Americans and Others | Page 9

Torrey's
evangelistic services. We still resort, as in the days of Sheridan, to our
memories for our jokes, and to our imaginations for our facts.
Moreover, we Americans have jests of our own,--poor things for the
most part, but our own. They are current from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, they appear with commendable regularity in our newspapers
and comic journals, and they have become endeared to us by a lifetime
of intimacy. The salient characteristics of our great cities, the accepted
traditions of our mining-camps, the contrast between East and West,
the still more familiar contrast between the torpor of Philadelphia and
Brooklyn ("In the midst of life," says Mr. Oliver Herford, "we are--in
Brooklyn") and the uneasy speed of New York,--these things furnish
abundant material for everyday American humour. There is, for
example, the encounter between the Boston girl and the Chicago girl,
who, in real life, might often be taken for each other; but who, in the
American joke, are as sharply differentiated as the Esquimo and the
Hottentot. And there is the little Boston boy who always wears
spectacles, who is always named Waldo, and who makes some
innocent remark about "Literary Ethics," or the "Conduct of Life." We
have known this little boy too long to bear a parting from him. Indeed,
the mere suggestion that all Bostonians are forever immersed in
Emerson is one which gives unfailing delight to the receptive American
mind. It is a poor community which cannot furnish its archaic jest for
the diversion of its neighbours.
The finest example of our bulldog resoluteness in holding on to a comic
situation, or what we conceive to be a comic situation, may be seen

every year when the twenty-second of February draws near, and the
shops of our great and grateful Republic break out into an irruption of
little hatchets, by which curious insignia we have chosen to
commemorate our first President. These toys, occasionally combined
with sprigs of artificial cherries, are hailed with unflagging delight, and
purchased with what appears to be patriotic fervour. I have seen
letter-carriers and post-office clerks wearing little hatchets in their
button-holes, as though they were party buttons, or temperance badges.
It is our great national joke, which I presume gains point from the
dignified and reticent character of General Washington, and from the
fact that he would have been sincerely unhappy could he have foreseen
the senile character of a jest, destined, through our love of absurdity,
our careful cultivation of the inappropriate, to be linked forever with
his name.
The easy exaggeration which is a distinctive feature of American
humour, and about which so much has been said and written, has its
counterpart in sober and truth-telling England, though we are always
amazed when we find it there, and fall to wondering, as we never
wonder at home, in what spirit it was received. There are two kinds of
exaggeration; exaggeration of statement, which is a somewhat
primitive form of humour, and exaggeration of phrase, which implies a
dexterous misuse of language, a skilful juggling with words. Sir John
Robinson gives, as an admirable instance of exaggeration of statement,
the remark of an American in London that his dining-room ceiling was
so low that he could not have anything for dinner but soles. Sir John
thought this could have been said only by an American, only by one
accustomed to have a joke swiftly catalogued as a joke, and suffered to
pass. An English jester must always take into account the mental
attitude which finds "Gulliver's Travels" "incredible." When Mr.
Edward FitzGerald said that the church at Woodbridge was so damp
that fungi grew about the communion rail, Woodbridge ladies offered
an indignant denial. When Dr. Thompson, the witty master of Trinity,
observed of an undergraduate that "all the time he could spare from the
neglect of his duties he gave to the adornment of his person," the
sarcasm made its slow way into print; whereupon an intelligent British
reader wrote to the periodical which had printed it, and explained

painstakingly that, inasmuch as it was not possible to spare time from
the neglect of anything, the criticism was inaccurate.
Exaggeration of phrase, as well as the studied understatement which is
an even more effective form of ridicule, seem natural products of
American humour. They sound, wherever we hear them, familiar to our
ears. It is hard to believe that an English barrister, and not a Texas
ranch-man, described Boston as a town where respectability stalked
unchecked. Mazarin's plaintive reflection, "Nothing is so disagreeable
as to be obscurely hanged," carries with it an echo of Wyoming or
Arizona. Mr. Gilbert's analysis of Hamlet's mental disorder,--
"Hamlet is idiotically sane, With lucid intervals of lunacy,"--
has the pure flavour of American wit,--a wit which finds its most