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We turn from considering the general nature of humor to the question of its expression, which means the way in which it is ‘put over.’ Indeed, one may revert to etymology and say that the expression of humor means the way it is expressed, or ‘pressed out,’ like wine from grapes as it were. First we may discuss the humor got out of mere words, that is, incongruities found in the words themselves, probably the most primitive method of humor conveyed in language as apart from pantomime, gesture and action. When we see dogs at play we realize that they have reached the humor of action—elusive dodging, artful nipping of the hind leg, etc. This means more than the mere ‘learning to fight’ which some biologists see in it, a sort of survival quality to sustain the evolution of dogs. It has in it the quite different element of ‘fun,’ of nascent humor. But dogs never get beyond this. If they could start a series of funny barks, imitative barks, wrong kind of barks, and do barking for barking’s sake, that would be the dawning humor of words. But they don’t.

Primitive races must have begun very early to find incongruities in their first beginnings of speech that would make the first beginnings of verbal humor. The kind of languages that they used, agglutinative, and made of combinations of repeated monosyllables all alike till rearranged or ‘resung’ in a different way, would lend themselves to it. The Chinese language, still of this form, must be, if I understand it right, one enormous pun. It is as if one struck in English such combinations as “Let’s have a ship-shape shop!” Compare the rapid remark of the busy French butcher—“À qui sont ces saucissons-ci et à qui sont ces saucissons là?” or the immortal “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”

Thus do we notice little children just beginning to talk mutter a word, and then fall to laughing at it. We are here witnessing the child repeat, as it does in all things, the evolution of the race. The little creature is back in Asia, fifty thousand years ago. It would be greatly to be desired that some properly equipped scholar should make an investigation and write a work on “Primitive Humor.” No doubt many scholars, anthropologists, have come very close to the topic: but the doubt is whether they are properly equipped. A blind man cannot write on sight.

From the point of view of the world of the last three thousand years, the world of written books, the earliest forms of ‘fun with words’ seem to be found in repetition, in rhythm, in alliteration, in double sense to single sound (puns), and in queer scholarly trickeries of language such as anagrams, acrostics, and crossword puzzles.

Repetition, saying a thing twice over—and ‘then some’—is one of the oldest and most obvious methods of emphasis, of imitation and, in a sense, of amusement. We still revert to it very naturally when we talk of a ‘long, long way,’ a ‘big, big man’ or in the familiar ‘very, very’ so much used in England. One has the idea (quite unprovable) that this is more habitual in the Old World than the New—English people are more apt to talk of the ‘blue, blue sky’, lingering on its blueness, than we are in the New World. We make it blue and let it go at that, in too big a hurry for a second coat of color. But I think we lose something of the simple emphasis of repetition. Such a phrase as ‘my old, old friend’ is better than ‘my old friend, if he will permit me to call him so, having known him for forty, I think it is forty, years.’ Repetition is also used, and always has been, for imitation—such words as hippety-hop, clopin-clopant, bumpety-bump.

Repetition as used for whole phrases and apart from single words is also based on the principle of conservatism, of liking to meet an old friend again, or enjoying again a sensation once before enjoyed. Thus Homer keeps on saying “tell Hector with the waving plume,” though he could easily have distinguished him more briefly as T. W. Hector. There is a well-worn story of a curate who could not, apparently, grasp the excellence of this primitive principle of repetition which is nowhere better illustrated than in the Old Testament. Finding that the text of the Lesson he had to read kept repeating the words “harp, flute, sackbut, psaltery and dulcimer,” he substituted the phrase “the band as before.” That curate should have lived in Kansas.

But repetition used, so to speak, for ‘fun,’ was born early and has never died. How easily we reach out for such nicknames as Jo-Jo or Poppo-Poppo: how instinctively we accept such a combination as Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-eh, and how pleasant it is to know that there is actually an American newspaper that carries on its title-page “The Walla-Walla Wahoo, Walla-Walla, Wash.”

