was coming all the
time. He laughs accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the village
shopkeeper. He has watched stage clowns many a time and he laughs, not
at the humor of the farce, but at the naive laughter of the peasant in
front of him. He, the shopkeeper, is superior to such broad and obvious
humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the schoolmaster. The
schoolmaster is a pedant; he has probably lectured to his boys on the
theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the smile of superiority on
the face of the shopkeeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent is
a man of the world, who glances at the clown, then at the peasant, then
at the shopkeeper, then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom is
laughing at the others, and the man of the world laughs at them all!

Let us take an even simpler illustration. We all know the comfortable
sense of proprietorship which we experience after a few days' sojourn
at a summer hotel. We know our place at the table; we call the head
waiter by his first name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now into
this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious superiority, comes a new
arrival. He has not yet learned the exits and entrances. He starts for
the kitchen door inadvertently when he should be headed for the
drawing-room. We smile at him. Why? Precisely because that was what we
did on the morning of our own arrival. We have been initiated, and it
is now his turn.

If it is true that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities
for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the
new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon
the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man
of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share
of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is
simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The
superiority need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority,
although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not
very delicately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery
store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in
a surprisingly large number of instances upon exactly the same
intellectual or social superiority which gives point to the _bon mots_
of the most cultivated and artificial society in the world.

The humor arising from incongruity, then, and the humor arising from a
sense