The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself,
and has to stop every little while to hold himself in and keep
from laughing outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes
in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles; and at the end of the
ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted,
and the tears are running down their faces.
The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness
of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result
is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious.
This is art--and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it;
but a machine could tell the other story.
To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering
and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they
are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position
is correct. Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third
is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it,
as if one where thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.
Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would
begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to
think was wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently
absent-minded pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way;
and that was the remark intended to explode the mine--and it did.
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