Stephen Leacock

“ I have had many times the satisfaction of seeing a Philosophical Society swept away from its moorings and tossing in a sea of laughter, as generous and as whole-hearted as anything we ever see in America.
But they are not so willing to begin. With us the chairman has only to say to the gaily dressed members of the Ladies' Fortnightly Club, "Well, ladies, I'm sure we are all looking forward very much to Mr. Walpole's lecture," and at once there is a ripple of applause, and a responsive expression on a hundred charming faces. ”

“ It is the times that have changed, not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as ever, but no greedier: and we have just the same social need of his greed as a motive power in industry as we ever had, and indeed a worse need than before.
We need him not only in business but in the whole setting of life, or if not him personally, we need the eager, selfish, but reliant spirit of the man who looks after himself and doesn't want to have a spoon-fed education and a government job alternating with a government dole, and a set of morals framed for him by a Board of Censors. ”

“ The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. But even in the highbrow the educated appreciation of humour is there—away down. Generally, if one attempts to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process were beneath him; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which he is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with a pointless story from Plato. ”

“ This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. ”

“ In England, in winter, night begins at four in the afternoon. In the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and the north (which is where the philosophical societies flourish) there is always a drizzling rain and wet slop underfoot, a bedraggled poverty in the streets, and a dimness of lights that contrasts with the glare of light in an American town. There is no visible sign in the town that a lecture is to happen, no placards, no advertisements, nothing. ”

“ I turn therefore with pleasure to the more congenial task of showing what is wrong with Oxford and with the English university system generally, and the aspect in which our American universities far excell the British.
The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The English are so proud of what Henry VIII and the benefactors of earlier centuries did for the universities that they forget the present. There is little or nothing in England to compare with the magnificent generosity of individuals, provinces and states, which is building up the colleges of the United States and Canada. ”

“ I have never seen a bad story-teller thrown forcibly out of the room or even stopped and warned; we listen with the most wonderful patience to the worst of narration. The story is always without any interest except in the unknown point that will be brought in later. But this, until it does come, is no more interesting than to-morrow's breakfast. Yet for some reason or other we permit this story-telling habit to invade and damage our whole social life. The English always criticise this and think they are absolutely right. ”

“ In fact, in England, you can mingle freely in general society without being called upon either to produce a funny story or to suffer from one.
I don't mean to deny that the American funny story, in capable hands, is amazingly funny and that it does brighten up human intercourse. But the real trouble lies, not in the fun of the story, but in the painful waiting for the point to come and in the strained and anxious silence that succeeds it. Each person around the dinner table is trying to "think of another." ”

“ He may move forward as fast as he likes, following the bent of his genius. If he has in him any ability beyond that of the common herd, his tutor, interested in his studies, will smoke at him until he kindles him into a flame. For the tutor's soul is not harassed by herding dull students, with dismissal hanging by a thread over his head in the class room. The American professor has no time to be interested in a clever student. He has time to be interested in his "deportment," his letter-writing, his executive work, and his organising ability and his hope of promotion to a soap factory. ”

“ The magnificent mechanism of the art of words is, quite literally, a sealed book to him. Here and there, indeed, a form of fun is found so elementary in its nature and yet so excellent in execution that it appeals to all alike, to the illiterate and to the highbrow, to the peasant and the professor. Such, for example, are the antics of Mr. Charles Chaplin or the depiction of Mr. Jiggs by the pencil of George McManus. But such cases are rare. As a rule the cheap fun that excites the rustic to laughter is execrable to the man of education. ”

“ The whole system at Oxford is such as to put a premium on genius and to let mediocrity and dulness go their way. On the dull student Oxford, after a proper lapse of time, confers a degree which means nothing more than that he lived and breathed at Oxford and kept out of jail. This for many students is as much as society can expect. But for the gifted students Oxford offers great opportunities. There is no question of his hanging back till the last sheep has jumped over the fence. He need wait for no one. ”

“ The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they would fill all the better if their education were fitted to their wants.
Some few, a small minority, really and truly "have a career,"—husbandless and childless,—in which the sacrifice is great and the honour to them, perhaps, all the higher. And others no doubt dream of a career in which a husband and a group of blossoming children are carried as an appendage to a busy life at the bar or on the platform. But all such are the mere minority, so small as to make no difference to the general argument. ”

