is_ done, the result is
fatal to sobriety. This is the root of every laugh: two things which
never met before, and ought not to meet, hail each other and set up a
claim of relationship on this very ground,--namely, that it was always
impossible that they could be related. In the farce of "Box and Cox,"
says one of these doubles to the other eagerly, "_Have you_ the mark
of a strawberry between your shoulders?" "No," answers the other. "Oh,
then you are indeed my long-lost brother!" It is so in the relations
which make laughter. There should be the mark of a strawberry; but
just because there is not, the whim of fraternity is raised, and for a
moment it appears as if the two things must have been twins at birth,
though separated since.
Thus, to begin at the lowest degree of this subject, the simply
ludicrous has its origin in the surprise caused by something which
interrupts or modifies an ordinary procedure: the latter is thus joined
for a moment to an idea not belonging to it. Why do we laugh when a
person tumbles upstairs? or when some respectable female struggles with
an umbrella which has shamelessly turned its bare ribs upon her and
sails jauntily with her down the street, or flounders in the gutter, an
inebriated wreck of usefulness? Because an erect position is the normal
one for man, and a protecting umbrella the helpmeet for woman. If it
were not so, we should laugh to see the most revered person succeed
in controlling her gingham dome, and stemming the tide as easily as
the whale which furnished it with bones. There is nothing essentially
ludicrous in seeing a man chase an animal: on the contrary, if you are
trying to head off your favorite pig and persuade it to taste again
your bounty, it is one of the saddest spectacles in existence. But when
a man is in full hue and cry after his own hat we laugh, because a hat
is inseparable from a head in idea, but becomes separated in fact. A
hatter's shop is full of the larvæ of this idea, but they would never
hatch there into hats. The conjunction of a head to each is needed to
make a perfect notion of a hat.
If we could be sure of preserving our own scalps, we should like to
have been near enough to watch the expression of the first Indian who
ever killed a man wearing a wig. For the wig is a sudden violation of
the logic of scalping, and the astonished Indian would have raised a
laugh as he raised the artificial hair.
General Sherman's body-servant was a German who went with him through
the war, but could never realize the idea that the war at last was
over. One day the General, having travelled from the South to Chicago,
was on the point of leaving, and ordered this man to pack a valise.
The one he selected was so enormous that the General remonstrated, and
examined what could be within. It was filled with hotel towels that had
been looted from Atlanta clear through, in company with table-spoons of
the Milledgeville Hotel; the German plundering on every route as if we
were still marching through Georgia. This incongruous behavior has all
the effect of a ludicrous incident.
Whatever accidental infirmity deposits us in positions incongruous
with our ordinary state generates a ludicrous impression. When the
obese lover, encased in corsets and tightly-strapped pantaloons, fell
plump upon his knees before a lady to make his declaration, she was
embarrassed, and besought him to arise; but he, fast anchored in the
stiffest of costumes, whimpered out, "I can't, madam," and she had to
ring for a servant. That is simply ludicrous. But suppose I should say
that his suit had been rejected,--it would be an execrable remark, but
still would modify the ludicrous impression, and raise it into a higher
region of the pleasurable by making the first step of a pun towards the
peculiar element of wit.
If a pun is good, the pleasure is sometimes purely mental and scarcely
gets beyond a smile; for it constrains two different ideas into an
accidental relation with one word, and the clever feat surprises us.
We are not looking for it, as our life is plain-spoken, does not twist
its intention nor its language, and passes for what it is. A friend,
really wanting to know if Foote the comedian had ever been in Cork,
in good faith asked him. "No," said he; "but I have seen a good many
drawings of it." So the new conundrum finds us unprepared: "Which goes
the quicker,--a full minute or a spare moment?" That pleases the mind,
but it does not make us laugh as when Abraham Lincoln, in his attack of
small-pox, said, "Now I am willing to see the office-seekers, for at
last I have something I can give 'em all." We laugh because the play
upon the word "give" betrays and yet relieves the moral annoyance of
that class of beggars.
Punning can enhance its quality by lurking in the quotation of
well-known and esteemed lines; as when a man who is importuned to
subscribe to something, on the score of the virtue there is in giving,
should quote the tender George Herbert,--
"Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives."
