Humorous American Short Stories Read online

  Humorous American Short Stories

  SELECTIONS FROM MARK TWAIN TO OTHERS MUCH MORE RECENT

  Edited by Bob Blaisdell

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Mineola, New York

  DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

  GENERAL EDITOR: MARY CAROLYN WALDREP

  EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: BOB BLAISDELL

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: SEE P. XI

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  Humorous American Short Stories: Selections from Mark Twain to Others Much More Recent, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2013, is a new anthology of short stories reprinted from standard sources. A new introductory Note has been specially prepared for this edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Humorous American short stories : selections from Mark Twain to others much more recent / edited by Bob Blaisdell Dover Publications, Inc.

  pages cm — (Dover Thrift Editions)

  eISBN-13: 978-0-486-31651-2

  1. Humorous stories, American. 2. Short stories, American. 3. American wit and humor. I. Blaisdell, Robert, editor of compilation.

  PS648.H84H86 2013

  817—dc23

  2013008657

  Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

  49988X01 2013

  www.doverpublications.com

  Contents

  Note

  Alice Addertongue (1732)

  Benjamin Franklin

  Rip Van Winkle: A Posthumous Tale of Diedrich Knickerbocker (1819-1820)

  Washington Irving

  Selecting the Faculty (1855)

  Robert Carlton (Baynard Rush Hall)

  “The Jumping Frog”: In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More, by Patient, Unremunerated Toil (1865 & 1879)

  Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

  Bill Nations (1873)

  Bill Arp (Charles Henry Smith)

  A Jersey Centenarian (1875)

  Bret Harte

  How I Killed a Bear (1878)

  Charles Dudley Warner

  The Parson’s Horse Race (1878)

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  The Peterkins Decide to Learn the Languages (1878)

  Lucretia P. Hale

  Uncle Remus and the Wonderful Tar-Baby Story (1881)

  Joel Chandler Harris

  His Pa Gets Mad! (1883)

  George W. Peck

  John Adams’ Diary (1887)

  Bill Nye

  Active Colorado Real Estate (1895)

  Hayden Carruth

  The Idiot’s Journalism Scheme (1895)

  John Kendrick Bangs

  Rollo Learning to Read (1897)

  Robert J. Burdette

  The Wish and the Deed (1903)

  Max Adeler (Charles Heber Clark)

  Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition (1904)

  Josiah Allen’s Wife (Marietta Holley)

  The Crimson Cord (1904)

  Ellis Parker Butler

  The Life Elixir of Marthy (1905)

  Elizabeth Hyer Neff

  The Tale of the Tangled Telegram (1905)

  Wilbur D. Nesbit

  The Set of Poe (1906)

  George Ade

  Our Very Wishes (1909)

  Harriet Prescott Spofford

  The Ransom of Red Chief (1910)

  O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

  The Golden Honeymoon (1922)

  Ring Lardner

  A Telephone Call (1928)

  Dorothy Parker

  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939)

  James Thurber

  Wooing the Muse (1950)

  Langston Hughes

  The Conversion of the Jews (1958)

  Philip Roth

  Harrison Bergeron (1961)

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  The Gift (1979)

  Kia Penso

  Flight Control (1981)

  Jervey Tervalon

  How to Fight with Your Wife (1996)

  Howard Kaplan

  Center of the Universe (2012)

  Simon Rich

  NOTE

  THE LAST THING an editor of a book of humor stories wants to hear about any of his selections is “That’s not funny.” Accusations of poor taste, ridiculousness, broadness, childishness, absurdity . . . those are great. That means the reader laughed but has decided to feel bad for having laughed. Speaking of which, if “Uncle Remus” weren’t so funny, I would’ve chickened out and jettisoned it from this anthology for all of its complicated political and racial incorrectnesses. In the post-Civil War South, Joel Chandler Harris’s presentation of Uncle Remus was a complicated balancing act, which even Harris didn’t seem fully conscious of performing: he simultaneously confirmed and mocked stereotypes. A sense of humor, it’s clear, allows us to get closer to the truth of our common humanity than our public opinions do.

