I.—THE “JOKAL CALENDAR.”

Every joke has its appropriate season. The true humorist—one who finds comedy in everything—gathers his ideas from what goes on about him, and by a subtle alchemy of his own distils from them jokes suitable to the changing seasons. The only laws to which childhood willingly yields obedience are those unwritten statutes which compel the proper observance of “trap-time,” “kite-time,” and “marble-time.” So even must the humorist recognize the different periods allotted respectively to goats,[Pg 276] stovepipes, ice-cream, and other foundations of merriment.

The Jokal Calendar begins in the early summer, when girls are leading young men into ice-cream saloons, and keepers of summer resorts are preparing new swindles for their guests. Soon the farmer will gather in his crop of summer boarders; the city fisherman will entangle his patent flies in the branches of lofty trees, while the country lad catches all the trout with a worm. Then the irate father and the bulldog will drive the lover from the front gate, while married men who remain in the city during their wives’ absence play poker until early morn and take grass-widows to Coney Island. About this time the chronicler of humor goes into the country, whence he will return in the early fall with a fresh stock of ideas, gathered in the village store, at the farm-house table, and by the shores of the sounding sea.

[Pg 277]Beginning his autumn labors with the scent of the hay-fields in his nostrils, and the swaying boughs of the pine forest still whispering in his ears, the humorist offers a few dainty paragraphs on the simple joys of rural life. The farmer who dines in his shirt-sleeves, the antiquity of the spring fowl, the translucent milk, and the saline qualities of the pork which grace the table; the city man who essays to milk the cow, and the country deacon who has been “daown to York”—all these are sketched with vivid pen for the delectation of his readers. But it must be remembered that these subjects have been used during the whole summer; and the humorist, after his return to the city, can offer, at the best, but an aftermath of farm-house fun. If it be a late fall the public may slide along on banana and orange peel jokes until the first cold snap warns housekeepers of the necessity of putting up stovepipes.[Pg 278] (Note.—About this time print paragraph of gas-company charging a man for gas while his house was closed for the summer. Allusions to the extortions of gas-companies are always welcome.)

Stovepipe jokes must be touched upon lightly, for the annual spring house-cleaning will bring the pipes down again, six months later, to the accompaniment of cold dinners, itinerant pails of hot soap-suds, and other miseries incident to that domestic event.

And now that the family stovepipe has ceased to exude smoke at every joint and pore, the humorist finds himself fairly equipped for his year’s work. The boys are at school; lodge-meetings have begun, and sleepless wives are waiting for their truant lords; college graduates are seeking positions in newspaper offices (and sometimes getting and keeping them, though it won’t do to let the public know it); election is at hand, and[Pg 279] candidates are kissing babies and setting up the drinks for their constituents; young men of slender means are laying pipes for thicker clothes—in short, a man must be dull of wit who cannot find food for comic paragraphs in what goes on about him at this fruitful season. The ripening of the chestnut-burr, and the harvesting of its fruit—beautifully symbolical of the humorist’s vocation—form another admirable topic at this time.

Winter comes with its snow and ice, and the small boy, who is always around, moulds the one into balls for destructive warfare, while corpulent gentlemen and pedestrians bearing eggs and other fragile articles slip and fall on the other. Oyster-stews, and girls who pine for them; the female craving for matinee tickets, and the high hats which obstruct the view of those in the back seats; nocturnal revelry in saloon and ball-room; low-necked dresses; and the extortionate idleness[Pg 280] of the plumber now keep the pen of the comic writer constantly at work. Chapters on the pawning, borrowing, lending, and renovation of the dress-coat are also timely.

Spring brings the perennial spring poet with his rejected manuscript; the actor with his winter’s ulster; the health-giving bock-beer; and, above all, the goat, in the delineation of whose pranks and follies the Jokal Calendar reaches its climax.

What the reindeer is to the Laplander the goat is to the writer of modern humor. His whole life is devoted to the service of the paragraphist. He eats tomato-cans and crinoline; he rends the theatre-poster from the wall, and consumes the bucket of paste; he rends the clothes from the line, and devours the curtain that flutters in the basement window; he upsets elderly men, and charges, with lowered horns, at lone and fear-stricken women.

