FullReads

Hence any paper which starts on a comic basis alone meets with rivals in all its sober-minded contemporaries, and comes to grief. The difficulty it has to contend with is, in short, very like that which the professional laundress or baker has to contend with, owing to the fact that families are accustomed to do their own washing and bake their own bread. And, indeed, it is not unlike that with which professional writers of all kinds have to contend, owing to the readiness of clergymen, lawyers, and professors to write, while doing something else. An ordinary daily paper supplies, besides its serious disquisitions, fun enough for one average household–sometimes in single jokes, and sometimes in the shape of “sparkle” or “spiciness” in grave articles. Often enough it is very poor stuff, but it amuses people, without turning their attention away from the sober work of life, which is the only way in which the vast body of Americans are willing to be amused. Newspaper comedians have here, what they would not have in London, a chance of letting off a joke once a day, and six or seven jokes a week is more than any comic paper is willing or able to take from any one contributor, partly owing to the need of variety in a paper given wholly to humor, and partly owing to want of space. Anybody, therefore, who has humor for sale finds a readier market among the dailies or magazines, and a far wider circle of readers, than he would in any comic paper.

The charge that our comic papers have generally opposed the friends of liberty and progress–that is the most intelligent and appreciative portion of the public–is quite true, but it does not go far to account for their failure. Punch has done this steadily ever since its establishment, without serious injury. No good cause has ever received much backing from it till it became the cause of the majority, or indeed has escaped being made the butt of its ridicule; and we confess we doubt whether “the friends of progress,” using the term in what we may call its technical sense, were ever a sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient love of fun, to make their disfavor of any great consequence. Most people in the United States who are very earnestly enlisted in the service of “a cause” look on all ridicule as “wicked,” and regard with great suspicion anybody who indulges in it, whether he makes them the object of it or not. They bore with it, when turned against slavery, from one or two distinguished humorists, because its effectiveness was plain; but we doubt whether any man who had the knack of seeing the ludicrous side of things ever really won their confidence, partly owing to their own natural want of humor, and partly to their careful cultivation of a habit of solemnity of mind as the only thing that can make an “advanced” position really tenable, to say nothing of comfortable. The causes of all successes, as of all failures, in the literary world are of course various, and no doubt there is a good deal of truth in all that has been said in solution of the comic-paper problem. American humorists of the best class can find something better or more lucrative to do than writing for a comic paper; while the poor American humorists, like the poor humorists of all countries, are coarse and vulgar, even where they are not stupid.

But there is one striking difference between American society and those societies in which comic papers have succeeded which not only goes a good way to explain their failure here, but puts a better face on some of their efforts–such as their onslaughts on the friends of progress–than they seem to wear at first sight. To furnish sufficient food for fun to keep a comic paper afloat, a country must supply a good many strong social contrasts for the professional joker to play upon, and must have a large amount of reverence for social distinctions and dignities for him to shock. Two-thirds of the zest with which foreign comic papers are read is due to the fact that they caricature persons or social circles with which the mass of their readers are not thoroughly familiar, and whose habits and ways of looking at things they do not share or only partly share. A good deal of the fun in Punch, for instance, consists in making costermongers or cabmen quarrel with the upper classes, in ridicule of Jeames’s attempts to imitate his master, of Brown’s efforts to scrape acquaintance with a peer, of the absurd figure cut by the “cad” in the hunting-field, and of the folly of the city clerk in trying to dress and behave like a guardsman. In short, the point of a great number of its best jokes is made by bringing different social strata into sharp comparison. The peculiarities of Irishmen and Scotchmen also furnish rich materials to the caricaturist. He never tires of illustrating the blunders and impudence of the one and the hot patriotism and niggardliness of the other. The Irish Highlander, who denies, in a rich brogue, that any Irish are ever admitted into his regiment, and the cannie burgher from Aberdeen, who, on his return home from a visit to London, says it’s an “awfu’ dear place; that he hadna’ been twa oors in the toon when bang went saxpence,” are types which raise a laugh all over the United Kingdom, and all because, again, they furnish materials for ludicrous contrast which everybody is capable of appreciating.