Repetition verges close on what may be called ‘rhythm,’ meaning combinations of words that have a special appeal by adding sound to sense. ‘Rhyme’ is of course the most obvious example, but metrical forms, and any combination of spoken sounds that please the ear, are of the same class. At times the sound used in speech imitates the sound of the thing discussed—onomatopoeic forms, as the grammarians called them. Rhythm is far more used for beauty than for humor, for harmony rather than for incongruity. But at times we get amusement out of sets of words for their very lack of rhythm—lucus a non lucendo. Compare, for example, Tom Hood’s line:

“Even is come and from the dark park, hark.”

Sometimes a set of syllables becomes so smooth and rhythmical and flows so easily that we can’t understand what they mean, which sets up an incongruity between the appearance of speech and the fact of unintelligibility.

“Didon dina dit-on du dos d’un dodu dindon.”

French lends itself especially to such over-rhythms as this, being, in spite of its beauty, a highly unintelligible language—at least to the dull Anglo-Saxon ear. When two comfortable middle-aged Frenchmen sit side by side in easy chairs in converse, it is hard for our ears to tell whether they are talking or just gargling.

In the highest class of comic verse (a theme which deserves a volume) the very ease of the rhythm becomes, as it were, a source of humor. No one excelled in this the late W. S. Gilbert, many of whose lines became laughable for what seems the very aptness, the inevitability, of the rhythmical effect.

“It’s grasped a better hand than yourn—

Come, gov’nor, I insist!”

The Captain stared! the bo’sun glared—

The hand became a fist!

(The Bab Ballads.)

People might well keep repeating “the hand became a fist” and chuckling over it, just as a baby chuckles over the words it learns to say.

The device of alliteration—the reappearance of one and the same letter—used as a means of emphasis or of amusement, seems also to go back as far as written language and no doubt further. The Anglo-Saxon used it in what they understood to be poetry. Lines of Cynewulf, ‘improved’ into modern English, read

Winsome is the wold theere: There the wealds are green,

Spacious spread below the skies; there may neither snow nor rain,

Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire, etc., etc.

The device, however, is as young as it is old. In America, at least, alliterative combinations are still created afresh, with every decade, with almost every day—‘sob-sisters’ and ‘lounge-lizards’ and ‘boy-bandits,’ ad infinitum.

The alliterative newspaper heading has been used, and over-used, in America for a generation. An American newspaper man making up a title instinctively looks for alliteration. He cannot bear to write “Criminal Escapes”; he would sooner sacrifice some of the meaning and write “Vandal Vamps,” or “Dangerous Desperado Disappears.” It always defies analysis to see why alliterate headings should carry emphasis unless it is, or was once long ago, for the shock of surprise: and since then it is mere custom. It is easier to see why alliterative combinations are, or once were, ‘funny’: there is an evident incongruity of language, a piece of ‘fun with words.’

But of all mere devices of language the one that stands supreme through the ages, denounced and execrated but refusing to die, is the pun. Expellas furco, tamen usque recurrit. By a pun is meant the use of a word or phrase which has two meanings which the context brings into a glaring incongruity. Thus when Tom Hood writes of a veteran of the Peninsular War that he had “left his leg in Badajoz’s breeches,” we get at once a marvellous contrast and incongruity between what has happened to him, and what seems to have, but didn’t. The pun in and of itself is just a matter of words, vox et praeterea nihil, and this is why it has been so roundly and so soundly execrated. An execrable pun (the phrase clings to it) is one that has no other point to it than just the similarity of word sounds. “He who would make a pun would pick a pocket,” Dr. Johnson is said to have said but didn’t say, or didn’t say first. But a pun may have a saving grace as well. The combination may be so ingenious that the very ingenuity pleases. It tickles us, so to speak. Let us take in proof a well-known story. There was an heroic poem, by Thomas Campbell, on the battle of Hohenlinden (a.d. 1800) which caught the attention of the English world of that day and which began:

On Linden when the sun was low,

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,

And dark as winter was the flow

Of Iser rolling rapidly.

