The village wits are not so shy. The young ladies, like Betsy Ward, say,
"If you mean getting hitched, I'm on." The public is not above the most
practical jokes, and a good deal of the amusement is derived from the
extreme dryness, the countrified slowness of the narrative. The
humorists are Puritans at bottom, as well as rustics. They have an
amazing familiarity with certain religious ideas and certain Biblical
terms. There is a kind of audacity in their use of the Scriptures, which
reminds one of the freedom of mediaeval mystery-plays. Probably this
boldness began, not in scepticism or in irreverence, but in honest
familiar faith. It certainly seems very odd to us in England, and
probably expressions often get a laugh which would pass unnoticed in
America. An astounding coolness and freedom of manners probably go for
something in the effect produced by American humour. There is nothing of
the social flunkeyism in it which too often marks our own satirists.
Artemus Ward's reports of his own conversations with the mighty of the
earth were made highly ludicrous by the homely want of self-consciousness,
displayed by the owner of the Kangaroo, that "amoosin' little cuss," and
of the "two moral B'ars." But it is vain to attempt to analyze the fun
of Artemus Ward. Why did he make some people laugh till they cried,
while others were all untouched? His secret probably was almost entirely
one of manner, a trick of almost idiotic _naivete_, like that of Lord
Dundreary, covering real shrewdness. He had his rustic chaff, his
Puritan profanity; his manner was the essence of his mirth. It was one
of the ultimate constituents of the ludicrous, beyond which it is useless
to inquire.

With Mark Twain we are on smoother ground. An almost Mephistophilean
coolness, an unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects,
after the mean possibilities of the sublime,--these, with a native sense
of incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration, make up his stock-