WIT AND HUMOR
It has been remarked by a certain hawker of platitudes that humor is
that which makes a man laugh. There have been several definitions of
wit, one of them by Sydney Smith, and all of them more or less wanting
in completeness. But in a general way nobody is particularly keen on
definitions, provided they can get for their amusement and exhilaration
either humor or wit. During the past few decades we have heard a vast
deal of the advantages which accrue from the possession of what is called
a sense of humor. This especial sense or faculty for appreciating a joke
is nowadays cultivated, and consciously cultivated, by all sorts and
conditions of people. The gravest and most reverend persons are wont
to enliven their conversation or their discourse with quips, cranks,
gibes, and other sallies, ingeniously calculated to set the listener in
a roar. The House of Commons has latterly appeared to be filled with
gentlemen who live to amuse each other; there are judges who seem almost
incapable of opening their mouths without attempting the hilarious, and
even bishops and bankers must have their little joke. The press also
strains after humorsomeness in every degree, and when critics wish to
be particularly severe they write simply, “Mr. So-and-So has no sense
of humor.” And here, in effect, we have what I conceive to be another
distinct injustice to Ireland. For Irish wit and humor have passed into
a tradition, and are believed by good judges to be the very wittiest and
most humorous wit and humor the gods are likely to vouchsafe to us. In
the course of years many fairly thick volumes have been compiled out of
the abundance of humorous material Ireland has furnished forth. To turn
to such a volume, however, is in my opinion to experience a certain
disappointment. There are jokes, it is true, and jokes innumerable; but
somehow for the modern laughter seeker there is a distinct flatness about
them. Furthermore, they are nearly all “chestnuts,” a fact which renders
it pretty plain that the people of Ireland have come to a full stop as
it were, and ceased to produce them. I subjoin a few examples culled
hap-hazard from a book published so recently as last year:
* * * * *
A prisoner was trying to explain to a judge and jury his innocence of
a certain crime. “It’s not meself,” he cried, “as’ll be afther thrying
to desave yer honors. I didn’t hit the poor dead gintleman at all, at
all. It was him that sthruck the blow, and the exartion killed him, and,
what’s more, I wasn’t there at the time.” “I perceive,” observed the
judge, “you are trying to prove an alibi.” “An al-loi-boi!” exclaimed
the prisoner, evidently pleased at the big word being suggested to
strengthen his defense. “Yes,” said the judge. “Can you tell me what is
a good alibi?” “Faith, yer honor,” replied the prisoner, “and it’s a loi
boi which the prisoner gets off.”
* * * * *
“What passed between yourself and the complainant?” inquired the
magistrate in a county court. “I think, sor,” replied the worthy O’Brien,
“a half-dozen bricks and a lump of paving-stone.”
* * * * *
“I say, Paddy,” said a tourist to his car-driver, “that is the
worst-looking horse you drive I ever saw. Why don’t you fatten him up?”
“Fat him up, is it?” queried the Jehu, “faix, the poor baste can hardly
carry the little mate that’s on him now!”
* * * * *
“Have you had any experience with children?” inquired a lady of a
prospective nurse. “Oh, yes, mum,” replied the woman, blandly. “Oi used
to be a child mesilf wanst.”
A jarvey, who was driving through the streets of Dublin, met with an
obstruction in the shape of a man riding a donkey. “Now then, you two!”
he exclaimed.
* * * * *
An Irish member, named Dogherty, who subsequently became Chief-Justice
of Ireland, asked Canning what he thought of his maiden speech. “The
only fault I can find with it,” said Canning, “is that you called the
Speaker sir, too often.” “My dear fellow,” replied Dogherty, “if you knew
the mental state I was in while speaking, you would not wonder if I had
called him ma’am.”
* * * * *
“Get on, man; get on!” said a traveler to his car-driver. “Wake up your
nag!” “Shure, sor,” was the reply, “I haven’t the heart to bate him.”
“What’s the matter with him?” inquired the traveler; “is he sick?” “No,
sor,” answered the jarvey, “he’s not sick, but it’s unlucky he is, sor,
unlucky! You see, sor, every morning, before I put him i’ the car, I
tosses him whether he’ll have a feed of oats or I’ll have a dhrink of
whisky, an’ the poor baste has lost five mornings running!”
* * * * *
“Did you notice no suspicious character about the neighborhood?” said a
magistrate to an inexperienced policeman. “Shure, yer hanner,” replied
the policeman, “I saw but one man, an’ I asked him what he was doing
there at that time o’ night? Sez he, ‘I have no business here just now,
but I expect to open a jewelry sthore in the vicinity later on.’ At that
I sez, ‘I wish you success, sor.’” “Yes,” said the magistrate, “and he
did open a jewelry store in the vicinity later on, and stole seventeen
watches.” “Begorra, yer hanner,” answered the constable after a pause,
“the man may have been a thafe, but he was no liar!”
