Richland beacon., 1873-05-17
The Source OF HumOr.

4 RECENT writer lashes himself into
fury over the iniquities of our American
humOrists, and denOunces them, one and
all, as ''liars and lovers of lies" He has
discovered that ''in almost every state.
ment they make they are guilty of the
grOssest eXaggeratiOn," and from this he
argues that they have no love of truth in
their souls, but are utterly and almost ir-
redeemably bad. We are half tempted to
print the article entire, for the same rea-
son that Mark Twain published serious
English review of the lnnOcents, because
it was the funniest thing he could possibly
| think of.
This censor of the genial humOrists
clearly has no conception of what humOr
il. else he would have discovered that it
is always and necessarily an eXaggeratiOn.
and that our American writers in this
branch OF literature are by no means Pc
culiar in this regard. Leigh Hunts die
tum was true, that humOr is an ebullitiOn
of buOyant animal spirits, and buOyant
animal spirits express themselves always
i'm eXaggeratiOn, because they themselves
are an exaggeratiOn. Your bright, en-
thusiastic boy. fairly running over with
energy and life. is sure to see a thousand
blackbirds in peach tree On any bright
June morning. and yet we never think
him liar because his young eyes see
more of jOyOusness i'm lite than our older
ones possibly can. And it is something
of this same exaggerated appreciation of
pleasurai lie ideas which makes the humOr-
ist "slOp over" to our great delight.
His animal spirits enable him to see more
in men and things than there really is in
them. and he jubilantly tells us, with pen
or pencil. the things which he sees-nOt
to deceive us, but TO let us share in the
fun he has in the sight. Our enjoyment
of humOr is of the keenest and heartiest
kind. chiefly because the buOyant spirit
of which humOr is born is irresistibly con-
tagiOus.
And this is the reason that so small
number of writer's. comparatively, achieve
anything like a genuine success in humOr-
Ous writing. Intellectual force, industry.
acuteness of perception, imagination-all
these are necessary to the humor-
ist, but these alone are not suffi-
cient. HumOr is not the product
of intellect. or of the Imagination.
or of the will, or of industry, or of all
these combined. The buOyant animal
spirit. the perpetual overlooking of the
soul is the first and chief requisite. And
so humorous books or pictures are not so
much works of art as manifestations of
nature, and there Is no branch of litera-
ture or art in which talent and industry
count for so little, and genius for so much,
as i'm this.
But while there are very few people
whose buOyancy is sufficient to make them
humOrists, nearly all of us have enough
of animal spirits to make us keen relish
ers of humOr. Now and then we meet
with an exception. but these are so rare
that the man who "cannOt understand
joke" is commonly regarded as himself
the best of all possible jokes. We never
laughed more immOderately than we did
over the manuscript Of an excellent cler-
gyman, submitted to US for publication a
year or two ago, in which nc in all serious
ness wrote something to this effect: "a
writer has wisely remarked that an ugly
young woman will become a pretty old
one, if she lives long enough; in saying
which he doubtless meant that the {Gpn,no
vation of moral beauty will in in,nternart" tier a,t !"
!i9 for the want Of its phHKpsiid pihHKpid by any means.
In. Inc LII il,d, WIS "a buoyancy was so utter that
~. ~. .r5a 1un mot he quoted never presented
itself TO him as bon mot at all.
Lord Morpeth used to tell Of a Scotch
friend of his, who, when Lord Morpeth
remarked that some people could not feel
a Jest unless it were fired at them with
cannon, replied, "Weel, but hoo can ye
fire a jest OOt of a cannon. mOn" A
lady friend once put a cOnundrum to her
rheumatic old nurse, asking her why
are YOU like church window, Sally:"
and gave the answer, because you are
full of pains - whereupon the old cOlored
woman pityingly replied, .'Oh! dear,
somebody has been fOOlin' Of We, honey.
Denis anudder sort o. panes. Dey's been
foOlin' We, chile. ."-Hea1th and Home.