[Pg 281]But as the encroachments of civilization have driven the buffalo from his native plains, so is the goat, propelled by a stern city ordinance, slowly but surely disappearing from the streets and vacant lots which once knew him so well. He is making his last stand now in the rocky fastnesses of Harlem. I have seen him perched on an inaccessible crag on the border-land of Morrisania, looking down with solemn eyes on the great city where he once roamed careless and free from can to ash-barrel. Etched against a background of lowering clouds, his was, indeed, an impressive figure, the apotheosis of American humor.
II.—THE IDEA AND ITS EMBELLISHMENT.

In the construction of a joke the chief requisite is the Idea.

Making jokes without ideas is like making bricks without straw; and the[Pg 282] people who tried that were sent out into the Wilderness to wander for forty years and live exclusively on manna and water—a diet which is not provocative of humor. Indeed it is a noteworthy fact that although the children of Israel were accompanied in their journeying by herds of goats, and were constantly hearing stories of the huge squashes and clusters of grapes which grew in the Promised Land—the California of that period—yet we have no record that they availed themselves of such obvious opportunities for jesting.

The humorist, having procured his Idea, should divest it of all superfluities, place it on the table before him, and then fall into a reverie as to its possibilities. Let us suppose, for example, that his Idea, in a perfectly nude condition, looks something like this:

“A girl is thin enough to make a good match for any one.”

[Pg 283]Now it will not do to offer this simple statement as a joke. It is merely an Idea, or the nucleus of a short story, and can be greatly improved by a little verbiage.

There would be no point gained in calling the girl a New Yorker, or even a Philadelphian, though the latter city is usually fair game for the paragraphist. She should certainly hail from Boston. The girls of that city are identified in the popular mind with eye-glasses, long words, angularity and other outward and visible signs of severe mental discipline and parsimony in diet. The ideal Boston girl is not rotund. On the contrary, she is endowed with a sharply defined outline, and a profile which suggests self-abnegation in the matter of food. A little dialect will help the story along amazingly; therefore let the scene be laid in rural New England, and let the point be made with the usual rustic prefix of “Wa-al!” This will afford an opportunity to utilize[Pg 284] a few minor ideas relative to New England rural customs, the maintenance of city boarders, the food provided, the economy practised, and other salient features of country life.

So, by judicious expansion—not padding—the humorist will stretch his little paragraph into a very respectable story, something like this:

Sample of Short Story Erected on Paragraph.

A summer evening of exquisite calm and sweetness. The golden haze of sunset sheds its soft tints on hill and plain, and pours a flood of mellow light over the roofs and trees of the quaint old village street. The last rays of the sun, falling through the waving boughs of elm and maple, form a checkered, ever-moving pattern on the wall of the meeting-house; they kindle beacon-fires on the[Pg 285] distant heights of Baldhead Mountain, and linger in tender caress on the dainty auburn tresses of Priscilla Whitney, who is displaying her flounces, furbelows, and other “citified fixin’s” on the front piazza of Deacon Pogram’s residence.

(It will be seen that the beginning of this paragraph is written in a serious vein; but the last two lines prepare the reader for a comic story. He now makes up his mouth for the laugh which awaits him a little farther along.)

From the kitchen comes a pleasant aroma of burnt bread-crusts, as dear old Samanthy Pogram, her kindly face covered with its snow-white glory, prepares the coffee for supper. Meanwhile the worthy deacon, in stocking-feet and shirt-sleeves, sits by the open door and enjoys the cool evening breeze that sweeps in refreshing gusts down the fertile valley of the Pockohomock.

“There ye be again, Sarah,” says Aunt[Pg 286] Samanthy to the hired help, a shade of annoyance crossing her fine old face. “Hain’t I told ye time ’n’ again not to put fresh eggs in the boarders’ omelet? I suppose ye think there hain’t such a thing as a stale egg in the haouse, but ye must be wastin’ good ones on the city folks! Sakes alive! but I’ll be glad when they’ve cleaned aout, bag ’n’ baggage. I’m nigh tuckered aout a-waitin’ on ’em ’n’ puttin’ up with their frills ’n’ fancy doin’s.”

“They tell me, Samanthy,” says the deacon, “that young Rube Perkins is kinder makin’ up to one of aour boarders. I s’pose ye hain’t noticed nothin’, mebbe?”

“I’ve seen him a-settin’ alongside o’ that dough-faced critter times enough so he’d like ter wear aout the rocker on the piazzy; but I guess Rube had better not set enny too much store by what she says to him. Them high-toned Whitney folks o’ hern daown Bosting way hain’t over[Pg 287] ’n’ above an............