  American humor is as distinctive as any culture’s, but I would be hard-pressed to describe what that distinctiveness is. Is it Ben Franklin’s satirical impersonations of various Philadelphia “types”? Is it Washington Irving’s post-revolutionary New York tall tales? Mark Twain is our most famous funny-man; he was so funny he could amuse us even as we expected amusement, which is a comedian’s most marvelous trick. He provided us with so many examples of humor, because everywhere he looked, all over the world (he was a real traveler), he was amazed and exasperated by the damned human race’s self-defeating lies and its verbal ingenuity in doing so. A recent commentator suggests that the distinctiveness of American humor is we are particularly good at making fun of ourselves, but that quality, it seems to me, is simply the universal basis of humor. Humor is humor because it shows us how mistaken-ridden we all are, how unconscious we are of our fallibilities, how blind we are to our own limitations, how serious we are and how ridiculous such posturing is. Humor tricks us into laughing with self-recognition.

  All jesters face the ax: Be funny or die! says the Reader King. Yet the comic tone usually assures us that nobody, at least in the story, is going to die, or if there is death, we readers or listeners will not be wrenched by it. The characters will face many troubles and will, to our reassurance, overcome them or at least end up exactly where he or she started, ready to face another “situation.” Dorothy Parker’s unfortunate first-person narrator of “A Telephone Call,” for example, dramatizes and satirizes a particular anxiety better than any representation before or since: “You see, God, if You would just let him telephone me, I wouldn’t have to ask You anything more. I would be sweet to him, I would be gay, I would be just the way I used to be, and then he would love me again. And then I would never have to ask You for anything more. Don’t You see, God? So won’t You please let him telephone me? Won’t You please, please, please? Are You punishing me, God, because I’ve been bad? Are You angry with me because I did that? Oh, but, God, there are so many bad people—You could not be hard only to me. And it wasn’t very bad; it couldn’t have been bad. We didn’t hurt anybody, God. Things are only bad when they hurt people. We didn’t hurt one single soul; You know that. You know it wasn’t bad, don’t You, God? So won’t You let him telephone me now?” We know, just as the Eternal One knows, that in spite of improved technology, our lonely souls haven’t moved a single step since 1928, when Parker wrote that story. Why comic revelations about human nature seem to me reassuring, I don’t know.

  Some of the characters in these stories became stars of recurring comedies—notably Lucretia P. Hale’s Peterkin family, John Kendrick Bangs’s Idiot, Marietta Holley’s Samanth
a Allen and Langston Hughes’s Jesse B. Simple. When readers asked for more, those writers discovered the versatility of their clowns. Simple’s creation gave Langston Hughes the fullest range Hughes ever had for his genius; he could step out and let loose on topics that were otherwise too infuriating for readers or too controversial, among them race and social injustice. Comedy gave opportunities to many of these writers to play around and regain the ability to surprise us. Comedy freed the authors and readers from arguments and proofs about the human condition and gave everyone instead a point of view of those edges where humans act consistently inconsistently—like humans.

  One of the most poignant of characters is Howard Kaplan’s ever-super-conscious protagonist in “How to Fight with Your Wife,” which was the title of the 1990s newspaper column that chronicled in the finest psychological detail the social and marital dilemmas of a New Jersey husband. Kaplan’s hero makes James Thurber’s Walter Mitty seem comparatively slow-witted: “I threw a quick glance at Jean. She looked quite normal. It was I, rather, for just a second, who didn’t look himself. I was suddenly in the position of a man who comes to the realization he might have just accidentally poisoned his wife. I’m not often in this predicament. Was this the first time in fact? The alarm I could have predicted, but not the degree of furtiveness. The furtiveness was there in equal measure to the alarm. And then shame at my furtiveness: I wasn’t going to warn her. Either everything was absolutely fine—as I was sure it was—or something really was the matter, in which case it was too late. In either case, it seemed to me best to keep quiet.” How Kaplan got away with writing so well, so comically, for so long, in a modern periodical remains a happy mystery.

