Further Foolishness

Ch. 17 - Humour As I See It

It is only fair that at the back of this book I should

be allowed a few pages to myself to put down some things

that I really think.

Until two weeks ago I might have taken my pen in hand to

write about humour with the confident air of an acknowledged

professional.

But that time is past. Such claim as I had has been taken

from me. In fact I stand unmasked. An English reviewer

writing in a literary journal, the very name of which is

enough to put contradiction to sleep, has said of my

writing, "What is there, after all, in Professor Leacock's

humour but a rather ingenious mixture of hyperbole and

myosis?"

The man was right. How he stumbled upon this trade secret

I do not know. But I am willing to admit, since the truth

is out, that it has long been my custom in preparing an

article of a humorous nature to go down to the cellar

and mix up half a gallon of myosis with a pint of hyperbole.

If I want to give the article a decidedly literary

character, I find it well to put in about half a pint of

paresis. The whole thing is amazingly simple.

But I only mention this by way of introduction and to

dispel any idea that I am conceited enough to write about

humour, with the professional authority of Ella Wheeler

Wilcox writing about love, or Eva Tanguay talking about

dancing.

All that I dare claim is that I have as much sense of

humour as other people. And, oddly enough, I notice that

everybody else makes this same claim. Any man will admit,

if need be, that his sight is not good, or that he cannot

swim, or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon

his sense of humour is to give him a mortal affront.

"No," said a friend of mine the other day, "I never go

to Grand Opera," and then he added with an air of pride,

"You see, I have absolutely no ear for music."

"You don't say so!" I exclaimed.

"None!" he went on. "I can't tell one tune from another.

I don't know _Home, Sweet Home_ from _God Save the King_.

I can't tell whether a man is tuning a violin or playing

a sonata."

He seemed to get prouder and prouder over each item of

his own deficiency. He ended by saying that he had a dog

at his house that had a far better ear for music than he

had. As soon as his wife or any visitor started to play

the piano the dog always began to howl--plaintively, he

said--as if it were hurt. He himself never did this.

When he had finished I made what I thought a harmless

comment.

"I suppose," I said, "that you find your sense of humour

deficient in the same way: the two generally go together."

My friend was livid with rage in a moment.

"Sense of humour!" he said. "My sense of humour! Me

without a sense of humour! Why, I suppose I've a keener

sense of humour than any man, or any two men, in this

city!"

From that he turned to bitter personal attack. He said

that _my_ sense of humour seemed to have withered

altogether.

He left me, still quivering with indignation.

Personally, however, I do not mind making the admission,

however damaging it may be, that there are certain forms

of so-called humour, or, at least, fun, which I am quite

unable to appreciate. Chief among these is that ancient

thing called the Practical Joke.

"You never knew McGann, did you?" a friend of mine asked

me the other day.

When I said I had never known McGann, he shook his head

with a sigh, and said:

"Ah, you should have known McGann. He had the greatest

sense of humour of any man I ever knew--always full of

jokes. I remember one night at the boarding-house where

we were, he stretched a string across the passage-way

and then rang the dinner bell. One of the boarders broke

his leg. We nearly died laughing."

"Dear me!" I said. "What a humorist! Did he often do

things like that?"

"Oh, yes, he was at them all the time. He used to put

tar in the tomato soup, and beeswax and tin-tacks on the

chairs. He was full of ideas. They seemed to come to him

without any trouble."

McGann, I understand, is dead. I am not sorry for it.

Indeed, I think that for most of us the time has gone by

when we can see the fun of putting tacks on chairs, or

thistles in beds, or live snakes in people's boots.

To me it has always seemed that the very essence of good

humour is that it must be without harm and without malice.

I admit that there is in all of us a certain vein of the

old original demoniacal humour or joy in the misfortune

of another which sticks to us like our original sin. It

ought not to be funny to see a man, especially a fat and

pompous man, slip suddenly on a banana skin. But it is.

When a skater on a pond who is describing graceful circles,

and showing off before the crowd, breaks through the ice

and gets a ducking, everybody shouts with joy. To the

original savage, the cream of the joke in such cases was

found if the man who slipped broke his neck, or the man

who went through the ice never came up again. I can

imagine a group of prehistoric men standing round the

ice-hole where he had disappeared and laughing till their

sides split. If there had been such a thing as a prehistoric

newspaper, the affair would have headed up: "_Amusing

Incident. Unknown Gentleman Breaks Through Ice and Is

Drowned._"

But our sense of humour under civilisation has been

weakened. Much of the fun of this sort of thing has been

lost on us.

Children, however, still retain a large share of this

primitive sense of enjoyment.

I remember once watching two little boys making snow-balls

at the side of the street and getting ready a little

store of them to use. As they worked, there came along

an old man wearing a silk hat, and belonging by appearance

to the class of "jolly old gentlemen." When he saw the

boys his gold spectacles gleamed with kindly enjoyment.

