narrative of a single event, told as being
striking enough to bring out a point. The keener the point, the more
condensed the form, and the more suddenly the application strikes the
hearer, the better the story.

To regard an anecdote as an illustration--an interpretive picture--will
help to hold us to its true purpose, for a purposeless story is of all
offenses on the platform the most asinine. A perfectly capital joke will
fall flat when it is dragged in by the nape without evident bearing on
the subject under discussion. On the other hand, an apposite anecdote
has saved many a speech from failure.

"There is no finer opportunity for the display of tact than in the
introduction of witty or humorous stories into a discourse. Wit is keen
and like a rapier, piercing deeply, sometimes even to the heart. Humor
is good-natured, and does not wound. Wit is founded upon the sudden
discovery of an unsuspected relation existing between two ideas. Humor
deals with things out of relation--with the incongruous. It was wit in
Douglass Jerrold to retort upon the scowl of a stranger whose shoulder
he had familiarly slapped, mistaking him for a friend: 'I beg your
pardon, I thought I knew you--but I'm glad I don't.' It was humor in the
Southern orator, John Wise, to liken the pleasure of spending an
evening with a Puritan girl to that of sitting on a block of ice in
winter, cracking hailstones between his teeth."[24]

The foregoing quotation has been introduced chiefly to illustrate the
first and simplest form of anecdote--the single sentence embodying a
pungent saying.

Another simple form is that which conveys its meaning without need of
"application," as the old preachers used to say. George Ade has quoted
this one as the best joke he ever heard:

Two solemn-looking gentlemen were riding together in a railway
carriage. One gentleman said to the other: "Is your wife
entertaining this summer?" Whereupon the other gentleman
replied: "Not very."

Other anecdotes need harnessing to the particular truth the speaker
wishes to carry along in his talk. Sometimes the application is made
before the story is told and the audience is prepared to make the
comparison, point by point, as the illustration is told. Henry W. Grady
used this method in one of the anecdotes he told while delivering his
great extemporaneous address, "The New South."

Age does not endow all things with strength and virtue, nor are
all new t