Nineteenth Century Humor
Bill Long 2/18/06
Historical humor is difficult to study and appreciate because we are missing the two ingredients most necessary to understand its appeal as humor: (1) the gestures, mimicry or tone of the speaker; and (2) the precise historical context in which words are spoken. Humor is usually situation-dependent. For example, I know I can draw laughter from my students if I make comments that play off of what students had said (or not said) in previous classes, though no one would "get" the humor if they read it on a cold and lifeless sheet of paper. These realities need to be understood within the context of an even larger issue which concerns me about humor from 19th century America--and that is, if such humor was to be spoken today about people or situations with which we are familiar, would we find it funny? That is, have standards of humor changed in America in 150 years such that only a few things from back then would evoke laughter in us now?
The issue came to me afresh when I was studying Mark Perry's Grant and Twain (2004). In this essay I will relate two brief stories where Twain's humor was widely appreciated at the time and then tell the story, in Twain's words, of the biggest miscalculation of his life in telling a humorous story.
Two "Successful" Humorous Stories
Twain, as Perry argues, was a "Grant-intoxicated" man. He met Grant early in the his Presidency (1869), and then endeared himself to Grant through the following story told a decade later at the Palmer House in Chicago [Grant had left the Presidency in 1877 and traveled the world to international acclaim for two years after that]. After dinner, Grant sat impassively as a round of testimonials was delivered. Twain vowed to break his stony demeanor and told the following (obviously apocryphal) story. He said he recalled a poignant moment in Grant's infancy where the "future illustrious commander-in-chief of the American armies" gave attention "to trying to find some way to get his big toe into his mouth" (Perry, xxvii). The gauntlet was thrown down, and Twain now had to rise to the challenge he had issued himself. So, he continued, "And if the child is but the father of the man there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded." Perry says that the joke became the talk of the nation even though we can see only a very attenuated humor in the remark 127 years later (Grant was, indeed, accused of putting his foot in his mouth throughout his presidency).
Again, when Twain and Cable were touring Buffalo, the home town of President-elect Grover Cleveland, on Dec. 10 and 11, 1884, Twain began his reading by peering out over the audience and saying: "I miss a good many faces. They have gone--gone to the tomb, to the gallows, or to the White House [Cleveland was in Albany at the time]. All of us are entitled to at least one of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for all" (quoted in Perry, 137). Well, are you laughing yet? I am not sure we would find that funny today.
When Twain Bombed
No one was more aware of how his humor completely "missed" his audience than Twain himself. On December 17, 1877, at the 70th birthday party of John Greenleaf Whittier, Twain was to entertain the audience with an after-dinner speech. I give the opening lines of the speech here. Suffice it to say that Twain used it as an occasion to lampoon the three "active volcanoes" or "billows" of the Boston literary establishment--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Each man was at least a generation senior to Twain, and Twain told a story in which each of the three supposedly visited a CA miner in the 1860s and quoted his own poetic works when the miner invited them in for supper. This attempt at presenting a ludicrous situation fell completely flat, and Twain knew it. He says,
"When I sat down (after the speech) it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat. I shall never be as dead again as I was then, I shall never be as miserable again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I shall never be as wretched again as I was then."
Even William Dean Howells, one of Twain's closest friends, tried to comfort him but could only manage a gasp (full quotation is here). Twain attributed his lack of success in that environment to the fact that he was a neophyte speaker.
Twenty-eight years later Twain remarked that he went over the speech and could really find nothing offensive in it. It was humorous and light-hearted. But, in my mind, he overlooked a cardinal rule about success in public speaking. In order to be applauded and appreciated, you need to honor your audience in ways that make them feel flattered. Before you poke fun at people, they have to give you permission, as it were, to do so. How does this happen? By having established a relationship with them previously. But it is exceedingly difficult to do intergenerational humor, especially if the one dealing the humor is the young one and the targets of the humor are the "old guard." Some of Twain's words describing that event are memorable:
"It was an atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put into Cellini's autobiography [Cellini's father showed his son the ability of a salamander to survive a fire]. There was a frightful pause. There was an awful silence, a desolating silence."
Conclusion
So, I don't yet quite know the answer to my question posed earlier. I suspect that 19th century humor was more of the "tall tale" variety while ours partakes more of "buffoonery" or "the ironic," though the jury is still out on that. I think I will turn to analyzing a book of late 19th century humor that no one has read--called Drummers Yarns and see if I can get any further on this question. I hope to be able to write about it soon.
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