e a part of the accepted
social furniture of the two countries. They belong to the decorative
background of the social drama. They heighten the effectiveness of
local humor, but it may be questioned whether they afford any evidence
of genuine racial differentiation as to the sense of the comic.

What one can abundantly prove, however, is that the United States
afford a new national field for certain types of humor and satire. Our
English friends are never weary of writing magazine articles about
Yankee humor, in which they explain the peculiarities of the American
joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes been thought to prove that
there is such a thing as national lack of humor, whether there be such
a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember,
endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in American
humor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography,
that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an
expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of
American humor lies in its habit of speaking of something hideous in a
tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, have been as much impressed
with this minimizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick
of magnifying. Upon the Continent the characteristic trait of American
humor has often been thought to be its exuberance of phrase. Many
shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its
most favorite methods is the suppression of one link in the chain of
logical reasoning. Such generalizations as these are always
interesting, although they may not take us very far.

Yet it is clear that certain types of humor and satire have proved to
be specially adapted to the American soil and climate. Whether or not
these types are truly indigenous one may hesitate to say, yet it
remains true that the well-known conditions of American life have
stimulated certain varieties of humor into such a richness of
manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show.

Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is
that urbane Horatian variety which has often been held to be the
exclusive possession of the cultivated and restricted societies of
older civilization. Yet it is precisely this kind of humor which has
been the delight of some of the most typical American minds. Benjamin
Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humorous
on the papers o