That’s the introduction, take that for granted. Now it happened that the witty someone-or-other, attempting to pay an evening call on his friend Campbell, and finding the stairway narrow and dark, slipped and fell with a great deal of clatter down the stairway. Campbell, hearing the noise, put his head out of his door at the top of the landing and called, “What’s that?” To which his falling friend called back, “I, sir, rolling rapidly.”

There is no sense in this, no philosophy or reflection, but the “cussed” ingenuity of it appeals to us. Take this further example.

It is related of the famous American humorist Bill Nye, who flourished at a time when puns were still permitted, and even enjoyed in America, that he was once introduced to Sir Mackenzie Bowell (rhyming with howl), a leading Canadian statesman of the day, and asked him very modestly if he was one of the “Bowels of Compassion, Ohio.” There is no sense in this, no meaning and no depth; and perhaps there never were any Bowels of Compassion, Ohio, anyway. But the parallel of sound is so ingenious and so complete that it appeals. Indeed, as will presently be seen in the case of anagrams, it seems as if the appreciation of ingenuity and the sense of amusement lie close together. This may well be, because ingenuity performing the impossible sets up a sort of natural or physical incongruity. We laugh when we see a conjurer make a billiard-ball vanish from his hand, or take a half-crown piece out of a boy’s ear. Similarly we laugh at each new and ingenious little machine—for instance the latest American one in which you stand on a platform, drop in a nickel, and the machine, thirty seconds later, hands you a framed photograph of yourself. In each case custom presently makes stale the effect and laughter dies. If a man fell down our stairs every morning and said, “It’s I, sir, rolling rapidly,” he would get tiresome. But while the novelty of the ingenious effect lasts it carries amusement.

But very often a pun has a much higher saving grace than mere ingenuity. It carries with it a further meaning. It becomes a subtle way of saying something with much greater point than plain matter-of-fact statement. Indeed, it often enables one to say with delicacy things which would never do if said outright.

Compare the writings of the Middle Ages in which dialogues as between animals represented talk which one dared not ascribe to prelates and cardinals. You can say in a barnyard what you had better not say in a court. Compare also the veiled writings of the eighteenth century in letters from Persia, or stories of Abyssinia as used to criticize the uncriticizable institutions of France or England. So with the pun as a form of polite satire where direct attack would be uncivil and displeasing. One thinks here of the famous and often-quoted pun of the Rev. Sydney Smith when he said to his fellow-canons of St. Paul’s Cathedral who were discussing the question of a wooden side-walk round the edifice. “Come, gentlemen, lay your heads together and the thing is done.” Observe that the pun itself is buried in the two meanings of the word wooden. But if Dr. Smith had said, “Gentlemen, you canons are a wooden-headed interminable lot of bores,” it would convey the same truth but with an unpermissible directness.

All the really best puns are of this last class; and on such a footing the pun deserves to survive and does survive in England, though to an American editor a pun is as a red rag to a bull. Strangely enough, the puns of the greatest punster who ever punned in England, Thomas Hood, were almost entirely of the cheapest class, the execrable puns with no second meaning to save them. Hood himself once wrote in exculpation—

However critics may take offence

A double meaning has double sense.

Yet the great mass of his puns have only a double sound without any second meaning of sense. Take, as proof, some of those most quoted: “He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell” ... “A cannon ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms” ...

Puns are of great antiquity, although the word itself is new, is English only and quite lost as to its etymology. It seems to have been in more or less frequent use from about the time of Queen Anne, but where it came from no one knows. Scholars tell us that it may be the Welsh word pun which means ‘the same.’ But then again it may not. It is also possible that it connects with ‘point’ and ‘punctilio’; also that it doesn’t.

