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Updated: June 15, 2025
But no one can read the pages of the older American humorists, or try to recall to mind the names of paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that newspaper, without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they caused a smile for the moment.
The wits and humorists, the distinguished worthies of the town or village, the apothecary, the attorney, even the curate himself, did not disdain to partake of this hebdomadal festivity.
The variety of grotesque shapes into which apple, trees contort themselves has its effect on those who get acquainted with them: they stretch out their crooked branches, and take such hold of the imagination, that we remember them as humorists and odd fellows.
Heine himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modern poets, and clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me wanting in a refined perception of that inward propriety which is only another name for poetic proportion, and shocks us sometimes with an Unflaethigkeit, as at the end of his Deutschland, which, if it make Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes other people hold their noses.
Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping eminence of intellect. "Many so-called American humorists," he once remarked to me, "have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local.
He spent an hour or more there, asking much advice of Barnum in regard to the management of the course of lectures on "The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century," which he proposed to deliver, as he did afterwards, with very great success, in the principal cities of the Union.
The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had, one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is a way, however, very different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.
It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities. Mather Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors. Dr.
Like all Thackeray's novels, it is a story of human frailty; but here the author's innate gentleness and kindness are seen at their best, and the hero is perhaps the most genuine and lovable of all his characters. Thackeray is known in English literature as an essayist as well as a novelist. His English Humorists and The Four Georges are among the finest essays of the nineteenth century.
In the first page of his book he speaks of humor as "a branch" of satire; in the second he identifies French satire as the "esprit gaulois;" in the third he tells us that "the French type for satire and humor has preserved one uniform character from generation to generation;" and in his last page he claims superiority for the French over the English humorists, on the ground that "Rabelais has a finer wit than Swift," that "we have no political satire so good as the Satyre Mènipée," "no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux," "no letter-writer like Voiture," "no teller of tales like La Fontaine," and "no chansonnier like Béranger."
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