“ I don't say that those are literal examples of the humour of the criminal court. But they are close to it. For a judge to joke is as easy as it is for a schoolmaster to joke in his class. His unhappy audience has no choice but laughter. No doubt in point of intellect the English judges and the bar represent the most highly trained product of the British Empire. But when it comes to fun, they ought not to pit themselves against the unhappy prisoner.
Why not take a man of their own size? ”

“ A man will freely confess that he has no ear for music, or no taste for fiction, or even no interest in religion. But I have yet to see the man who announces that he has no sense of humour. In point of fact, every man is apt to think himself possessed of an exceptional gift in this direction, and that even if his humour does not express itself in the power either to make a joke or to laugh at one, it none the less consists in a peculiar insight or inner light superior to that of other people. ”

“ I freely admit that a girl who knows algebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and a nobler wife and mother than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But the point is this: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a lawyer also fit a person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other words, is a lawyer a wife and mother? I say he is not. Granted that a girl is to spend four years in time and four thousand dollars in money in going to college, why train her for a career that she is never going to adopt? ”

“ I do not think that, on the whole, the English are quite as fond of humour as we are. I mean they are not so willing to welcome at all times the humorous point of view as we are in America. The English are a serious people, with many serious things to think of—football, horse racing, dogs, fish, and many other concerns that demand much national thought: they have so many national preoccupations of this kind that they have less need for jokes than we have. ”

“ London, like South Bend itself, is a city of clean streets and admirable sidewalks, and has an excellent water supply. One is at once struck by the number of excellent and well-appointed motor cars that one sees on every hand, the neatness of the shops and the cleanliness and cheerfulness of the faces of the people. In short, as an English visitor said of Peterborough, Ontario, there is a distinct note of optimism in the air. ”

“ The American loves particularly as his line of joke an anecdote with the point all concentrated at the end and exploding in a phrase. The Englishman loves best as his joke the narration of something that actually did happen and that depends, of course; for its point on its reality.
There are plenty of minor differences, too, in point of mere form, and very naturally each community finds the particular form used by the others less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very reason each people is apt to think its own humour the best. ”

“ At any rate I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the British university is just as good a basis for reflection and judgment as that of the numerous English critics who come to our side of the water. I have known a famous English author to arrive at Harvard University in the morning, have lunch with President Lowell, and then write a whole chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education in America. I have known another one come to Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do an entire book on the Decline of Serious Study in America. ”

“ But when one turns to England, what a striking difference! The English, with the whole huge British Empire to fish in and the European system to draw upon, can always dig up some kind of political topic of discussion that has a real charm about it. One month you find English politics turning on the Oasis of Merv and the next on the hinterland of Albania; or a member rises in the Commons with a little bit of paper in his hand and desires to ask the foreign secretary if he is aware that the Ahkoond of Swat is dead. ”

“ A Harvard audience, as I have reason gratefully to acknowledge, is wonderful. But an Oxford audience is just as good. A gathering of business men in a textile town in the Midlands is just as heavy as a gathering of business men in Decatur, Indiana, but no heavier; and an audience of English schoolboys as at Rugby or at Clifton is capable of a wild and sustained merriment not to be outdone from Halifax to Los Angeles.
There is, however, one vital difference between American and English audiences which would be apt to discourage at the outset any American lecturer who might go to England. ”

“ But I have since pieced together my impressions as conscientiously as I could and I present them here. If they seem to be a little bit modelled on British impressions of America I admit at once that the influence is there. We writers all act and react on one another; and when I see a good thing in another man's book I react on it at once.
London, the name of which is already known to millions of readers of this book, is beautifully situated on the river Thames, which here sweeps in a wide curve with much the same breadth and majesty as the St. Jo River at South Bend, Indiana. ”

“ Any American college student can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion on what has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these things indeed which stamp him as a college man, and occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of his parents.
But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur. ”

“ In all that goes above I have been emphasising the fact that the British and the American sense of humour are essentially the same thing. But there are, of course, peculiar differences of form and peculiar preferences of material that often make them seem to diverge widely.
By this I mean that each community has, within limits, its own particular ways of being funny and its own particular conception of a joke. Thus, a Scotchman likes best a joke which he has all to himself or which he shares reluctantly with a few; the thing is too rich to distribute. ”

“ As a short cut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort our legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink, it begins already to guard us against the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in two states of the American Union it even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of evolution. ”