Oddly enough, the pun can be used in a sense that is rather derisive than humorous. It was said above that the original stream of humor of exultation and demolition changed, or rather divided into the separate channels of kindly humor and cruel humor. So it would seem that the play upon words can be used not to create a laugh but to intensify the emotions of contempt. This may be—or it may not be—the explanation of Shakespeare’s use of puns at critical moments of a drama. “Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old.” John of Gaunt is not trying to be funny, nor, presumably, is Shakespeare. Gaunt is getting bitter about himself and ‘rubbing it in’ by taking a crack even at his very name. So with the famous ‘pun,’ if we dare call it so, made by Pope Gregory about the little English boys sold in the Roman slave market. “Non Angli sed Angeli.” In that charming book In Pursuit of Laughter (1936) we read: “Of course it is a pun and a very good one. But its note of profound and prophetic sympathy has done much more than its wit to keep it alive for thirteen hundred years.” In other words, the play of sound is used for point not for humor.

This is a matter which would readily admit of further study. If this little book, having the dignity of forming part of a university library, is used by students seriously interested, one might suggest that a thesis On the Literary Use of Puns would be a valuable field of study. But no doubt the answer is that a German has already written it.

The punster pays the full penalty, and even more than the full one, that has been seen to attach to humorous writers as opposed to those without humor. People won’t ‘take him seriously.’ Thomas Hood, who started his Comic Annual in 1830, aspired more and more to be a satirist of public affairs, a champion of good causes, as witness his matchless Song of the Shirt published in the Christmas Punch of 1843, and since become a part of the history of England. Here is a poem undisfigured by any incidental and inappropriate puns. But with most of Hood’s work the case was otherwise and he found it more and more difficult to get himself taken seriously. The fact that he crowded even his serious essays with puns, spoiled his work for serious acceptance. To write with humor is bad enough. But to write with puns goes too far. Even Sydney Smith, whose puns were few and far between, as mere occasional fireworks, but whose humor was like a sustained glow of heat, found it hard to get himself accepted at full value. “Now I can do something for Sydney Smith,” said Lord Grey when the Whigs came in in 1830. But he found that Sydney Smith was not the stuff of which bishops are made.

But there is perhaps a special reason why punsters, not humorists at large, should pay this penalty. The law often goes on the principle that an example must be made: military law starts from this idea: and in the courts of Kentucky, we are informed, it is a maxim of law that it is better that a hundred innocent men should be hanged rather than that one guilty one escape. So with the punsters. Common observation shows that his activity is a menace to society. It runs easily to a sort of mental degeneration in which the unhappy victim tries to make puns all the time, hears only sounds and not ideas, his mind as vacant as a bell waiting for its clapper. Many people hate the idea of drinking because of drunkards—and so do many hate puns because of punsters. Poetic justice therefore warns them in time.

As most people know, puns and the punning habit ran riot in Victorian England. Thomas Hood was merely the brightest star in a galaxy, or if one will, the blackest spot in a darkened sky.

In America puns never assumed the place which they occupied in England. American humor, after the democratic age began, ran in its own channels. This was when the newer civilization that had crossed the Alleghanies to the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi said good-bye to the older culture of New England and Virginia, outposts of Europe, and started a culture of its own. In humor it ran to tall stories, gargantuan exaggerations and new words and expressions reflecting the new life of the West. It did not tend very much towards puns: in a sense a pun is a scholarly thing, or at least a degenerate product of scholarship. Pope Gregory’s joke, or his musing, whichever it was, can’t be appreciated without Latin declensions. But the new America found its own luxuriant riot in the humor of bad spelling. This became as widespread, as execrable and as tiresome as the pun in England. The earliest (puerile) writings of Mark Twain show him as attempting to be funny in this way. He soon shook loose from it. But other celebrities of the day—Artemus Ward and Josh Billings—maintained the same style through life. Here is an example that is historic—

HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA

In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.

The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.

1 day as I was given a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn and disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.

