June 7, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
23 
Goaks and Humor 
By J. G. Squire 
THERE arc a great many books about Wit and 
Humour. Hobbes thouglit one laughed because one 
felt superior ; Bergson thinks that the comic is 
always the animate imitating the mechanical ; and 
Kant tlKHight something else, I forget what. The last treatise 
I read was by the German Professor Freud, who appeared 
anxious to prove that wit and humour are a kind of sexual 
perversions. But I still do not understand what they arc, 
and I have something better to do than make my head ache 
by attempting to invent satisfactory, or even unsatisfactory, 
definitions of them. If it is difficult to define wit and humour, 
it is equally difficult to discriminate precisely between the 
humour of one nation and the humour of another. There 
certainly are differences. But probably there is no special form 
of joke that can be appreciated by every American, and by 
no Englishman, or vice-versa. And there is a great deal of 
American humorous writing which might have been done by 
Englishmen. We are accustomed to think of our humour, 
at its best, as a quieter and wiser thing, urbane and sym- 
pathetic. But Washington Irving and Holmes are (subject 
matter apart) as English as Lamb, if those are our qualities ; 
and many other Americans, in some ways very Transatlantic 
((). Henry and Twain are examples), are masters of the richer 
and deeper humour as well as of the other sort. Bret Harte's 
Condensed Novels, again, might have been written by a very 
restrained European parodist. And when Choreau said 
that " the profession of doing good is full," and Ambrose 
Bierce defined a bottle-nose as " A nose fashioned in the 
impge of its Maker," their mots were in the traditional 
Euiopean mould. There are, however, kinds of humour 
in which the Americans have speciahsed ; the body of 
American humorous literature is as peculiar as it is extensive. 
We have had practitioners in dialect and humorous bad 
spelling ; but there is a difference between them and Josh 
Billings, Artemus Ward, who invented the Goak, and Mr. 
Dooley. We have had humorous travellers, but they are not 
like Mark Twain. Where lies the difference ? 
***** 
.\merican humour, of the distinctively American sort, 
gains something from the peculiar flavour of the American 
dialect. There was a man who travelled in a sleeping car on a 
railway. During the nigiit he wai' annoyed by vermin, and 
he wrote to the headquarters of the company to complain. 
He received back from the administrative head a letter of 
immense effusiveness. Never before had such a complaint 
been lodged against this scrupulously careful line, and 
the management would have suffered any loss rather than 
cause annoyance to so distinguished a citizen as, etc., etc. 
He was very delighted with this abject apology. But as he 
was throwing away the envelope there fell out a slip of paper, 
which had, apparently, been enclosed by mistake. On it 
was a memorandum : " Send this gvy the bug-letter." One 
need not explain how this joke gains from the peculiarity of 
the lan^'uage. (It has incidentally another feature which is 
traditionally a characteristic of much American humour — 
namely, laconicism. All nations have their laconics ; but 
brevity has always been a popular cult in the U.S..\. 
A typical example both of this and of an equally common 
habit of allusiveness is the remark of the Yankee at the Zoo, 
who, for the first time in his life, saw a giraffe. He looked 
at it long and hard, and then observed : " I don't beHeve it.") 
The language does give a tinge to American jests : and, 
naturally, an even more important element is the sum of 
American social conditions and history. The unique circum- 
stances of American life are directly responsible to some of 
the striking things about .American humour. 
