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By humour I do not mean a taste for irresponsible merriment; for though humour is not a necessarily melancholy thing, in this imperfect world the humorist sighs as often as he smiles. What I mean by it is a keen perception of the rich incongruities and absurdities of life, its undue solemnity, its guileless pretentiousness.
I says to the Wells-Fargo gent, as we looks at Slim Jim: ""Pard, the drinks is due from me on this. If I has a week to guess in, I'd never said 'Slim Jim." "Whatever makes this yere jaybird Bob believe he's a humorist," said the Old Cattleman one afternoon as we slowly returned from a walk, "whatever it is misleads him to so deem himself is shorely too many for me.
He pursued his own fancies, his own predilections. He did not cling to any superior intellect, nor cherish any inferior humorist or wit. Perhaps no one ever thought more independently. He had great enjoyment in the talk of able men, so that it did not savor of form or pretension. He liked the strenuous talk of Hazlitt, who never descended to fine words.
Only the look-out men, crouching behind their periscopes and loopholes, keep their posts. The wind is the wrong way for gas, and in any case we all have respirators. Private M'Leary, the humorist of "A" Company, puts his on, and pretends to drink his tea through it. Altogether, the British soldier appears sadly unappreciative either of "frightfulness" or practical chemistry. He is a hopeless case.
A humorist, who stuck his head out of a garret window, went so far as to advise him to slaughter his horses on the spot, as they could never get out again alive. Mrs. Warden alighted, and turned into a still narrower street; she wanted to see poverty at its very worst. In a door-way stood a half-grown girl. Mrs. Warden asked: "Do very poor people live in this house?"
The process is unconscious, or at least but semi-conscious; for your professed observer has never that keen insight which, being native, is not to be acquired by even the most assiduous practice, and alone permits of truthful analysis. In the making of the genuine humorist the faculty of observation is the first necessity.
He was a humorist, besides, in his way, because he found that jokes and fun admirably served his turn. They helped to throw people off their guard, and to conceal his hang-dog look. He had a hard head, as well as hard heart, and could stand any quantity of drink.
There was a time when I seriously thought of inserting the following ad in a Philadelphia newspaper. I find a memorandum of it in my scrap-book: HUMORIST: Young and untamed, lineal descendent of Eugene Field, Frank Stockton, and François Rabelais, desires to run a column in a Philadelphia newspaper. A guaranteed circulation-getter.
He was the last one to sarve here. He sarved an attachment," replied the inevitable humorist of all Californian assemblages. "Is he here?" asked Mrs. Tucker, disregarding the renewed laughter which followed this subtle witticism. The loungers at the door made way for one of their party, who was half dragged, half pushed into the shop.
"Oh, you're all bugs, anyway, so that doesn't prove anything," said Herb, calmly finishing the last of his pie. "But some day, when I become a world-famous humorist, you'll realize how dumb you were not to appreciate my jokes. Now you get them free, but then it will cost you money to hear them." "It will never cost me any money," said Bob, with conviction.
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