“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.

Sez he, “What did you bring this pussy-lanermus cuss here fur?” & hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.

Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air a wax figger—a representashun of the false ’Postle.”

Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3rd. degree.

This is famous as the extract which Abraham Lincoln read to his cabinet before he showed them his Emancipation Proclamation. It is pretty steep reading for us to-day. We have to adopt towards it the same reverent attitude that we have for Greek jokes. What is more, unless Lincoln had explained the spelling, which so far as is known he didn’t, the cabinet couldn’t get it. This is another shortcoming of bad spelling, that it appeals only to the eye.

It is not difficult to account for the vogue of bad spelling in America. In England it made no hit as humor because it had existed for centuries as a matter of custom and indifference. When Mr. Weller told the court in Bardell v. Pickwick that his name could be spelt according to the “taste and fancy of the speller,” he hit exactly the English point of view towards spelling from Elizabethan and Stuart times till almost our own day. It was no great matter. Prince Rupert was probably one of the most brilliant men of the seventeenth century and, in the proper sense of the word, the most scholarly. Yet we have only to read his letters, as printed in Warburton’s Life with his own spelling, to realize that he would just as soon spell ‘dog’ with two g’s as not. The English nation at large never learned to read and spell till the middle of the nineteenth century.

At the opening of Queen Victoria’s reign about half the people of England were illiterate and half of the other half not much better. On marriage registers two-thirds of the brides ‘made their mark.’ In big towns such as Liverpool, only half the children went to schools and the other half, says Mr. G. M. Young (Victorian England, 1936), “did not miss much.”

In America the case was different. Public education began in New England with the arrival of the Pilgrims. The little red school became the Oxford of America. England began at the top: America at the bottom. The spelling-book and the ‘spelling-bee’ were part of the life of the settler. Hence bad spelling had all the fascination that goes with irreverence, and all the incongruity that lay between the rigorous correctness of the spelling-book and the wild luxuriance of free spelling, that somehow hit the mark as well. Presently, as higher culture spread and the West became easternized, America discarded bad spelling as pointless in a world of rotary presses and clicking typewriters. It only exists now in the desperately silly idea of gradual spelling reform, which is like an attempt to grow one hair at a time. It has broken out again recently, however, as a sort of nemesis in the new form of bad spelling used in advertising to attract attention, and perhaps to gain custom by amusing the ‘prospect.’ Hence ‘fit-rite’ clothes, and ‘nite’ restaurants and ‘Uneeda’ biscuits and much else.

Bad spelling having been at length ruled out of court as not funny, the same idea comes in again through a side door in the form of bad typing. The weird possibilities of mechanical errors in typewriting are known to everyone who has tried to learn how to use a machine. The effects are often grotesque. No reproduction of them was ever happier than that effected by Mr. A. P. Herbert in a discussion of “Criminal Type” in his delightful volume Light Articles Only. He begins:

To-day I am MAKing aN inno6£vation, as you mayalready have gessed, I am typlng this article myself Zz½Instead of writing it, The idea is to save time and exvBKpense, also to demonstratO that I can type /ust as well as any blessedgirl if I give my mind to iT’’’’

But after all any humor that can be got out of bad typing is under the same limitation as the humor of bad spelling. It reaches only the eye, not the ear. It is even more limited than bad spelling since it can’t be explained in words even if one tries. Parallel to this is the new department of humor over the radio which of necessity becomes ‘fun in the dark.’