In this way Mr. Thackeray made one of his best puns. Some one was
talking to him of a man of talent, who was prodigiously addicted to
beer; saying what a pity it was, for they hardly knew his equal. "Yes,"
said Thackeray, "take him for half-and-half, we ne'er shall look upon
his like again."
So Douglas Jerrold, referring in one of his plays to the English habit
of scrawling names and lines with diamonds upon window-panes, makes
one of his characters say: "One man goes to foolscap, another to a pane
of glass. They may be very different people; but, well considered,
I doubt if the motive hasn't the same source." "At least, the same
effect," is the reply; "for, as my friend Laman Blanchard sings,--
"''Tis oft the poet's curse
To mar his little light with verse.'"
In the same way a classic line which is quoted in mimicry of a modern
situation can raise the surprise of a pun. The very best instance,
perhaps, of this felicity was the quotation of Dean Swift when a lady's
long train swept down a fine fiddle and broke it. He cried out,--
"Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ!"[1]
Sporting with words blew aside a little the powder-smoke of the battle
of Shiloh, and etherized the pain of one of our soldiers, whose cheek
and chin had been carried away by a shot. "What can we do for you?"
asked his comrades. "Boys," said he, with what articulation was left
to him, "I should like a drink of water mighty well, if I only had the
face to ask for it."
A very good pun can be made unconsciously, as when the schoolmaster
asked the class what Shylock meant when he said, "My deeds upon my
head." "Well," said one of the boys, "I don't know, unless he carried
his papers in his hat." In the same way, Lord Dundreary makes a good
pun because he can only comprehend one use for one word at a time;
and, if the most obvious use strikes him first, he is incapable of
making any transfer of it. So he says to Lieutenant Vernon, "Of course
you can _pass_ your examination: what I want to know is, can you _go
through_ it?"
Every language invites this trick of the pun. The Greeks and Romans
relished it, but the instances would involve explanations too tedious
for popular reading. Perhaps a few may be ventured from the French,
who are as delicate in this as in the manufacture of a Sèvres cup or a
pattern of tapestry.
Henry IV., at the surrender of Chartres, received a deputation at the
gates. The spokesman said, "Sire, the city submits to your Majesty as
much by divine as by Roman law." He replied, "You may as well add, by
canon law, too."
Louis XIV., during a critical aspect of his affairs, said in council,
"_Nous maintiendrons la couronne de la France_." His dauphin merely
remarked, "_Maintenons la_" (_Madame de Maintenon l'a_).
When complaint was made in Paris that the first Napoleon was too young
to assume command of an Italian campaign against Austria, he said,
"They may let me alone: in six months _j'aurai Milan_" (_j'aurai mille
ans_).
But the late M. Jules Janin made the cleverest pun. It was at a time
when the Parisian authorities were macadamizing some of the streets
that he was unsuccessfully proposed for membership of the famous
Académie. Some one condoling with him for his failure, he replied that
he meant to throw himself into the streets. "But how so, Monsieur?"
"_Parceque, dans ce cas, on tout de suite m'acadamiserait._"
Punning approaches the character of wit when the identity of sound not
only covers two ideas, but also hides an allusion to still another.
When Douglass Jerrold by a quick motion accidentally threw himself
backward into the water, and was carried into a tavern, he said to the
servant, "I suppose these accidents happen frequently off here." "Oh,
yes, sir, frequently; but it's not the season yet." "Ah! I suppose it's
all owing to a backward spring." "That's it, sir." The play recalls the
manner of his ducking, and also involves the servant's idea, as if it
depended upon the time of the year. This is witty, because it effects
a temporary junction of very opposite ideas, apart from the pun which
gives the opportunity.
