Jerome K. Jerome Says that the American
Sense of Humor Has Been Overfed
by Brilliant Humorists.
More great humorists have arisen in the United States during the last
seventy-five years than in any other country. Among the professionals are,
or have been, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain,
and George Ade. Who of these have been and who still are there is no need
of saying. But certainly the constellation is brilliant with these names
alone, though the lesser stars have been many.
Have we had too much humor? Are we sated? Jerome K. Jerome, after several
months of personal observation, answers yes. Near the end of his recent
tour of the country he said:
It seems to me that the American people have been surfeited
with humor. So many brilliant men have written their jokes
for so long that they have become jaded. I thought at first
that the American sense of humor was radically less subtle
than ours in England, but now I know better. It is simply
overfed.
Mark Twain is, I think, the only living humorist of the old
American school, and he, like _Falstaff_, is growing old.
But the subtle touch that England likes still and America
liked once is still his. You laugh with him now, I think,
more from a sense of duty than a sense of the ridiculous.
You have grown tired and need coarser fare to stimulate your
appetite. And I've discovered the cause of it, too. It is
the comic supplement of the Sunday papers.
The New York _World_ takes exception to Mr. Jerome's remarks, and answers
him as follows:
In the name of Punch and the Prophet, figs! The history of
American humor is a chronicle of development to a present
pitch of refinement and subtlety with which the work of the
earlier humorists suffers by comparison. It is the history
of the evolution of the pun into the witticism.
Could Petroleum V. Nasby get a hearing to-day? Or the
Danbury News Man, or "Peck's Bad Boy"? Would not a Burdette
writing for the more exacting twentieth-century perception
find his occupation gone? Even an Artemus Ward and a Josh
Billings appealing to latter-day readers would perceive the
essential need of a purification and refinement of method if
they were to hold their audience under anything like the old
spell.
Progress from broad lines approaching buffoonery to
delicacy, from the obvious and the apparent to the elusive,
is observable in all humorists who hold their public. It was
seen in Eugene Field. It is discernible in Mark Twain, whom
Mr. Jerome cites as a survival of the "old American school."
Between "The Innocents Abroad" and "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and
"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" is all the contrast of
the changed taste of a new generation. _Falstaff_ is not now
the fashion.