A peculiar mode of verbal humor has of recent years been introduced or emphasized in America in the form, not of bad spelling, but of bad grammar. This is written as an exact transcription of what people say, not as an exaggeration, and is handled always with a peculiar moderation, never overdone and never interfering with the flow of the narrative. The writer uses “I could of done it,” instead of “I could have”: “Me and Mary,” instead of “Mary and I” as the subject, and reversed for the object—“He used to visit Mary and I.” In this method the present tense is used for the past, as is widely done in America, not in the old grammatical sense for vividness, as when one would say—“The room was empty, but what do I see lying on the floor, etc., etc.,” a form which used to be called in the grammar books the ‘dramatic present tense.’ Not at all. The use here meant runs like this—“I come home about six and this feller is waiting for me in the kitchen along with a gentleman who had come to fix the sink.” Notice the use of the word ‘gentleman’ used indiscriminately in this style and helping to give it the false elegance with which the bad grammar contrasts. Indeed, the point lies in this contrast between what is at times elegant diction, and its glaring absurdities. ‘Gentleman’ is freely used, but two gentlemen switch into ‘boys,’ etc. You may write of ‘a crowd of women,’ but each single one is a ‘lady.’ That lost genius Ring W. Lardner was a perfect master of this method. Here, for example, is a scene in elegant life when a husband is moved into a new apartment by his wife and her sister:

“Well, I was just getting used to the Baldwin when Ella says it was time for us to move.

“‘I and Kate,’ she says, ‘has made up our minds to do things our own way with our own money.... All as we want is a place that’s good enough and big enough for Sis to entertain her gentlemen callers in it and she certainly can’t do that in this hotel....’

“‘Well,’ I says, ‘all her gentleman callers that’s been around here in the last month, she could entertain them in one bunch in a telephone booth.

“On the third afternoon they (the two ladies) busted in all smiles.

“‘We got a bargain,’ said Ella. ‘It’s in the nicest kind of neighborhood and we can’t meet nothing only the best kind of people. You’ll go simply wild! They’s a colored boy in uniform to open the door and they’s two elevators.’”

There is far more art in this than in the old discriminate exaggeration of bad spelling; how much art can be realized at once by anybody who tries to imitate it. The same effect is admirably achieved by Anita Loos in the famous best-seller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). Here the humorous effect is produced by the reproduction of such a desperate struggle towards good grammar that it produces a sort of super-grammar.

“Mr. Spoffard told us all about his mother and I was really very very intreeged because if Mr. Spoffard and I become friendly he is the kind of gentleman that always wants a girl to meet his mother. I mean if a girl gets to know what kind of a mother a gentleman’s mother is like, she really knows more what kind of a conversation to use on a gentleman’s mother when she meets her. Because a girl like I is really always on the verge of meeting gentlemen’s mothers. But such an unrefined girl as Dorothy is really not the kind of girl that ever meets gentlemen’s mothers.”

But there are further modes of humor arising out of single words far more subtle and far more legitimate than either puns or bad spelling. One of these is the use of a word that is the wrong word for the sense but the right word for the sound: in other words using the wrong word in the right way. This is seen in the speech of people who try deliberately to use big words, as the Negroes do, or at times sententious Cockneys. Indeed, the attempt is the humble and creditable prompting of a mind that would like to have been educated and never was, and finds in words a wistful and appealing grandeur.

To turn this misuse of words into humorous expression is a delicate art. Done clumsily it is as tiresome as bad spelling. At its best it is wonderful. Mark Twain hit it off marvellously in his character of “old Mr. Ballou” in the Western book Roughing It. On one occasion a group of Westerners, including Mr. Ballou, are lost in the snow and think themselves about to perish and one says, “Let’s die without hard feeling towards each other: I freely admit that I have had hard feelings against Mr. Ballou for abusing me and calling me a logarithm; it has hurt me a good deal but let it go.” One might search the whole dictionary and find nothing to equal ‘logarithm.’

Mark Twain also was able to utilize admirably the converse verbal trick of using a word or phrase that is suddenly and amazingly right, contrary to all expectation. He has a story called Cannibalism in the Cars, the idea of which is that a number of Congressmen being snowed in on a mountain train, and about to die of hunger, resort to cannibalism but employ in connection with it the full legislative procedures to which they are accustomed. Notice in the present connection the use made of a verb in the following sentence.

“The next morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast, one of the finest men I ever sat down to.”

