. When Keats wrote the line, 'What pipes and timbrels, what wild
ecstasy!' I am willing to believe that the American humorist would have
expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with 'Some
pipe!' When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, it
was really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion
of a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird,
and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the
Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, 'Some bird?' as if he were
offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to this
root and rationale of a joke, the English language already contains
quite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say, 'Some bird'; there is
a far finer irony in the old expression, 'Something like a bird.' It
suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlike
about a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a
bird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like
the faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of
imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical.
All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, take
up a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the point
of either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used to
say, 'Something like a bird,' now say, 'Some bird,' with undiminished
weariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English; for
in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the
joke.

There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these
American jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in our
climate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certain
that they were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or
scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the British
public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to the
eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek Key,
but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the
Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the
most funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills are
picturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothing
so national as humour; and many things, like many people, can be
humorous