Let a case in illustration be invented. Suppose a man hears that in
the Quissama tribe of Angola any one who cannot pay his debts is at
once killed and eaten. He improves this curious fact to say, "That
would be a pretty effective way of collecting a debt, if debtors did
not always disagree with creditors." This leads us to consider that
wit takes place when two or more very distinct objects or perceptions
are brought arbitrarily under the sway of one idea which for a moment
appears to embrace them. Punning is a constraint of two different ideas
to be expressed by one word. Wit is the constraint of different objects
to be expressed by one idea. Wit depends for its effect upon ideas
alone; and it is reached whenever the mind suddenly forces an idea
that is suggested to it to appear, for a moment, like something that
belongs to another idea. The latter really resembles the first idea in
no point at all: they ought to be kept asunder for want of a natural
and organic connection. Yet they are compelled to seem to have this;
and, though the illusion can last but for a moment, that is time enough
to surprise and delight us with the mental stratagem. Perhaps the
second idea, so far from having any natural relation with the first,
is violently opposed to it in every sensible way, so that nobody can
pretend a possibility that they should communicate. The mind contrives
this momentary rendezvous; and a lightning-flash betrays these two
heterogeneous things apparently in close communion.
But, although this is the metaphysical basis of all wit, we must
notice the distinctions in its quality, according as it draws upon
more or less of the imagination, and is more or less interfused with
good-nature. It has a range of effects extending from a bitterness
which may be ferocious through a cold cynicism, a clear, calm light
of the understanding, into moods that are colored by fancy and warmed
into geniality by a human heart; and then it becomes a favorite ally
of humor to promote its intention of tolerating all our infirmities.
Douglas Jerrold gives us examples of the caustic kind; Tom Hood, of
its jollity; Charles Lamb, of its clearness; Richter, Sydney Smith,
Shakspeare, of its broad humanity.
Some one asked Heine, "Have you read B.'s new pamphlet?" "No, dear
friend; I only read his great works: the three, four, and five-volumed
ones suit me best." "Ah! you jest, and mean something." "Certainly: a
great extent of water--a lake, sea, ocean--is a fine thing; but in a
teaspoon I cannot stand it."
Heine said of one of his acquaintances, "The man is really cracked; but
I will confess that he has lucid intervals when he is only foolish."
This was the same person whom Heine had in his mind when he said to
a caller, "My head to-day is perfectly barren, and you will find me
stupid enough; for a friend has been here, and we exchanged ideas."
The old age of Lamartine exhibited a painful decline of his truly great
qualities, and an exaggeration of his foibles. A French paper concluded
his obituary with the remark, "He has ceased to survive himself."
These are caustic specimens; but the last one contains a high per cent
of pleasure, because we are left uncertain whether it was a serious
case of wit. But none of them can scald as Douglas Jerrold did, when,
meeting a man who was such an abject toady that if his friend Jones had
the influenza he would contrive to get up a cold, Jerrold said to him,
"Have you heard the rumor that is flying around town?" "No." "Well,
they say that Jones pays the dog-tax for you."
That is bitter. But when one gentleman during a supper of sheep's heads
throws down his knife and fork in rapture, and exclaims, "Well, sheep's
heads for ever, say I," and Douglas Jerrold remarks, "There's egotism,"
we have a point tempered in the flame of fun. So, too, when a member
of his club, hearing an air mentioned, said, "That always carries
me away when I hear it," Jerrold, merely to seize an opportunity,
said, "Then can nobody whistle it?" This kind of wit easily rankles,
if there be a drop or two of suspicion in our veins; for there is
nothing in the tone to announce its discrimination from ill-nature. For
instance: Sheridan, soliciting the votes of the shoemakers of Stafford,
exclaimed, "May the trade of Stafford be trampled under foot of all the
world!" and mortally offended them.
We should like to know how the French attaché felt who, being at a
soirée just after the dubious affair of the annexation of Nice and
Savoy to France, met Lord Houghton, as he went towards the supper-room,
and said, "_Je vais prendre quelque chose!_" "_Vous avez raison_," was
the reply; "_c'est l'habitude de votre pays_."
But the French abound in the kind of wit which penetrates like a
colorless North light, and sets a contrast in clearness, so that we
admire its outlines, scarcely smiling; as when Hippolyte Taine said,
"An Englishman would be exceedingly mortified if he had no faith in
another life." When the Duke de Choiseul, who was a remarkably lean
man, came to London to negotiate a peace, Charles Townsend, being asked
whether the French Government had sent the preliminaries of a treaty,
answered that he did not know, but they had sent the outline of an
ambassador. This preserves the French flavor, which we recognize, for
instance, in Ninon de l'Enclos, who, being asked one day by a Parisian
lady whether she believed that St. Denys walked _all_ the way to Paris
with his head under his arm, replied, "_Pourquoi pas, Mademoiselle? ce
n'est que le premier pas qui coûte._"
The best repartee must subsidize the pleasure of wit. When M. Scribe
replied to the millionnaire who wanted him to lend the use of his
genius for a consideration, that it was contrary to Scripture for a
horse and an ass to plough together, the man instantly parried the snub
by saying, "By what right do you call me a horse?"
