particular error.
Especially are the Americans convinced that there is no humour in
Englishmen. Germans and Frenchmen may possess humour of an inferior
sort, but not Englishmen. It is my belief that in the American clubs
where I find copies of _Fliegende Blaetter_ and the _Journal Amusant_,
these papers are much more read than _Punch_, and in not a few cases, I
fear, by men who have but slight understanding of the languages in which
they are printed. Indeed, _Punch_ is a permanent, hebdomadally-recurrent
proof to American readers that Englishmen do not know the meaning of a
joke.[153:1] Americans, of course, do not understand more than a small
proportion of the pages of _Punch_ any more than they would understand
those pages if they were printed in Chinese; but because _Punch_ is
printed in English they think that they do understand it, and because
they cannot see the jokes, they conclude that the jokes are not there.

A certain proportion of American witticisms are recondite to English
readers for precisely similar reasons, but the American belief is that
when an Englishman fails to understand an American joke, it is because
he has no sense of humour; when an American cannot understand an English
one, it is because the joke is not funny. It is a view of the situation
eminently gratifying to Americans; but it is curious that their sense of
humour does not save them from it.

Whatever American humour may be, it is not subtle. It has a
pushfulness--a certain flamboyant self-assertiveness--which it shares
with some other things in the United States; and, however fine the
quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense
will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any
foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that
it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability.

What I take to be (with apologies to Mr. Dunne) the greatest individual
achievement in humorous writing that has been produced in America in
recent years, the Wolfville series of books of Mr. Alfred Henry Lewis,
is practically incomprehensible to English readers, not from any lack of
capacity on their part, but from the difficulties of the dialect and
still more from the strangeness of the atmosphere. In the same way the
Tablets of the scribe Azit Tigleth Miphansi must indeed be but ancient
Egyptian to Americans. But it would not occur to an Englishman to say,
because Americans