The writings of O. Henry offer innumerable examples. Any student of humor who wants a lesson in the possibilities of verbal technique should study the language placed by O. Henry in the mouths of Jefferson Peters and Parlez-voo Pickers in the volume The Gentle Grafter.

The same idea of misused terms has been exploited on an extended scale with delightful success by Mr. A. P. Herbert in a ‘piece’ in which the names of flowers are transformed in delirious fashion. The true gardener (or horticulturist, as he would call himself) never cares to give a flower an English name if he can give it a Latin one. To him snapdragon is not snapdragon, but ‘antirrhinum’ and “a primrose by the river’s brim” becomes one of the Primulaceae distinguished by its tubular corolla and spreading lobes. Mr. Herbert sees his chance and fills the flowerbeds with a nosegay of blossoms that must be read to be appreciated.

An ingenious verbal device, closely related to those mentioned, is where a metaphor is suddenly ‘disconnected’ and sounds like an absurdity. Ever so many of our words are metaphors, that is, words that meant something else and were used as a striking form of comparison. The man who first called the skyline of the Spanish mountains ‘sierras’ (saws) made a great hit.

We use a lot of verbs metaphorically as when we talk, let us say, in connection with rebuilding a house, of ‘throwing the hall into the dining-room.’ Literally this is absurd, and the absurdity becomes patent if we repeat the phrase enough to call attention to it. “Acting on the specialist’s advice,” wrote Harry Graham in his inimitable Private Life of Gregory Gorm, “Lord Porcupine began on the ground-floor by throwing the dining-room into the front hall. He then proceeded to throw the smoking-room into the billiard-room, and the drawing-room into the study, and, by throwing the library into the gun-room, provided an excellent dining-room to replace the one he had thrown into the front hall. This, however, involved throwing the pantry into the kitchen, and the kitchen into the servants’ hall, and having gone thus far, it became inevitably necessary to throw the servants’ hall somewhere, and there was nowhere left to throw it except into the garden.”

People of a humorous turn notice these absurdities readily: solemn people never.

Twisted uses of words are sometimes made with a further artful implication of a new meaning, just as the pun carries a genuine second meaning when legitimately used. Thus the annual Baseball World Series is, or ought to be, the last word in carefree amusement. But mentioned with a Yiddish touch, as the ‘Voild’s Serious,’ the implication is as entertaining as it is obvious.

But there are still deeper and more subtle effects to be got out of individual words than these superficial inconsistencies. It seems more or less clear that certain sounds still retain for us something of their primitive qualities as growls of anger, groans of distress, or yelps of delight. Hence there is a ‘tone’ quality in words. Nobody needs to be told what a scrumptious afternoon is, or what kind of individual is meant by a boob, a slob, or a goof. Sometimes of course these illuminated words are merely abbreviations or remaking of others, as boob is of booby: or they are combinations of two into one, like the telescoped words that Lewis Carroll made so famous. Everybody recalls ‘brillig’ as meaning ‘brilliant twilight’: ‘galumping’ a compound of ‘galloping and leaping’: a ‘vorpal’ sword, to mean perhaps ‘violent and fatal,’ and the priceless name ‘Rilchiam’ to combine ‘Richard and William.’

But I am claiming here that there is far more in the matter than that. The tones have a sort of instinctive subconscious sound-appeal. Thus when Dickens made up his wonderful proper names, such as Mr. Vholes, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Weller, and a hundred others, they are drawn from the under-sound and any connection with other words is either accidental, or by attraction, but not of necessity. Thus Vholes, the name of a rascally lawyer, if you like is vampire and ghoul but only because it had to be: what is Gamp—is it gruesome and damp?

