Copyright 2020 by Gary L.Pullman
In
a time such as our own, when newspapers are quickly becoming a thing
of the past, it is difficult, perhaps, to imagine how readers, in the
past, looked forward to the delivery of their daily chronicles.
The
newspaper brought the world into their homes, where the news of the
day—stories of election fraud, of gunfights, or stagecoach and
train robberies, of hangings, of gold strikes—could be read in armchairs by the
fireside or over bacon and eggs at breakfast tables.
Stories
of travel and adventure, of newfangled inventions, of battle and of war
in the planet's far-flung countries could be read and debated in pool
halls and barbershops and saloons.
The
newspaper opened parochial, small-town life on the frontier to the
world at large. The stories, often reported in a dramatic tone, were
calculated to provoke, to excite, to anger, and to amaze.
Journalism
was emotional; unless a newspaper article did as good a job at
arousing its readers' passions as it did in relating the facts, a
story hadn't successfully performed its task. (In truth,
sensationalism was often more important than objectivity, just as
feeling was more significant than facts.)
In
their efforts to amuse and to be many, if not all, things to
all readers, frontier newspapers also often contained humorous
columns. Indeed, these periodicals included even analyses of the
nature and methodology of humor, as in the “Wit and Humor”
article published in the November 2, 1889, edition of Elko, Nevada's
Daily Independent, which
states that, although “laughter may be either genial or malignant,
. . . it is allied rather to egoism and contempt than to affection
and devotedness, the chief source of the ludicrous being the
degradation of some person or thing which we have been accustomed to
associate with power, dignity, or gravity.”
Although
this is but one of several competing theories of what tickles the
funny bone and why, it certainly prescribes, for reader and humorist
alike, the main types of humor, their common wellsprings and method, and
even the typical targets of the humorist. But our author, who prefers
the protection provided by anonymity, further enlightens his readers
as to the differences between wit and humor.
Sydney Smith
Originally, the writer
instructs, “wit” referred to “intelligence,” but has since
itself “become so degraded that paronomasia [the newspaper writers
of yore were often intimately familiar with the lexicon] it is
considered a species of wit.” The rest of the column continues to
differentiate between humor and wit, backing its claims with allusions to the
English wit Sydney Smith, the essayist William Hazlitt, the
lexicographer Noah Webster, and the satirist Thomas Carlyle and ending
with an example of each category.
As
an instance of humor, the author cites Miguel de Cervantes's Don
Quixote: the would-be knight exemplifies humor, the columnist says, when he explains to his page,
“The reason, Sancho, why thou feelest that pain all down thy back
is that the stick which gave it thee was of length to that extent.”
As
an exhibit of wit, the writer repeats the anecdote of a mute whose
master reproached him for laughing “at a funeral” by observing,
“You rascal, you, I have been raising your wages for these two
years past on condition that you should appear more sorrowful, and
the higher wages you receive the happier you look.”
The
article, both educational and amusing, is a good mix, and a good
example, of the humor and wit its author defines, in all places, on the page of a newspaper published in one of the towns of the American Wild West!
No comments:
Post a Comment