WIT AND HUMOR

Evening Star, Issue 17284, 24 February 1920, Page 2

WIT AND HUMOR

[By Caxon Nevim..] Two _ things are always being mixed-*-wit a-ad humor. Th-.'. Frenchman is witty, sometimes humorous; ths Englishman humorous, feut seldom witty, quits as of ton • unconsciously so—witness Ge-M-go Borrow when ho threw hi;- Italian cook out of the window. Ituslung to the window he exclaimed: "Good God! I had forgotten the violets'" A'-Scotsman is more humorous than tiie Englishman, but his humor is of an even drier tyj>9. Dean R-amsay tells of a festive party where all the gnesta had finally subsided under the table, and one, an "Englishman, who had also retired, there as a matter of precaution, felt a hand fumbling at his neckcloth. Full of alarm, he asked who it whs. " Pkass, lam the boy who undoes tho cravats!" was the answer. Perhaps tins may be called moist humor and not dry; but- it has tho Scottish tang all right,. The only class 50 years ago where wit really existed was among the lawyers. Whether their position made them witty at ether people's expense or not I cannot say. Apropos of the Scotch sense of I humor, Lord Brampton telis a story which nits both ways. " Cockburn was sitting next to Thesigor during a trial before Campbell, Chief Justice, in which the Judge read some French documents, and, being a .Scotchman, it attracted a good deal of attention. Cockburn, who was g, good French scholar, was much aimoved p tno Chief Justice's pronunciation of "the I'renca language. "He is murdering it," said he. "murdering it." "'No mv dear C-Ockburiv answered Thesiger. "lie*is not kl bnig it, only Scotching it/' Of this type wore both Svdney Smith and Douglas -ferrold. Svdney Smith ha» imd many jokes fathered on him, good, ba.ci, and indifferent, from his celebrated aaviceto the London City Corporation to, put thieir heads together, when they were consulting about the materials for paving the city; down to any stupid witticism which had no father. The following, however, Lord Brampton relates on the authority of Sydney Smith's son. " His father had been sent for to sec an old lady who was one of his most troublesome parishioners. Sad to say. she had always been querulous and quarrelsome; and her husband had had an uncomfortable time with her. When Sydney Smith reached th? house the old lady was dead, and the bereaved widower, a religious man in his way, said: "Oh, sir,' you are too late, my poo-.-, dear wife lias 'gone to Abraham's bosom." "Poor Abraham," exclaimed Sydney, "she'll tear his inside out." Douglns Jerrold was not- always too amiable in his wit, especially when lie did not like people. Alceting one vc-rv dull person at his club, a- Sir Charles Taylor, the question of music cropped up. Sir Charles was fond of music, "and remarked that ' The Last Pose of Summer ' so affected him that it quite carried him away. "Can anyone hum it?" asked Jerrold. Stephen 'Leacock is not to bo taken as the exponent of a new kind of American humor. He lives in America, if is true, but there the resemblance ceases. Mark Twain is an .American humorist pure and simple. His first great success, ' The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,' has all the elements of 'The Innocents Abroad/ 'Roughing It,' and A Tramp Abroad I —exaggerated comparisons, the wildest and most absurd statements made in an unmoved tone, and antithesis piled on antithesis. Of course. A lark Twain was not- onlv a humorist of this kind. 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Fin' are Alirk Twain's own boyhood, aud ' Life on tho Afississippi' is h'i< early manhood. If ever any of his books deserved to live it is the "first two, and if any deserve, inc-ine: athui it is 'A Yankee at the L'o-jrt of King Arthur,' where 'ho crudest iirnoranco of Feudalism is mingled with a ghastly jumble of modern electricity.