***** 
A noticeable thing about American humour— one doesn't 
mean merely the efforts of a few prominent humorists- is 
the range it covers. Few things are sacred, and few are too 
serious to be jested about. Cutting loose from Europe and 
all its traditions (the breach here is rather closing up than 
widening), and living in a new country, where the normal life 
was adventurous and changeful, and anything might turn up 
at anv moment, the .American developed a curious detach- 
ment.' With this came a philosophic whimsicality, which 
treated everything liglitly and saw everything on the comic 
plane. We in Europe have all sorts of taboos. We are 
serious about many things ; and if we are serious about a 
thing we do not (unless we are exceptional people) jest about 
it. The normal .American humorist jests about everything 
(however strongly he may feel about it) from his wife down- 
wards. He will even make jests about millionaires, a thing 
which to most Englishmen seems shocking. If you detach 
yourself suflTciently from things, everything on earth 
will a])pear a little comic, as mdeed it is. This habit of 
standing outside things has been general in America. When 
Artemvis Ward wrote his letter to the Prince of Wales : 
" Friend Wales — You remember me. I saw you in Canady 
a few years ago. I remember you too. I seldom forgit a 
person. ... Of course, now you're married you can 
eat onions," he was not merely the Republican being familiar 
with the Royal Prince : he was doing what he would have 
done to the Head of his own State. Even a Republican 
Englishman would probably have been slightly shocked by 
such irreverence. It was an American, again, who discovered 
that " the cow is an animal with four legs, one at each corner." 
As a scientific fact this, I need scarcely say, had been long 
known : but it took a new pair of eyes to see it precisely in 
this way. 
***** 
.\ European of Mark Twain's abihties ';and position 
would scarcely have written his book about the Court of 
King Arthur. We have too many inhibitions. They are 
great and small. But the American habit of putting remarks 
m a whimsical, humorous form, whatever they are, and 
whatever the occasion, is so widespread that one often finds 
Americans of the most sober and humourless kind putting 
things humorously out of sheer force of national habit. An 
English employee, giving his employer notice, will either say 
that he cannot stand this place any longer or else apologise 
in an embarrassed way for causing inconvenience. The 
.American is more likely to come up with a normal expression 
and observe, " Say, Doc, if you know anybody who wants 
my job, he can have it." Everything is susceptible of 
humour ; and the more extravagant the humour, the better. 
.American humour is, strictly speaking, pervasive. The 
kcturer who announced on his programme that he was 
" compelled to charge one dollar for reserved seats, because 
oats, which two years ago cost 30 cents per bushel, now cost 
one dollar ; hay is also one dollar 75 cents per cwt., formerly 
50 cents," was carrying his systematic h'gh spirits into a place 
where few British entertainers would have thought of being 
funny. It all springs from the state of mind which lea, 
some years ago, to tne formation of Smile Clubs, institutions 
that no other jieople would have dreamed of. Jocosity is 
the best policy. 
***** 
There is an American story about a man who invented a 
pneumatic life-saving device, to be attached to the body 
when jumping from a window during a fire. He announced 
an exhibition test. He sprang from the top <5f a sky-scraper, 
and then " he bounced and bounced and bounced until we 
had to shoot him to save him from death by starvation." 
There is another about a dispute between two fishermen 
as to the relative size of fish in their respective waters. Smaller 
fry having been catalogued, one man said that he once, when 
after very large tarpon, got a whale : to be met by the blase 
repartee, " In my State, sir, we bait with whales." And 
there is another (where it comes from, I forget), about two 
brothers who went out hunting with two rifles iind a single 
bullet, and brought the bullet home after killing a hundred 
head of buffalo. Their method was this. They were very 
crack shots ; and they used to stand one on each side of the 
doomed beast. The bullet was fired by one brother, went 
through the victim, and was received by the muzzle of the 
other brother's rifle. An Englishman, hearing these stories, 
would know where they had come from. We can appreciate 
them, but we do not as a rule make them. We illustrate 
the qualities of men and things by telling lies about them, 
but we do not tell such thumping big ones. Our fishing 
stories are only slightly over the borders of the credible ; 
a foolish person might be taken in by them : the American 
ones are such lies that narrators have no hope that even the 
most innocent will believe them. This obvious difference 
between the usual American and the usual EngUsh method of 
treating a thing humorously may be illustrated by examples. 
Ten years ago, or so, the London, Chatham and Dover Rail- 
way reached its nadir, and all British humorists were 
making jokes about the slowness of the trains. Some of 
