Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/27

 General Sherman's body-servant was a German who went with him through the war, but could never realize the idea that the war at last was over. One day the General, having travelled from the South to Chicago, was on the point of leaving, and ordered this man to pack a valise. The one he selected was so enormous that the General remonstrated, and examined what could be within. It was filled with hotel towels that had been looted from Atlanta clear through, in company with table-spoons of the Milledgeville Hotel; the German plundering on every route as if we were still marching through Georgia. This incongruous behavior has all the effect of a ludicrous incident.

Whatever accidental infirmity deposits us in positions incongruous with our ordinary state generates a ludicrous impression. When the obese lover, encased in corsets and tightly-strapped pantaloons, fell plump upon his knees before a lady to make his declaration, she was embarrassed, and besought him to arise; but he, fast anchored in the stiffest of costumes, whimpered out, "I can't, madam," and she had to ring for a servant. That is simply ludicrous. But suppose I should say that his suit had been rejected,—it would be an execrable remark, but still would modify the ludicrous impression, and raise it into a higher region of the pleasurable by making the first step of a pun towards the peculiar element of wit.

If a pun is good, the pleasure is sometimes purely mental and scarcely gets beyond a smile; for it constrains two different ideas into an accidental relation