Among the announcements in a French paper, we find that "a young man
about to marry wants to meet a man of experience who will dissuade
him." So Abraham Lincoln thought he would not marry, because "I can
never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have
me."
Perhaps the purest instance of thoroughly French wit is to be credited
to Mr. Emerson. An amiable rustic once heard him lecture, but could
make nothing of it. Turning to a friend, he said, "Darn it! I'd like
to know what Emerson thinks about God. I bet I'll ask him." He did,
when Mr. Emerson came down the aisle. "God," replied he, "is the _x_
of algebra,"--that is, the unknown quantity in every problem. Nothing
could be more admirable.
Mr. Beecher affirms that "it is impossible to discriminate between
the wit that produces only pleasure of thought and that which
produces pleasure of laughter." It does not seem to me so hopeless a
task to discriminate between the two kinds of wit. Where reflection
predominates, and the act of wit approaches the statement of a truth,
so that the surprise does not borrow any tinge from any human
sentiment, the pleasure will be inaudible; and, if we produce a
smile at all, it will be where the German constructed the idea of a
camel,--in the depths of his consciousness; as when Voltaire said of
the priests of his time, "Our credulity makes all their knowledge." But
when an American poet, whose Pegasus had stepped upon his foot, said,
"What a pity it is! my grandfather left to me his gout, and nothing
in the cellar to keep it up with," a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous
kind; it is so incongruously human to nurse our own infirmities.
So when Frederic the Great said spitefully to Minister Elliot, on
occasion of the Te Deums over the reverses of Hyder Ali in India,
"I never knew that Providence was one of your allies," and Elliot
replied, "The only one, sire, whom we do not pay," both the remark and
the retort involve the mind in a momentary adjustment of its ideas to
the new suggestion; and the wit is thus restrained from sallying into
laughter. We have to reflect that Elliot's repartee is a hit at all
subsidized powers, including Prussia, and also at his own nation for
its trick of futile gratitude and ascription of praise. But if any
movement of sympathy prevents the act of wit from settling upon the
internal organs, and bids it escape by every pore, we feel the dew
of laughter on the face; as when Falstaff whimsically apologizes for
himself, "Thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam fell; and what
should poor Jack Falstaff do, in the days of villany?"--or when, at
a meeting in London to hear a report from some missionaries who had
been sent to discover the lost tribes of Israel, the chairman opened
the business by saying, "I take a great interest in your researches,
gentlemen. The fact is, I have borrowed money from all the Jews now
known; and, if you can find a new set, you'll do me a favor."
It is witty when the author of the "Maid of Sker," describing a dinner,
makes the mouth water with smiles when he particularizes "a little pig
for roasting, too young to object to it, yet with his character formed
enough to make his brains delicious."
Wit can depend, like punning, upon the felicitous use of some
well-known verse or sentiment, which suddenly is made to adapt itself
to a new idea; as when Henry Clapp, speaking of an intolerable bore,
inverted the famous sentence which is associated with Shakspeare, and
said, "He is not for a time, but for all day."
In the same vein, on the strength of Laurence Sterne's[2] assertion
that "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," a Boston wit, finding
himself in the powerful blast which sweeps across the Common and makes
a tunnel of Winter Street, remarked that he wished there was a shorn
lamb tied at the head of that street.
Walter Scott tells an anecdote of the same special character. "So deep
was the thirst of vengeance impressed on the minds of the Highlanders
that, when a clergyman informed a dying chief of the unlawfulness of
the sentiment, urged the necessity of forgiving an inveterate enemy,
and quoted, 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,' the acquiescing
penitent said, with a deep sigh, 'To be sure! it is too sweet a morsel
for a mortal.'"
