[figure description] Page 017.[end figure description]

My dear friend Artemus! I have a thousand things to say
about you, but only room for a few.

Once we traveled together down the Mississippi—in 1863.
His trunks were labelled thus:

A. WARD
HYS
Business Suite

A. WARD
HYS STORE CLOTHES

A. WARD
Hys Sunday
Clothes

The steamer stopped at the writer's plantation at Lake Providence.
He took especial delight in the good-natured plantation
darkies. Strolling through the “quarters,” his grave words, too
deep with humor for darky comprehension, gained their entire
confidence.

One day he called up Uncle Jeff, an Uncle-Tom-like patriarch,
and commenced in his usual vein: “Now, Uncle Jefferson,”
he said, “why do you thus pursue the habit of industry?
Indolence is preferable. I prefer it. I am happier when
I am idle. Why cannot you pursue a life of happy idleness too?
Why, Jefferson, you could live for months without performing
any kind of labor, and at the expiration of that time still feel
fresh and vigorous enough to commence it again. Idleness invigorates
the system; it is a sweet boon. No one should work;
they should get other people to do it for them.”

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

During this conversation Uncle Jeff returned his mournful
gaze with a mute admiration for the good and wise originator of
the only theory which the darkey mind could appreciate. “You
is jes' right, Mr. Artemus,” ejaculated Jeff, when the mournful
humorist handed him a dollar and waved him away. As Uncle
Jeff ran to tell his wonderful story to the negroes in the “quarters,”
holding up the dollar as material proof, Artemus would
lean forward with his elbows on his knees and indulge in a
chuckling laugh.

One day the negroes were grinding their hoes on an old,
dilapidated grindstone, which wabbled and swayed up and down,
being worn by time and hard usage
to an eccentric ellipse. When the
eyes of Artemus sighted the rickety
grindstone, he settled into a long and
hearty laugh. Then, tired of laughing,
he eased himself down
upon his elbows, but did not
cease his intermittent chuckling.
“There!” he gasped,
as he wabbled his hand
and arm in the curves of
a parabola; “there is wit
personified, or thingified.
When you can surprise any one with an eccentric anti-climax
instead of a rounded sentence, then you will have something
funny.”

“People laugh at me,” the humorist once said to me, “because
of my eccentric sentences. There is no wit in the form of a well-rounded
sentence. If I say Alexander conquered the world and
sighed because he could not do so some more, there is a funny
mixture, that is, it is funny to those intelligent enough to understand
the original sentence, which is burlesqued.”

Here is the true key to Artemus Ward's power as a humorist,
and it will be found that the great majority of his jokes depend
upon a sudden switch off from a serious beginning to an absurd
ending. While at Natchez he sent the writer a ticket to his
lecture which read thus:

ADMIT THE BEARER
AND ONE WIFE
yours trooly
a. Ward.

p628-032

Previous section

Next section