For pure boy humor of the best sort take an example of this sort from 'Tom Sawyer ' ; Tom has been punished by Aunt Polly unjustly. "He pictured him"stlf lying sick unto death, and his auntbending over him, beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to tho wall, and die with that word unpaid. Ah. how would she feel then? And he pictured himself brought home from the river dead, with his'curls all wet and his poor hands still for ever, and his sore heart at rest. About half-past 9 or 10 he came along the deserted street to where tho adored unknown lived ; he paused a moment : no sound foil upon bis listening ear : a candle was casting adull glow upon tiie curtains m' a secondstory window. He climbed the fence. his stealthy way through the plants, till he stood under that window; ho looked up at it long mid with emotion; then he laid him down on the ground under it, disposing himself upon his back, with his hands clasped uuon his breast, and holdiii-g his poor wilted Slower. And thus he would dio--out in the cold world, with no shelter over his homeless head: and, oh, would she drop one tear upon his poor lifeless form? Would she heave one little sight to see a bright _ young life so rudely blighted ? The window went up. a maidservant's discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains! The strangling hero sprang up with a relieving snort : -there was a whizz as of a. missile in the air; a sound as of shivering glass followed, and a small vague form went over the fence and shot away in the gloom." This is pure fun. and ; Tom Sawyer' is full of this kind of fun, w-hioh occasionally changes into farce. Witness the episode of the dog in ehim-h.. who iiicautiouslv sat down "upon a beetle. "There, was a wild yelp of agr-uy, and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelp's continued. and so did the dog : he crossed the hmiso in front- of the altar, he flew down the other

aisle, ho crossed before the doors, hp clamored up the home stretch. His anguish grew with his progress, till presently lie was but a woolly comet, moving in its, orbit with the gleam .and the speed of lights At last the frontic sufferer sheered trom its course and sprang into its master's He flung it out of the window, and the voice of distres-s quicklv thinned away and died in the distance." * This is pure, farce, but delightful farce all the same Stephen Leacock, on theother hand, has a more delicate touch altogether, and more than a hint of European culture, where Alaik Twain is natural genius without the French polish of an educational outfit. Leacock deals in touches whio.il at times recall AJark Twain, « s in Lapses,' in the article 'Boardinghouse. Geometry.' "The landlady of 'a boarding;house is a .parallelogram—that is, an oblong, angular figure, which cannot be described/but which is equal to anything. _ AH tho other rooms being taken, a single room is said to be a double room. A pie may be produced anv number Of times. The landlady can bo reduced to her lowest terms bv a, series, of propositions. The clothes of a bca-vding-house bed, though produced ever so far both ways, will not meet. Any two meals at a boarding-house aie together less than two square meals." Alar'fc Twain would hail this ?.? something quite in his owi, vein. In 'Helping the Armenians,' in the fame volume, there is a more deft- kind of sstira altogether. . It is a satiie that has more than a suspicion of truth in it as regards church finance, and even tiie finance of secular undertakings know something of it:

The financial afl'airs of the parish church up at Doogalvilie have been getting rather into a tangle in the last sis ninths. The people of tha church were specialty enxiona "to do something toward the general public subscription of tho town on behalf of the imhaDpv Av~ mc-niar>3, nnd to thai purpose thev determined to devote the collections, taken up at a scries of special evening services. To givejhe right sort of swing to the stfTvices. ami to stimulate generous giving, a new pipe organ into tho church. In oidor to nuiko a prelijninarv payment on the organ, it was okknded to raise a mortgage on the parsonage. To pay tho interest on the morfcgiigo tho choir of tho church got up a sacred ccuoert in the town hall To pay for tho town hall, the Willing Workers' Guild held a social in tho Siindar school. To pay the expenses of tho social the rector delivered a public lecture on 'ltalv and Her Past/ llkistiatod 'O7 a :nagio X^..

? tern. To pav for the magic inntern tl;e 1 curate and the ladies of the church got up soma am&tcu? . theatricals. FinaSj.-. J to pav for the costumes for the theatricals, tie rector felt it his duty to dis»ens'j with tho curate.

As the University Senators have just left Daruvlin, & few of Leacock's ideals on education are much to ...the point. Educations axe divided into splendid educations, thorough classical educa-

tions, and averege educations. AH very old men have splendid educations; nil men who apparently know nothing elso have thorough clasHk-al education"; nobody has an s-ver-ago education. An education when it is all written cuton foolscap covers nearly 10 sheets. Here is his sliest on history : Aztecs, a. fabulous race, half :n,-,n, half harse, half moundbuiiders. They flourished at about the same time a.? the early Calithumpjans. They bsve ileft (some awifully Stupendous numr.monts of themselves somewhere. Life of CVsar : A famous Bomnn general, ths last- who over landed in Britain without being stopped at the- C;:.?-tom-house-.

