Humorous Columns of Frontier Newspapers: Part 4

 Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

As we mentioned in a previous post, Wild West newspapers seem to have been fond of philosophizing about the causes and effects of humor. As the titles of these articles and columns indicate, there were divergent opinions and theories concerning the topic.

“What is Humor?” asks an article in the Saline County Journal (August 28, 1879). Of course, the anonymous author answers his own question straightaway, or, rather, offers various responses of experts on the matter.

For Melville De Lancey Landon, who went by the nom de plume Eli Perkins, humor derived from the exaggeration to be found in “telling a big yarn” and the 'ability to tell a funny thing in a funny manner.”

The Internet Archives website features several specimens of his funny stuff. Among others, his Off to Saratoga parades horse-racers, whose research enables them to foretell the future behavior of the thoroughbreds they investigate (“When the race comes off, they know every horse—his pedigree, what he has done, what he can do, and what he will do); gamblers, “a handsome set of rascals” whose ability to make money at their sport perplexes their observers until, at last, one discovers their secret (“They bring others to play, and when they have lost fortunes they get their receive a percentage as their commission from the owner of the bank”); and clergymen, who are nothing if not creative in their theology (Sunday is the “strongest day in the week” due to the fact that 'all the other days are week days”). 

 

“[James Montgomery] Bailey of the Danbury News, our columnist suspects is himself devoid of a sense of wit, but has a prodigious sense of humor, as is clear from his ability to “scrawl off a laughable column” concerning the most ordinary of inanimate objects, including “a stove pipe, chair leg, [or a] chicken or cucumber.” Samples of his work also appear on the Internet Archives website. The story of the stove pipe (“Putting Up a Stove Pipe”) isn't really a tale of an inanimate object as much as it's a humorous account of a the stress evident in a married couple's everyday lives. Here is the opening paragraph:

Putting up a stove is not so difficult in itself. It is the pipe that raises four-fifths of the mischief and all the dust. You may take down a stove with all the care in the world, and yet that pipe won’t come together again as it was before. You find this out when you are standing on a chair with your arms full of pipe, and your mouth full of soot. Your wife is standing on the floor in a position that enables her to see you, the pipe and the chair, and here she gives utterance to those remarks that are calculated to hasten a man into the extremes of insanity. Her apron is pinned over her waist, and her hands rest on her hips. She has got one of your hats on her head, and your linen coat on her back, and a pair of galoshes on her feet. There is about five cents’ worth of pot-black on her nose and a lot of flour on her chin, and altogether she is a spectacle that would inspire a dead man with distrust. And while you are up there trying to circumvent the awful contrariness of the pipe, and telling that you know some fool has been mixing it, she stands safely on the floor, and bombards you with such domestic mottoes as, “What’s the use of swearing so?” “You know no one has touched that pipe.” “You ain’t got any more patience than a child.” “Do be careful of that chair.” And then she goes off, and reappears with an armful more of pipe, and before you are aware of it she has got that pipe so horribly mixed up that it does seem no two pieces are alike.

 

Our columnist also mentions the names of better-known such humorists as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, and, of course, the great humorist Mark Twain.

Most of “What Is Humor?” is about what humor is not or what it may be, in part. Answers to this question, of course, have long defied any authoritative answer and tend to elicit suggestions, rather than unified or even generally accepted, theories as to the nature and origin of humor itself, nor do these partial answers, to the extent that they are “answers” at all, much explain how and why humor “works.” The best we can hope for, our guide suggests, are glimpses of humor itself.

Paradoxically, our expert says, the humorist is quite often not amusing under ordinary circumstances or everyday conversations. At best, perhaps, he suggests, we can remark that humorists seem to possess the ability to combine “comicalities” in creative and amusing ways, a feat that can be accomplished on occasion, if not on a regular basis even by folks who are not known to be funny (and maybe do not intend to be so).

Ward witnessed this very phenomenon firsthand after one of his performances, when he “was outdone by one of his hearers who came up to him after the lecture was over.” Ward had performed before an “audience [that] had been [so] unusually dull [that] only a man over in one corner, now and then, encouraged the funny man.” After the lecture, this man approached the humorist:

. . . Said he to Ward:

“I say, you do not know me?”

“I do not,” said Ward.

“What, you don't know me,” the man shrieked in surprise, “why I was the man that laughed!” Ward shook himself out of town, convinced that he had met a funny man at last.”—Bart L. Bonsall, the “Postal Pellet,” Man of the Camden (N. J.) Post

Humorous Columns of Frontier Newspapers: Part 3

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Wild West newspapers, it seems, were fond of philosophizing about the causes and effects of humor, but they also offered samples of the merchandise.

Sometimes, the samples themselves rely upon reasoning—or, rather, errors in the exercise of that faculty. The January 19, 1900, edition of The Daily Morning Alaskan column “Humor of the Hour” offers its readers these choice morsels, borrowed form their original sources.

The first anecdote is based upon jumping to a conclusion; the second involves a mistaken inference; and the third relies upon the fallacy of begging the question (and early twentieth-century sexism).

Untitled

Of course she was indignant when it dawned on her that some one was trying to flirt with her. Yet there was no denying the man behind her had kept steadily after her since she had left the street car.

“And old enough to be in better business,” she said to herself indignantly. “I'll cross the street just to make sure whether he is really following.”

She crossed the street, and so did he. Then she turned on him.

“Sir,” she said, “why do you persist in following me?”

He started, as if disturbed in the midst of some abstruse mental calculation, and for a minute seemed to be bewildered. Then he bowed courteously and said:

“Madam, why do you persist in preceding me?”

Two doors farther on, he turned in, producing a latchkey as he did so and showing in other ways that he had reached his destination. She turned back and went around the block rather than pass that house, and her face was still red when she reached home. —Chicago Post

Making It Right

“Madam,” said the leader of The Best Citizens' league, “I have come to inform you that we just lynched your husband by mistake.”

The bereaved woman covered her face with her hands and began to moan.

“There, there,” the best citizen went on, “don't cry. We expect to get the right man before night.” —Chicago News

Couldn't Believe It

“Do you see that girl with the fluffy brown hair over there?”

“The one with the pink roses in her bodice?”

“Yes. She knows French, German, Latin and Greek, besides English, and she graduated a few weeks ago.”

“Pshaw, that can't be right! There must be some mistake. Why, that girl is actually beautiful!” (Title of source is illegible.)