  While I intended to include only independent short stories, I found I couldn’t draw the line at the excerpts I discovered in earlier anthologies. There was a hey-day of humor anthologies from the 1880s (when Twain edited a great grab-bag volume of American humorous skits, stories, and poems) to the 1910s, when dozens of collections gathered material from the many American magazines that published short fiction or from excerpts the anthologizers quietly made from novels. I myself have not made any excerpts but, less guiltily, have accepted earlier excerpts as faits accompli, among them the marvelous “Selecting the Faculty” by Robert Carlton (Baynard Rush Hall).

  The span of time from Benjamin Franklin to Simon Rich is almost three hundred years, but it looks like a lively skip and a jump rather than a leap. Franklin, forever inventive in the sciences as well as in literature, never stopped writing skits and stories of bugs and aliens and underappreciated left hands, while Rich, the cleverest and funniest of contemporary writers, has taken turns through the consciousness of various characters, from ants to chickens to God, Socratically pondering life’s everyday problems. Franklin would’ve immediately grasped and enjoyed Rich’s faux-naïve fancies.

  I have arranged the stories chronologically, by date of original publication, and at the end of each story have credited the source. The stories and tales, I have trusted, create their own contexts, so I have noted only the skimpiest of background details about the authors or their works. I thank my friends Max Schott, Enid Stubin, and Jack Wolkenfeld for their suggestions of material.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Langston Hughes: “Wooing the Muse” from The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1961 by Langston Hughes. Copyright renewed 1989 by George Houston Bass. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  Howard Kaplan: “How to Fight with Your Wife” by Howard Kaplan, reprinted with permission of the author. Howard Kaplan’s work has appeared most recently in The New England Review.

  Dorothy Parker: “A Telephone Call” from Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, copyright 1924–29, 1931–34, 1937–39, 1941, 1943, 1955, 1958, 1995 by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

  Kia Penso: “The Gift” by Kia Penso, reprinted with permission of the author.

  Simon Rich: “Center of the Universe” by Simon Rich. Copyright © 2012 Condé Nast. From The New Yorker. All rights reserved. Article by Simon Rich. Reprinted by permission.

  Philip Roth: “The Conversion of the Jews” from Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. Copyright © 1959, renewed 1987 by Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Jervey Tervalon: “Flight Control” by Jervey Tervalon, reprinted with permission of the author.

  James Thurber: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” from My World—And Welcome to It by James Thurber. Copyright © 1942 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: “Harrison Bergeron” from Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., copyright © 1961 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc. and the Trust U/W of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., and to the Trust U/W of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. for permission.

  ALICE ADDERTONGUE (1732)

  Benjamin Franklin

  The most famous American who was never President, Franklin (1706–1790) was not only an important printer, publisher, inventor, and diplomat; he was also America’s first great popular writer. He often composed witty articles about topical issues from the point of view of various characters. Here, his Alice Addertongue speaks up for gossip, human nature, and women’s rights.

  Mr. Gazetteer,

  I was highly pleased with your last Week’s Paper upon Scandal, as the uncommon Doctrine therein preach’d is agreeable both to my Principles and Practice, and as it was published very seasonably to reprove the Impertinence of a Writer in the foregoing Thursday’s Mercury, who at the Conclusion of one of his silly Paragraphs, laments, forsooth, that the Fair Sex are so peculiarly guilty of this enormous Crime: Every Blockhead ancient and modern, that could handle a Pen, has I think taken upon him to cant in the same senseless Strain. If to scandalize be really a Crime, what do these Puppies mean? They describe it, they dress it up in the most odious frightful and detestable Colours, they represent it as the worst of Crimes, and then roundly and charitably charge the whole Race of Womankind with it. Are they not then guilty of what they condemn, at the same time that they condemn it? If they accuse us of any other Crime, they must necessarily scandalize while they do it: But to scandalize us with being guilty of Scandal, is in itself an egregious Absurdity, and can proceed from nothing but the most consummate Impudence in Conjunction with the most profound Stupidity.