He began waving his arms and calling, "Now, then, boys,

free shot at me! free shot!" In his gaiety he had, without

noticing it, edged himself over the sidewalk on to the

street. An express cart collided with him and knocked

him over on his back in a heap of snow. He lay there

gasping and trying to get the snow off his face and

spectacles. The boys gathered up their snow-balls and

took a run toward him. "Free shot!" they yelled. "Soak

him! Soak him!"

I repeat, however, that for me, as I suppose for most of

us, it is a prime condition of humour that it must be

without harm or malice, nor should it convey incidentally

any real picture of sorrow or suffering or death. There

is a great deal in the humour of Scotland (I admit its

general merit) which seems to me not being a Scotchman,

to sin in this respect. Take this familiar story (I quote

it as something already known and not for the sake of

telling it).

A Scotchman had a sister-in-law--his wife's sister--with

whom he could never agree. He always objected to going

anywhere with her, and in spite of his wife's entreaties

always refused to do so. The wife was taken mortally ill

and as she lay dying, she whispered, "John, ye'll drive

Janet with you to the funeral, will ye no?" The Scotchman,

after an internal struggle, answered, "Margaret, I'll do

it for ye, but it'll spoil my day."

Whatever humour there may be in this is lost for me by

the actual and vivid picture that it conjures up--the

dying wife, the darkened room and the last whispered

request.

No doubt the Scotch see things differently. That wonderful

people--whom personally I cannot too much admire--always

seem to me to prefer adversity to sunshine, to welcome

the prospect of a pretty general damnation, and to live

with grim cheerfulness within the very shadow of death.

Alone among the nations they have converted the devil

--under such names as Old Horny--into a familiar

acquaintance not without a certain grim charm of his own.

No doubt also there enters into their humour something

of the original barbaric attitude towards things. For a

primitive people who saw death often and at first hand,

and for whom the future world was a vivid reality that

could be _felt_, as it were, in the midnight forest and

heard in the roaring storm, it was no doubt natural to

turn the flank of terror by forcing a merry and jovial

acquaintance with the unseen world. Such a practice as

a wake, and the merry-making about the corpse, carry us

back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage

in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still

lived. Our funeral with its black trappings and its

elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a

merry-making. Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial

master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the

death-dance. Thus have the ceremonies and the trappings

of death been transformed in the course of ages till the

forced gaiety is gone, and the black hearse and the gloomy

mutes betoken the cold dignity of our despair.

But I fear this article is getting serious. I must

apologise.

I was about to say, when I wandered from the point, that

there is another form of humour which I am also quite

unable to appreciate. This is that particular form of

story which may be called, _par excellence_, the English

Anecdote. It always deals with persons of rank and birth,

and, except for the exalted nature of the subject itself,

is, as far as I can see, absolutely pointless.

This is the kind of thing that I mean.

"His Grace the Fourth Duke of Marlborough was noted for

the open-handed hospitality which reigned at Blenheim,

the family seat, during his regime. One day on going in

to luncheon it was discovered that there were thirty

guests present, whereas the table only held covers for

twenty-one. 'Oh, well,' said the Duke, not a whit abashed,

'some of us will have to eat standing up.' Everybody, of

course, roared with laughter."

My only wonder is that they didn't kill themselves with

it. A mere roar doesn't seem enough to do justice to such

a story as this.

The Duke of Wellington has been made the storm-centre of

three generations of wit of this sort. In fact the typical

Duke of Wellington story has been reduced to a thin

skeleton such as this:

"A young subaltern once met the Duke of Wellington coming

out of Westminster Abbey. 'Good morning, your Grace,' he

said, 'rather a wet morning.' 'Yes' said the Duke, with

a very rigid bow, 'but it was a damn sight wetter, sir,

on the morning of Waterloo.' The young subaltern, rightly

rebuked, hung his head."

Nor is it only the English who sin in regard to anecdotes.

One can indeed make the sweeping assertion that the

telling of stories as a mode of amusing others ought to

be kept within strict limits. Few people realise how

extremely difficult it is to tell a story so as to

reproduce the real fun of it--to "get it over" as the

actors say. The mere "facts" of a story seldom make it

funny. It needs the right words, with every word in its

proper place. Here and there, perhaps once in a hundred

times, a story turns up which needs no telling. The humour

of it turns so completely on a sudden twist or incongruity

in the _denouement_ of it that no narrator, however

clumsy, can altogether fumble it.

Take, for example, this well-known instance--a story

which, in one form or other, everybody has heard.

"George Grossmith, the famous comedian, was once badly

run down and went to consult a doctor. It happened that

the doctor, though, like everybody else, he had often

seen Grossmith on the stage, had never seen him without

his make-up and did not know him by sight. He examined

his patient, looked at his tongue, felt his pulse and

tapped his lungs. Then he shook his head. 'There's nothing

wrong with you, sir,' he said, 'except that you're run

down from overwork and worry. You need rest and amusement.

Take a night off and go and see George Grossmith at the

Savoy.' 'Thank you,' said the patient, 'I _am_ George

Grossmith.'"

