Knoxville daily chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1882, 1882-04-12
American Humor.

In some respects. though in some
only, Charles Lambs humor antici-
pates the type of humor which we
now call, in the main, American.
When, for instance, he gravely mar
rated the origin of the Chinese in,
vention of roast pig, in the burning
down of house-when he told a
friend that he had moved just forty
two inches nearer to his beloved
London-and again, when he wrote
to Manning in China that the new
Persian Ambassador was called
"Shaw Ali Mira" but that the COM
mon people called him ''Shaw Non
sense, we might think we were lis
tening to Artemus Wards or Mark
Twain's minute and serious nonsense.
But for the most part Charles Lambs
humor is more frolicsome, more
whimsical, and less subdued In its
extravaganza more like the gambol-
ing of mind which did not care to
conceal it's enjoyment OF paradox,
and less the inward invisible laugh
ter in which the Yankees most de~
light. Lamb dearly loved d frisk.
And when, for instance, he blandly
proposed to some friend who offered
to wrap up for him bit of old cheese
which he had seemed to like at din
ner, to let him have bit of string
with which he could probably lead
it home there was certainly nothing
in him of the grim impassiveness of
Yankee extravaganza. 1t might be
asserted, perhaps, that, even if the
prospect of a great future for English
humor is good, there is still reason
10 fear that it must dwindle in large,
ness of conception, SO that such mas
sive forms of humor as we find, for
instance, in "Gulliver's Travels or
the ''Tale of a tub, are not likely to
return. But even this we greatly
doubt. Dickens-who as humorist
was probably not inferior in concep-
tons, and certainly more abundant
in creation than any humorist in the
worlds wholly modern, and he GER
tainly has by no means exhausted the
field even of that sort of humor in
which he himself was most potent.
The field of what we may call idealized
vulgarities, which includes sketches
of the abstract monthly nurse whose
every thought and action breathe
the fawning brutalities of the Mrs.
Camp species-of beadles who incar-,
nate all beadledom-of London pick
pockets who have assimilated ali that
is entertaining in the world of pros
fessional slang an nothing that is
disgusting-of boarding house keep
ers whose whole mind is transformed
into an instrument for providing
enough food and gravy and amuse>
ment for their commercial gentle-
men-of water rate collectors gloris
fed by one ideal passion for the bal
let-of raseally schoolmasters whose
every action betrays the coward and
the bully-or of hypocrites who se-
crete airs of pretentions benevolence
as an oil-gland secretes iol, is by no
means exhausted, hardly more than
attacked. And yet it promises a sort
of humor particularly we'll adapted
to this period of at once almost sord
id realism and ingenious abstraction.
Nor can it be denied that "Alice in
Wonderland, . especially such plains
tive ballads as that of the walrus and
the carpenter, provide us with type
of grotesque fancy almost cut free
from the realities of life, and yet
quantity reproducing all the old
human tendencies under absuredly
new conditions nor that this prom>
ises we'll for the infinite fexibility of
the laughing faculty in man. We
quite admit that we never expect to
see the greater types of trans Allan
tic humor reproduced on this side of
the Atlantic. These, for the most
part, imply rare faculty for turn,
ing the mind aside from the direct
way of saying thing to one that is
so indirect as to lead you travelling
on totally opposite track, as, for
example, when Bret Harte declares
that one of his rowdies
'Took point of order, when
| A chunk of old red sandstone hit him in the
| abdomen,
And he smiled kind O. tickly smile, and
curled up on the floor
And the subsekent proceedings interested
him no more;"
OF when the American blasphemer
retorted that if his censor had but
Jumped out of bed on the business
end of a tin,tack, even he would
have cursed some" This wonderful
power of suggesting misleading
analogies taken from the very prov~
ince which would seem to be least
suggested either by analogy or con
trast seems to be, in some sense, in.
digenous in the United States.-The
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