The Humour of America Selected, with an Introduction and Index of American Humorists — Reading Notes

The Opening Gambit: Nye's Deadpan and Riley's Pastoral

The first two selections establish contrasting modes. Bill Nye's "My Dog" (page 1) relies on a narrator who reports canine chaos with clinical detachment: the dog "ate up a whole set of law-books" and "killed a neighbor's hen." The humor emerges from the gap between the trivial events and the grave tone. In contrast, James Whitcomb Riley's "Knee-Deep in June" (page 4) offers a gentle, rhythmic celebration of rural idleness—"the jaybird chatters" and "the bee-martin's wing." Riley's dialect and sentimentality provide a foil to Nye's irony, hinting at the anthology's range from affectionate regional sketches to sharper satire.

Dialect and Character: From Cable to Harris

Several pieces showcase regional speech as a comic device. George Washington Cable's "The School Examination" (page 28) uses a Louisiana Creole setting, with dialogue that captures vernacular rhythms. Joel Chandler Harris's "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" (page 108) presents Uncle Remus's dialect in a tale of trickery, where Brer Fox's "lay low" and Brer Rabbit's "please don't fling me in dat brier-patch" become iconic. These selections rely on oral storytelling traditions, with humor rooted in character interaction and verbal play rather than plot. The compiler's inclusion of Harris alongside Cable suggests an interest in how dialect shapes comic identity.

Mechanical Absurdity: Cozzens and the Patent Bedstead

Frederick Swartout Cozzens's "The Sparrowgrass Papers" excerpt (page 243) offers a sustained comic set-piece about a self-adjusting bed that ejects its occupants hourly. The narrator's scientific precision—"a complication of mechanical forces"—contrasts with the chaos of "the baby, one cradle (overturned), and Mrs. Sparrowgrass." Cozzens builds humor through escalating detail: the bed's "iron elbow" cries "like unto a steel Katydid," and the narrator's rationalizations ("I had made a small mistake the first night, in not setting the 'indicator'") parody technological optimism. This piece exemplifies the anthology's fondness for domestic mishaps treated with mock-heroic gravity.

Satirical Forms: Franklin's Maxims and Bierce's Items

Benjamin Franklin's "Maxims" (page 175) and "Model of a Letter of Recommendation" (page 176) offer compressed, ironic wisdom: "He that lives upon hope will die fasting." These brief entries contrast with Ambrose Bierce's "Items from the Press of Interior California" (page 166), which parodies newspaper reporting with deadpan absurdities like "An Avalanche of Drugs." Bierce's entries, signed "Dod Grile," use the language of journalism to mock sensationalism. The juxtaposition of Franklin's 18th-century aphorisms with Bierce's 19th-century cynicism reveals the anthology's historical sweep, from Enlightenment wit to Gilded Age skepticism.

Readers approaching this anthology may find it useful to sample selections in any order, as the pieces are self-contained and vary widely in tone. The index of American humorists at the end provides biographical context for the authors, many of whom were nationally famous in their day. Pay attention to the illustrations by C. E. Brock, which often amplify the comic situations with expressive line drawings. The collection rewards those who enjoy period language and cultural references, though some dialect may require slow reading.

There’s a particular ache in those old dialect stories—the way they laughed to keep from crying. I found myself thinking of that while revisiting Frontier Humor in Verse, Prose and Picture — A Closer Reading, where the same wistfulness hides beneath the tall tales, like a porch swing creaking after everyone’s gone inside.