  This, supposing, as they do, that to scandalize is a Crime; which you have convinc’d all reasonable People, is an Opinion absolutely erroneous. Let us leave then these Ideot Mock-Moralists, while I entertain you with some Account of my Life and Manners.

  I am a young Girl of about thirty-five, and live at present with my Mother. I have no Care upon my Head of getting a Living, and therefore find it my Duty as well as Inclination, to exercise my Talent at CENSURE, for the Good of my Country folks. There was, I am told, a certain generous Emperor, who if a Day had passed over his Head, in which he had conferred no Benefit on any Man, used to say to his Friends, in Latin, Diem perdidi, that is, it seems, I have lost a Day. I believe I should make use of the same Expression, if it were possible for a Day to pass in which I had not, or miss’d, an Opportunity to scandalize somebody: But, Thanks be praised, no such Misfortune has befel me these dozen Years.

  Yet, whatever Good I may do, I cannot pretend that I first entred into the Practice of this Virtue from a Principle of Publick Spirit; for I remember that when a Child, I had a violent Inclination to be ever talking in my own Praise, and being continually told that it was ill Manners, an
d once severely whipt for it, the confin’d Stream form’d itself a new Channel, and I began to speak for the future in the Dispraise of others. This I found more agreable to Company, and almost as much so to my self: For what great Difference can there be, between putting your self up, or putting your Neighbour down? Scandal, like other Virtues, is in part its own Reward, as it gives us the Satisfaction of making our selves appear better than others, or others no better than ourselves.

  My Mother, good Woman, and I, have heretofore differ’d upon this Account. She argu’d that Scandal spoilt all good Conversation, and I insisted that without it there could be no such Thing. Our Disputes once rose so high, that we parted Tea-Table, and I concluded to entertain my Acquaintance in the Kitchin. The first Day of this Separation we both drank Tea at the same Time, but she with her Visitors in the Parlor. She would not hear of the least Objection to any one’s Character, but began a new sort of Discourse in some such queer philosophical Manner as this; I am mightily pleas’d sometimes, says she, when I observe and consider that the World is not so bad as People out of humour imagine it to be. There is something amiable, some good Quality or other in every body. If we were only to speak of People that are least respected, there is such a one is very dutiful to her Father, and methinks has a fine Set of Teeth; such a one is very respectful to her Husband; such a one is very kind to her poor Neighbours, and besides has a very handsome Shape; such a one is always ready to serve a Friend, and in my Opinion there is not a Woman in Town that has a more agreeable Air and Gait. This fine kind of Talk, which lasted near half an Hour, she concluded by saying, I do not doubt but every one of you have made the like Observations, and I should be glad to have the Conversation continu’d upon this Subject. Just at that Juncture I peep’d in at the Door, and never in my Life before saw such a Set of simple vacant Countenances; they looked somehow neither glad, nor sorry, nor angry, nor pleas’d, nor indifferent, nor attentive; but, (excuse the Simile) like so many blue wooden Images of Rie Doe. I in the Kitchin had already begun a ridiculous Story of Mr. ’s Intrigue with his Maid, and his Wife’s Behaviour upon the Discovery; at some Passages we laugh’d heartily, and one of the gravest of Mama’s Company, without making any Answer to her Discourse, got up to go and see what the Girls were so merry about: She was follow’d by a Second, and shortly after by a Third, till at last the old Gentlewoman found herself quite alone, and being convinc’d that her Project was impracticable, came her self and finish’d her Tea with us; ever since which Saul also has been among the Prophets, and our Disputes lie dormant.