* * * * *
“Bridget, I don’t think it is quite the thing for you to entertain
company in the kitchen.” “Don’t ye worry, mum. Shure, an’ oi wouldn’t be
afther deprivin’ ye o’ th’ parler.”
* * * * *
An old lady in Dublin, weighing about sixteen stone, engaged a car-driver
to convey her to a North Wall steamer. Arrived there, she handed the
driver his legal fare—sixpence. Gazing disconsolately at the coin in his
hand, and then at the fat old lady, he exclaimed as he turned away—“I’ll
lave ye to the Almoighty, ma’am!”
* * * * *
“Prisoner,” demanded a magistrate of a man charged with begging,
“have you any visible means of support?” “Yes, yer honor,” replied
the prisoner, and then turning to his wife who was in court, he said,
“Bridget, stand up, so that the coort can see yez!”
* * * * *
Now it is plain that we have here a fairly representative selection
of the kind of wit and humor that is supposed to come to us out of
Ireland. Some of it no doubt is reasonably good, some of it is quite
mild. Possibly it is amusing, and calculated to tickle old-fashioned
people. Yet one has distinct qualms about it when one considers it as a
means for provoking the laughter of the twentieth-century person. The
fact is that humor has been made so much of a cult in the modern mind
that it has to be very humorous indeed, not to say a trifle subtle, if
it is to raise a smile. And in considering the examples quoted, we are
faced with a further difficulty. Are these anecdotes of unquestionable
Irish extraction? I am afraid not. Their authenticity is impeachable.
_Mutatis mutandis_, they have been told of Cockneys and Yorkshire men,
and Somersetshire men, and even of Scotchmen. Furthermore, there is
nothing in them that can be considered peculiarly and exclusively Irish,
or indicative of the Irish temperament and character as it exists to-day.
Your modern Irishman, as I have pointed out, is a dreary and melancholy
wight. Laughter and sprightliness have died out of him, and whether in
thought or word he is about as dull and plantigrade as even a sad man can
well be. The eminent people who stand for Ireland in this country are all
of them afflicted with a similar lack of cheerfulness. Rouse them, and
they can be as bitter and vituperative and aboriginal as any Scotchman
of them all; but their ordinary habit is sad, uncertain, and inept, and
they do not know how to laugh. Here and there one of them at the Bar, or
in the House of Commons, or at a greasy journalistic banquet, does his
feeble best to keep up the Irish tradition for smartness and wittiness
of remark. But the attempt is invariably a failure, because at the back
of it there is no real brain and no real flow of spirits. One of the
biggest bullies at the Bar is a beefy Irishman who esteems himself a
great humorist. I have heard him fire off twenty or thirty idiotic jokes
in the course of half an hour or so, and always does he snigger at the
beginning of his precious gibe; always does he snigger in the middle;
always does he make pretense of becoming apoplectic with chortle at the
end. The circumstance that people laugh at him and not with him, does not
appear to occur to his small, if legal, mind. His dearest friends call
him “the sniggerer,” and it is said that he is in the habit of retiring
to his chambers of afternoons for the purpose of having a protracted
fit of giggling. Primed with four or five glasses of cheap port, his
capacity for low comedy becomes so evident that one trembles lest some
enterprising theatrical manager should offer him the Leno-Welch part in
next year’s “Little Goody Two-shoes.” Another “witty” Irishman, who shall
be nameless, came to these shores with a fair array of good gifts at
his disposal. Knowing himself for an Irishman, and having faith in the
Irish tradition, he forthwith set up in business as a posturing clown and
professional grinner through horse-collars, with the result that his
genius is altogether obscured. Irishmen of all degrees will do better if
they endeavor to remember that they have really no sense of humor left.
The only one of them who has made anything like a satisfactory reputation
in London, Mr. W. B. Yeats to wit, has helped himself to it by being as
devoid of humor as a bone-yard. Mr. Yeats has never been known publicly
to try his hand at the very smallest joke. The sobriety of the hearse is
his, and much good sense also. For the eminent Irish, as we know them
among us, are by nature neither witty nor humorous; and those who try
to be so, succeed in being only fatuous and vulgar. Somebody has said
cuttingly that a Frenchman consists of equal parts of tiger and monkey.
Of certain of the eminent Irish in London it may be said that they are
half jackal and half performing dog; for they are at once hungry and
fantastic.