The angel would eat too much gingerbread - Emerson cracks a joke

Somewhere on Wuthering Expectations, although heck if I can remember where, I included Ralph Waldo Emerson in a list of writers I considered humorless. Having read more deeply - or more shallowly? - anyway, more something - in Emerson, I am happy to retract the charge.

In his essay "Nominalist and Realist" (1844), Emerson reminds us that even Great Men are imperfect: "I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity."

That's, I say, that's a joke, son. I didn't say it was necessarily funny, but an angel stuffing himself with gingerbread is comic. Still deflating the Great Men, he varies the joke in the "Napoleon" chapter of Representative Men (1850) when listing Napoleon's bad qualities:

"He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at key-holes, or, at least, that he was caught at it."

OK, "that he was caught at it," not bad.

I have been reading Emerson in something like chronological order. I think he gets funnier as he ages, although I may have only now learned to identify his comic tone. He becomes a bit sour, even, but there's an accompanying recognition of the ridiculousness of things that is very genial. This is easier to see in his journal than in his essays, but traces begin to appear everywhere.

Don't get me wrong - the default Emerson style is "earnest gasbag", but there's a lot of variation around that. Look at this defense of earnestness, in "Montaigne; or the Skeptic":

"The first dangerous symptom I report, is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers."

This is immediately followed by a parody of his "subtle and admirable friend" Thomas Carlyle, a heavy mocker, who becomes "San Carlo." Again, not exactly funny, but comic, and the only example of Emersonian parody that I have come across, or anyway recognized.

As enjoyable as it is to find this side of Emerson, there is no excuse for this journal entry from December 1850:

"How could the children of Israel sustain themselves for forty days in the desart?
Because of the sand-which-is there."

George Eliot, barrel of laughs - you couldn't tell the monkey from the mounseers

How many great writers lack a sense of humor? Very few, I think. I'd pick out Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, let's see, Yukio Mishima. Feel free to suggest others. I can think of a much longer list of writers who do not get enough credit for their humor, and I was pleased to find that George Eliot belongs on the second list, not the first one.

Sometimes the characters in Adam Bede tell jokes; sometimes the narrator slips one in. How about this one:

"Meanwhile the conversation at the head of the table had taken a political turn. Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information. He saw so far beyond the mere facts of a case that really it was superfluous to know them." (Ch. 53, The Harvest Supper)

That's not just a sly observation, it's a bonafide joke, and a good one. A contemporary reader might be able to apply it to his own daily life. Perhaps to his own conversation. Ahem.

That whole Harvest Supper chapter is quite funny. The farmers discuss the Napoleonic war, and the poor fighting prowess of Bony and his mounseers. Mr. Poyser suspects it's the result of eating too much salad, and not enough beef. Mr. Craig argues ("thumping the table rather fiercely") that when the French drafted a "big monkey," "you couldn't tell the monkey from the mounseers!"

Although the book Adam Bede is often funny, the character Adam Bede is completely humorless. He argues that the story about the monkey, for example, is "all nonsense." Way to kill a joke, pal. Adam is good-humored, but is that ever not the same thing as having a sense of humor. He's the fellow who laughs along with a joke because he recognizes the form, not because he actually gets it.

Come to think of it, none of the central characters - Hetty, Arthur, Dinah, God forbid - have much of a sense of humor. Well, they have their own business in the book. Mr. Craig, Mrs. Poyser, Adam's mother, and our narrator George Eliot - they provide the humorous undercurrent that keeps much of the book moving along. I was delighted to encounter this side of Eliot.

Stendhal and his jokes

"This Minister, despite his frivolous manner and his brilliant remarks, did not possess a soul à la française; he was not able to forget his griefs and grievances. When his pillow revealed a thorn, he was compelled to snap it off, and blunt its point against his own throbbing limbs. (I apologize for this paragraph, translated from the Italian)."

The Charterhouse of Parma, Modern Library, p. 96.

This is an entire paragraph. The first sentence is the sort of French character versus Italian character stuff Stendhal likes. The second sentence is bizarre and barely comprehensible. The third sentence is a classic Stendhalian joke.

A classic Stendhalian joke is one no one else gets. His entire book On Love is in this genre.