Let the reader please observe that I have purposely told

this story all wrongly, just as wrongly as could be, and

yet there is something left of it. Will the reader kindly

look back to the beginning of it and see for himself just

how it ought to be narrated and what obvious error has

been made? If he has any particle of the artist in his

make-up, he will see at once that the story ought to

begin:

"One day a very haggard and nervous-looking patient called

at the house of a fashionable doctor, etc. etc."

In other words, the chief point of the joke lies in

keeping it concealed till the moment when the patient

says, "Thank you, I am George Grossmith." But the story

is such a good one that it cannot be completely spoiled

even when told wrongly. This particular anecdote has been

variously told of George Grossmith, Coquelin, Joe Jefferson,

John Hare, Cyril Maude, and about sixty others. And I

have noticed that there is a certain type of man who, on

hearing this story about Grossmith, immediately tells it

all back again, putting in the name of somebody else,

and goes into new fits of laughter over it, as if the

change of name made it brand new.

But few people, I repeat, realise the difficulty of

reproducing a humorous or comic effect in its original

spirit.

"I saw Harry Lauder last night," said Griggs, a Stock

Exchange friend of mine, as we walked up town together

the other day. "He came on to the stage in kilts" (here

Grigg started to chuckle) "and he had a slate under his

arm" (here Griggs began to laugh quite heartily), "and

he said, 'I always like to carry a slate with me' (of

course he said it in Scotch but I can't do the Scotch

the way he does it) 'just in case there might be any

figures I'd be wanting to put down'" (by this time,

Griggs was almost suffocated with laughter)--"and he took

a little bit-of chalk out of his pocket, and he said"

(Griggs was now almost hysterical), "'I like to carry a

wee bit chalk along because I find the slate is'" (Griggs

was now faint with laughter) "'the slate is--is--not

much good without the chalk.'"

Griggs had to stop, with his hand to his side, and lean

against a lamp-post. "I can't, of course, do the Scotch

the way Harry Lauder does it," he repeated.

Exactly. He couldn't do the Scotch and he couldn't do

the rich mellow voice of Mr. Lauder and the face beaming

with merriment, and the spectacles glittering with

amusement, and he couldn't do the slate, nor the "wee

bit chalk"--in fact he couldn't do any of it. He ought

merely to have said, "Harry Lauder," and leaned up against

a post and laughed till he had got over it.

Yet in spite of everything, people insist on spoiling

conversation by telling stories. I know nothing more

dreadful at a dinner table than one of these amateur

raconteurs--except perhaps, two of them. After about

three stories have been told, there falls on the dinner

table an uncomfortable silence, in which everybody is

aware that everybody else is trying hard to think of

another story, and is failing to find it. There is no

peace in the gathering again till some man of firm and

quiet mind turns to his neighbour and says, "But after

all there is no doubt that whether we like it or not

prohibition is coming." Then everybody in his heart says,

"Thank heaven!" and the whole tableful are happy and

contented again, till one of the story-tellers "thinks

of another," and breaks loose.

Worst of all perhaps is the modest story-teller who is

haunted by the idea that one has heard this story before.

He attacks you after this fashion:

"I heard a very good story the other day on the steamer

going to Bermuda"--then he pauses with a certain doubt

in his face--"but perhaps you've heard this?"

"No, no, I've never been to Bermuda. Go ahead."

"Well, this is a story that they tell about a man who

went down to Bermuda one winter to get cured of rheumatism

--but you've heard this?"

"No, no."

"Well he had rheumatism pretty bad and he went to Bermuda

to get cured of it. And so when he went into the hotel

he said to the clerk at the desk--but, perhaps you know

this."

"No, no, go right ahead."

"Well, he said to the clerk, 'I want a room that looks

out over the sea'--but perhaps--"

Now the sensible thing to do is to stop the narrator

right at this point. Say to him quietly and firmly, "Yes,

I have heard that story. I always liked it ever since it

came out in _Tit Bits_ in 1878, and I read it every time

I see it. Go on and tell it to me and I'll sit back with

my eyes closed and enjoy it."

No doubt the story-telling habit owes much to the fact

that ordinary people, quite unconsciously, rate humour

very low: I mean, they underestimate the difficulty of

"making humour." It would never occur to them that the

thing is hard, meritorious and dignified. Because the

result is gay and light, they think the process must be.

Few people would realise that it is much harder to write

one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in _Punch_ than to

write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark

Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_ is a greater work than Kant's

_Critique of Pure Reason_, and Charles Dickens's creation

of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human

race--I say it in all seriousness--than Cardinal Newman's

_Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom_. Newman

only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world.

Dickens gave it.

But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what

we call humour is revealed only to the few who, by instinct

or by effort, have given thought to it. The world's

humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the

highest product of our civilisation. One thinks here not

of the mere spasmodic effects of the comic artist or the

blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really

great humour which, once or twice in a generation at

best, illuminates and elevates our literature. It is no

longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words,

or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that

strike us as "funny." Its basis lies in the deeper

contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity

between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager

and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness

to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that

are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as

we look back upon the course that has been traversed we

pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old

age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry

quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger

aspect, humour is blended with pathos till the two are

one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled

heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.

END