The subject, one admits, is a difficult one. It is quite possible that many names seem appropriate and self-evident because we have read the book and grown used to him. Pendennis is a good name and Harry Lorrequer and Maggie Tulliver: but if she had been called ‘Jane Goodall’ would it have made any difference? One feels that Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves couldn’t have been called anything else. It is a topic that belongs not solely to the subject of the vocabulary of humor and of the mechanism of humor but to the subject of language at large. What is really meant is the question of the extent to which the primitive beginnings of speech still affect living language. A scholarly treatise could be written on the topic Do We Growl Still?

If we put together all the various kinds of verbal effects just described, and other lesser and similar ones, we can see at once the distinction that is to be made between humor and wit. We can define wit as being an expression of humor involving an unexpected play upon words. Thus wit is far the lesser term of the two: it is all included under humor. There could not be real wit without humor. It is possible indeed for people with more cheeriness than brains, more voltage than candlepower, with high spirits but low intelligence to chatter away on a line of imitative jokes and secondhand effects without any real humor. But this is only in the same way as a person may be sentimental without sorrow, pious without religion and didactic without learning. It is this possibility of replacing true wit with imitation, gold with dross, that has led to a tendency to degrade wit as the crackling of thorns under a pot. On the strength of this idea some writers seem to try to separate wit from humor by a line different from that just drawn, as if humor were of a different quality and atmosphere. Definition, of course, is as free as disbelief, and it would be of no value to pile up citations of authority, since the matter lies outside of the ambit of quantitative measurement. But judging in a general way what each of us feels to be the sense attached by good writers and good speakers, the distinction just given, making wit a form of humor, is the one most frequently made and most widely accepted.

We speak, for example, of ‘a witty French Abbé’ because we understand that French Abbés had a way of getting off good things and their good things always turned on words. But whoever writes of a witty Scotsman? Not that there are none; indeed, I am sure that there must be, the population of Scotland being close to five millions. But as a matter of fact the amusement that comes out of Scotland (and the exports of that realm are what make it illustrious—the export of brains, of Scotch whisky, and of golf) somehow always seem to turn on character. Thus:

A frugal Scot was walking to church barefoot carrying his new Sunday boots under his arm. In walking he stubbed his toe. For a moment he drew it up in pain. Then his face relaxed and he said with a smile of satisfaction, “It would ha’ gi’en ’em an awfu’ dig!” This is not wit; there is no verbal effect in it.

On the other hand, we always talk of a ‘witty Irishman,’ that being the rôle for which the Irish are cast. The Irish are not only witty on purpose, since their nature is merry and they love words, but they are witty by accident, in the verbal form called an Irish bull. This is seen where the sense is clear enough and where the words actually convey it, though if they are taken literally they say something else, something that is quite impossible or quite the contrary of what is meant.

“Indeed, miss,” said the Irish usher of a Dublin theatre, “I’d like to give you a seat but the empty ones are all full.”

An Irish doctor sent in his professional account to a lady with the heading—“For curing your husband till he died.”

It was said above that the form called the pun could be used with but little humor, in the sense of amusement, but rather as a form of point and emphasis. So with wit. If humor in its essence stands for human kindliness, one has to admit that at times the forms of wit depart far from it and become like the cold light without heat, like that of the fire-fly, that contrasts with the warmth of a fireplace. Take the wit of the famous Talleyrand who began life as a ‘witty French Abbé,’ and ended it, or should have, like La Fontaine’s wolf, in thinking of “sa longue et méchante vie.” Talleyrand left behind him, since he couldn’t take them away, a great number of epigrams and bons mots. They still pass current in our histories, but in all the lot of them there isn’t enough of kindliness to warm a frog. He said of the British constitution, “Elle n’existe pas”; he said of Jeremy Bentham, “Pillé par tout le monde il est toujours riche”; he said of Napoleon’s pacific proclamations after Elba, “Le loup est devenu berger”; and he said of the Congress of Vienna, “Le congrès danse bien mais ne marche pas.”

All of this is wit undoubtedly, but there is a sort of chill to it. If witty people talk like that, I’d prefer to be with Scotsmen.