Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1884 — The John Bull Joke. [ARTICLE]

The John Bull Joke.

The average English joke has its peculiarities. A sort of mellow distance; a kind of chastened reluctance. A coy and timid, yet trusting, though evanescent intangibility, which softly lingers in the troubled air, and lulls the tired senses to a dreary rest, like the subdued murmur of a hoarse jackass about nine miles np the gulch. He must be a hardened wretch, indeed, who has not felt his bosom heave and the scalding tears steal down his farrowed cheek after he has read an English joke. There can be no hope for the man who has not been touched by the gentle, pleading, yet all-potent sadness embodied in the humorous paragraph of the true Englishman. One may fritter away his existence in chasing the follies of our day and generation, and have nanght to look back upon but a choioe assortment of robust regrets; but if he will stop in his mad career to read an English pun, his attention will be called to the solemn thought that life is, after all, but a tearful journey to the tomb. Death and disaster on every hand may fail to turn the minds of a thoughtless world to serious matters, but when the London funny man grapples with a particularly skittish and evasive joke, with its weeping willow attachment, and hurls it at a giddy and reckless humanity, a prolonged wail of anguish goes np from broken hearts, and a somber pall bangs in the gladsome sky like a pair of soldier pants with only one suspender. If the lost and undone victim to the great catalogue of damning vice and enervating dissipation will for a moment turn his mind to the solemn consideration of the London Punch, and wrestle with it alone, where the prying eyes of the world cannot penetrate, though unused to tears, the fountains of the great deep in his nature will be opened up, and he •will see the blackness of intense darkness which surrounds him, and be led to penitence and abject humanity. The mission of the English humorist is to darken the horizon and shut out the false and treacherous joy of existence—to shut out the beauty of the landscape and scatter a $2 gloom over the glad green earth. English humor is like a sore toe. It makes you glad when you get over it. It is like small-pox, because if you live through it you are not likely to have it again. When we pass from earth, and our place is filled by another sad-eyed genius whose pants are . too short, and who manifests other signs of greatness, let no storied nrn or animated bust be placed above our lowly resting place, but stuff an English conundrum so that it will look as it did in life, and let it stand above our silent dust, to shed its damp and bilious influence through the cemetery, as a monument of desolation and a fountain of unshed tears, and the grave robber will shun our final resting place as he would the melon patch where lurks the spring gun and the alert and irritable bulldog.— Bill Nye.