head, you booby.”
Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood
looking down upon it in great perplexity. At length he said:
“It is true, sir, just as you have said.” Then after a pause he added,
“But he TOLD me IT WAS HIS LEG! ! ! ! !”
Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous
horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings
and shriekings and suffocatings.
It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form;
and isn’t worth the telling, after all. Put into the humorous-story form
it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever
listened to–as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.
He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just
heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is
trying to repeat it to a neighbor. But he can’t remember it; so he gets
all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious
details that don’t belong in the tale and only retard it; taking them out
conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless; making
minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and explain how
he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in in
their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his
narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier
that was hurt, and finally remembering that the soldier’s name was not
mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance,
anyway–better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all–
and so on, and so on, and so on.
The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to
stop every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing
outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with
interior chuckles; and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have
laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their
faces.
The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old
farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is
thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art and fine and beautiful,
and only a master can compass it; but a machine could tell the other
story.
To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and
sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are
absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of
a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking
aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.
Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would begin
to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was
wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently absent-minded
pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the
remark intended to explode the mine–and it did.
For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, “I once knew a man in New
Zealand who hadn’t a tooth in his head”–here his animation would die
out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily,
and as if to himself, “and yet that man could beat a drum better than any
man I ever saw.”
The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a
frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate,
and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right
length–no more and no less–or it fails of its purpose and makes
trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and
[and if too long] the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is
intended–and then you can’t surprise them, of course.
On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in
front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important