ies have
characterized other schools of humor. There is the same element of
surprise in De Quincey's {568} anticlimax, "Many a man has dated his ruin
from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little
of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to publish a joke
now and then." The violation of logic which makes us laugh at an Irish
bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff
Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if
he had never been born." Or in his advice, "Always live within your
income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;" or, again, in his
announcement that, "Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his own contracting."
A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual collocation of words,
is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he says of Brigham Young,
"He's the most married man I ever saw in my life;" or when, having been
drafted at several hundred different places where he had been exhibiting
his wax figures, he says that if he went on he should soon become a
regiment, and adds, "I never knew that there was so many of me." With
this a whimsical under-statement and an affectation of simplicity, as
where he expresses his willingness to sacrifice "even his wife's
relations" on the altar of patriotism; or, where, in delightful
unconsciousness of his own sins against orthography, he pronounces that
"Chaucer was a great poet, but he couldn't spell," or where he says of
the feast of raw dog, tendered him by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It
don't agree with me. I prefer simple food." On the {569} whole, it may
be said of original humor of this kind, as of other forms of originality
in literature, that the elements of it are old, but the combinations are
novel. Other humorists, like Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings"), and David
R. Locke, ("Petroleum V. Nasby"), have used bad spelling as a part of
their machinery; while Robert H. Newell, ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L.
Clemens, ("Mark Twain"), and more recently "Bill Nye," though belonging
to the same school of low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of
these the most eminent, by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has probably made
more people laugh than any other living writer. A Missourian by birth
(1835), he served the usual apprenticeship at type-setting and editing
country newspapers; spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi
steam-boat, and seven years more mining