Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1885 — The Funny Item. [ARTICLE]

The Funny Item.

It is becoming quite common to utter the word funny sarcastically, with italic emphasis, and as if with quoted marks. But hundreds of poor mortals who have found the world one too many for them, the lines about whose mouths are deepening every year, and becoming more and more strange to the smile that approaches timidly and hurries away as if it felt itself an unwelcome guest, have had their lives temporarily brightened (perhaps permanently, for life is such a strange thing that the apparently trivial things affecting it cannot, like notes, be estimated at their face value) by this same funny item. It is no light task to dish up day after day, or even week after week, a continual fund of humor. It is not an uncommon belief that a humorist is so with no effort of his own, and can dash off a funny thing with as much ease as he can walk a mile. With such men as Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and some others, it is, perhaps, just as natural to be humorous as not; but, with the majority, it becomes very much a mechanical effort after all. Have you never seen an attempt at gayety when you knew that underneath it was a pain that gave it pathos in your eyes? So it is not difficult to imagine a so-called humorist, in response to a demand, writing a piece that shall make merry many a sober and saddened heart, while his own is heavy with pain of a bereavement or other loss, or with the burden of a bodily sickness silently and heroically borne. Do you think humor is as easy for the writer as for the reader ? Do you think there is no pathos, no tragedy, even, in the live ■* of those men whose business it is to make fun for the multitude ? Several years ago there was in Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum an inmate who had made mirth for thousands. He was then a hypochondriac of the extremest kind. Food was disgusting to him; milk was gangrene; all meat was in the last stages of putrefaction. In short, the man who had made others merry was himself dying of the deepest melancholy. Think of Fox, or of Emmett. It is frequently noticed that a funny writer is a man of the gravest expression himselt. Depend upon it that here is an illustration that humor means work, hard work. Savants tell us, too, that the reading of the crisp, sparkling items of the funny column, which almost every paper now contains, is injurious to the memory. This is certainly crushing evidence against the poor paragraphs, but don’t you think that the heavy laugh these despised items afford you, the dispelling for the time of the morbid feelings we are all prone to as we feel the presence of life’s burdens, the stimulus to new activity occasioned by the gleam of merry sunshine that finds its way into the darkness of your spirit, perhaps the new lease of life that is given you by the momentary cheer in the midst of your gloom, are more than compensation for any trifling injury to your memory? But you can make these items a positive aid to your memory. Store the good ones up for repetition. You will have a fund of humor at your disposal, will have pleasant food for meditation., and will be a more welcome companion. —¥omJoers Gazette.