Neil Schmitz
ON AMERICAN HUMOR
My show at present consists of three moral Bares, a kangaroo (an
amoozin lillie Raskal-t'would make you larf yerself to deth
LO
see
the lillie cuss jump up and squeal) wax figgers of G. Washington
Gen. Taylor John Bunyan Capl. Kidd and Dr. Webster in me act of
killin Dr. Parkman, besides several miscellanyus moral wax statoots
of celebrated piruts
&
murderers,
&.,
ekalled by few
&
exceld by none.
-Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne)
Beginning with
Goodbye, Columbus,
I've been attracted
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prose
that has the turns, vibrations, intonations, and cadences, the sponta–
neity and ease, of spoken language, at the same time that it is solidly
grounded on the page, weighted with the irony, precision, and
ambiguity associated with a more traditional literary rhetoric.
-Philip Rom (Philip Rom)
In the nineteenth century the sign of the humorous text in
American literature iz fonetick spellin, misplaced and absent letters,
the text so basically wronged that often it can not be read aright. The
humorist typically rongs riting, disfigures it, and this salience, this
queer style of the wrongly written, distinguishes him from the comic
writer who is easily at home in literature: Washington Irving, Edgar
Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Few humorists indeed represent
colloquial speech in their spelled-out sense of the spoken word, but it is
nonetheless speech they imitate, an unlettered, countrified speech that
humorously violates the continuities and proprieties of written dis–
course and gets away with it, scoring hits. "Poetri, tew be excellent,"
Josh Billings wrongly writes, "wants tew be natur, but about 4 times az
big." Throughout the nineteenth century the typographical clash of
speech and writing in the humorous text, even when its result was
trivial, greatly amused the American reading public. All the popular
humorists of the age were artful misspellers, wrong writers, joshers in
dialect. The style undoubtedly appealed to an ambivalent national
feeling about Jeffersonian rusticity, homespun language, the specific