Wit can be blundered into as well as a pun. The unmerited praise of it
can be earned by mental awkwardness and want of tact. A widower, who
had loved a lady previous to his marriage to another, approached his
first love after the death of his wife, and sought to renew the old
attachment. After he had made his offer, at a juncture more critical
than the turning-point of Waterloo, he was permitted to add, "And I
know that all my children will follow you to the grave with the same
affection that they showed when their mother died." This is certainly
the _pallida mors_ of Horace beating _æquo pede_ at the door.
Wit can also be enhanced by a droll incompetence of understanding on
the part of the listener. Sydney Smith, complaining of the heat, told a
lady that he wished he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones.
The wit consists in extending the congruity of taking clothes off to
the flesh, and there is an electric instant of mental possibility. But
it is enhanced to us when we recollect the shocked and puzzled look
of the lady, who saw only an indelicacy in a remark which was really
delicate to the pitch of ghastliness,--stripped, in fact, of every
rag of that most indelicate of all things, prudery. Thus the raillery
of Falstaff owes half its excellence to Dame Quickly's consistent
misinterpretation, for this reflects back upon it the color of wit.
She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making a
capital match. "Go to! you are a woman: go." "Who, I? No! I defy thee.
God's light! I was never called so in mine own house before." "You are
a thing to thank God on." "I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou
should'st know it." And the grim irony of Hamlet, who, after killing
Polonius, replies to the king that the old man is at supper, has grown
upon us through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know he is
killed as well as we do, and have been sent to find the body, but
cannot take the point of Hamlet's answers.
In a play of Douglas Jerrold, an old sailor gets a box on the ear while
trying to snatch a kiss. "There," cries he, "like my luck! always
wrecked on the coral reefs." When the manager heard the play read he
could not see the point, and increased the wit for us by making Jerrold
strike it out.
Perhaps the best modern instance of this kind is the colossal stupidity
of some foreign critics, who gave such an exquisite flavor to Mark
Twain's "Innocents Abroad" by blaming his ignorance and misapprehension
of places, pictures, and traditions.
The Beaufort negroes are unconsciously witty when, perceiving that
an idea is dawning upon them, they say they feel their head "growing
thinner." A premium for involuntary wit must be conferred upon the old
lady in New Bedford, who heard about the cheapness of the manufactured
oils and the great increase in the use of them, which threatened to
drive sperm-oil out of the market: "Dear me, the poor whales! What will
they do?"
There must also be complete unconsciousness in the perpetrator of a
bull. "The pleasure," says Sydney Smith, "arising from bulls proceeds
from our surprise at suddenly discovering two things to be dissimilar
in which a resemblance might have been suspected;" but ordinary wit
creates a sudden surprise at a resemblance which could not have been
suspected between two things. Perhaps the best bull was practically
perpetrated by the old lady in Middlebury, Wis., who crossed over a
bridge that was marked "Dangerous" without seeing the sign. On being
informed of the fact on the other side, she instantly turned in great
alarm and re-crossed it.
The wit which produces laughter cannot be analyzed without a mental
process: but that is an after-thought and laughter anticipates it;
as when Mark Twain, writing upon Franklin, says, "He was twins,
having been born simultaneously in two houses in Boston." There is an
unconscious organic assumption that both houses, since people insist
upon both, must have been the spots of his birth. If so, the births
in two houses must have been simultaneous, but the two Franklins not
identical. Of course, then, they must have been twins. At least, this
is the best that can be done with the historical material. But I am
reminded of a famous wit, who, after viewing the Siamese Twins for a
while, quietly remarked, "Brothers, I suppose."
If wit ever unmasks a moral feeling it performs its noblest function
and imparts a complicated pleasure; as when Abraham Lincoln, in
defending a fugitive slave before a court, said, "It is singular that
the courts will hold that a man never loses his right to his property
that has been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost the right to
himself if he was stolen."
When wit creates a temporary congruity between an idea and an object
which are essentially incongruous on all points, the shock dissolves in
pleasure, because the oppressiveness of life results from its ideas;
and yet one of them opens to us an escape from it. We find a way of
eluding for a moment a task-master, and it makes us smile. It is not
a moral revolt, for that would be a deepening of the seriousness till
it became too pathetic; but it is a momentary beguilement, and we are
cheated into the presumption that there is no care in the world. We
return to the care refreshed by this electric bath of wit, which has a
tonic quality and saves us from despair.