The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1911-07-10
American HuInor

We are sensible, or we seem to be
sensible, of a lull in American humor,
If We may so phrase it, in which we
may fifty look about u.s. and challenge
the elements as to their intentions
concerning it. Sometimes we will
confess, we have been afraid that Am
erican humor had possibly overdone
itself. There was q moment, baleful
or hopeful as the reader may decide,
when, just before the lapse of faith,
it appeared as If We almost expected
to be saved by humor. That may have
been an Illusion but it " as strong en-
ough to prompt the most serious in
quiry into the nature of humor and its
place in the spiritual orCer of things.
Clearly, one could not conceive of an
angel joking, and properly speaking,
could there be any such thing as jok-
ing in heaven? By that time hell was
about being disposed of by popular
vote, or by a consensus of newspapers,
rather, and it was only of heaven that
one could think in the connection.
Was there not something essentially
cruel in humor? Did not it, in its last
analysis, rest upon the derision of
some human infirmity, or deformity,
or imbecility, and could such things be
matter of mirth with the heavenly host
or any of it? The arcti-f1end. before
he was blotted out with his followers
by the newspapers and the newer cri-
ticism, might have subtly or coarsely
found those obliquities funny; Satan
might, Beelzebub might, Mammon
himself might; but could Michael, or
Gabriel or Ithuriel, before they too
! paied in the blaze of journalistic inves-
tigation? In the general substitution
of humor for faith as a saving agency,
one had to ask ones self these pierre
| ing questions.
Their consideration brought to light
several facts concerning the nature of
humor which one had to subject to the
severeSt scrutiny. At first it appeared
as If the broader humor was the kind
1 lier, was, in fact, not at all cruel, since
| it involved it's object in a sort of con-
fession of the general human weakness
and pitied while it laughed, and in
vited it's object to laugh with it. But
this inference scarcely boro examina-
ton. There is nothing crueler than
the fun of barbarians or of boys, and
/ in emergency from barbaris-l and boy
hood into civilization and maturity,
Ihumor kept too much OF both. The
joking in Rabelais is not only filthy, it
| is atrocious; and when yos come to
the humaner humor of Cervantes, it is
still so abominably unfeeling that it is
doubtful whether Don Qujxote has not
died the death because the fun of the
book was mostly so brutal that man
kind could no longer bear it, rather
than because the books o. chivalry
which 1t burlesqued were no longer
! known to readers, and the Duriesque
was uninteliigible Much of the humor
in Shakespeare is cruel, so cruel that
Mark Twain used to say that when it
did not bore him it offended him past
endurance Consider what an awful
thing the mocking of Malvolio was,
how heart1ess the jokes PUT upon Fal-
staff The one great English hum or
ist who never had credit for the high
moral quality of his humor was Swift,
who really seldom hurt but to heal,
but who got himself permanently i'm
agined a cynical savage by a humorist
who ought to have been kinder to him
and truer He came nearer being the
purely and entirely humorous humorist
we are requiring from the future as a
successor to Mark Twain. and he was
the most eminent predecessor of Mark
Twain in the conscienced humor we
must always associate with that great
pseud onym.-WiIliam Dean Howells,
in