Life oi Dante : An Italian; the first to introduce the banana and the class

of street 'organ known as " Dante's Inferno."

Peter the Great, Alfred the Great, j Frederick tho Great, John the Great. ! Tom the Great, Jim the Great, Joe the j Great. It is impossible for a busy man j to _ keep these apart. They sought * living as kings and apostles and pugilists, and so on. ' I Aristotle and Dryden said that genius j was allied to madness, and most, of the! etupid_ people in the world have been i repeating too phrase ever since. Samuel ! Warren, the author of 'Ten Thousand a Year/ a celebrated novel of its. day, wus I made a Commissioner of Lunacy, and in i the course of his inspections camo across j one gentleman who on Warren's first visit claimed to be St. Paul, and on that ae- I count demanded immense reverence. The i second visit he insisted that ho was the ' Shah. Warren asked him how lie err- ! plained the diftioulty. H& replied: "Tnei explanation, my clear sir, 'is ' simple.' j It- was tho same mother, but two fathers." j Another of his ji-atients told him that he I had married the daughter of "Auld Hornie." "She was a, nice piri enough." ho I said, " and though my people thought i ' had-married beneath me, 1 whs s.\usfie■! ■ with her rank, seeing she v.-p.< a Prince's daughter." " I hope," .- :a jJ Warren, "thatyour marriage was a happy one." "Yes/' said he. with ;: . sign, ""but wdun't ;;<*(. on with the old folks." j The following stories have never, to j my knowledge, appeared in any book, ; with one or two exceptions, where the stories are apocrypnal. Thev are told of Archbishop Temple, who was noted for bis sardonic, humor :■—

On one or.-nsion a, lady who was sit-tin-next to_ him at dinner regaled the Primate with a long story about her aunt, who had recently just- missed a certain tram, and so escaped the terrible accident which befell it a few hours later. She finished her story by asking the' archbishop if he did not regard that as a peculiarly marked interference of a beneficent providence mi behalf of her aunt. The archbishop replied with grim brevitv -. "Can't say—don't know your aunt."' One of his London clergy once complained to him that ho had" " no time." "No time," said the Primate. "You have all there is." Me was once met in Pall Mail, hurrying off to the House of Lords, with "a ■small shiny black leather bag of the five-shilling kind in his hand, itis friend asked him/what he was carrying. "Oh. they arc my robes," twanged the archbishop.

At a London confirmation the somewhat pompous vicar was the candidates and tho choir, and everyone and everything concerned, until ' the bishop beckoned the i'ussv cleric, and with stage whisper, which rang 'round toe church, exclaimed : "Don't fidtiet." At a public meeting he'was asked by a foolish speaker: "Shall I be in order, your grace, in what I am goin.; to sivv'; " Temple rasped out-: " I don't know what you are going to say." His voice was not only rough, but- tuneless. On. one occasion, when taking part in a London church service as ail ordina.ry worshipper and singing a hvmn lusl'ily according to liis wont, his next-door neighbor, a mechanic, kept turning to him with evident signs of displeasure. But-tbe archbishop continued his jevful "raise" until his neighbor, slamming his hymn bc#>k shut, said : " I s-nv. guv'ner, chuck it. You're spoiling th'- blonmins show."

Another fussy cleric wrote to him, suggesting a dozen different positions fr.r°n sacred .picture he wished to hang in ihe church. The reply came back on a. post card; "Dear B—'-; hang your picture." Many reasons have been 'given for the respect in which the archbishop was held. The quaintest was that of the' Devonshire fanner, who declared : " I do lnv our bishop,/e do 'oiler so." Another recommendation was given by a. London policeman to his friend soon after Temple became Bishop of Loudon. "My word. Jim./ quoth ho, "the bishop's a fine man. It would take two of us to run him in."