But there is one striking difference between American society and
those societies in which comic papers have succeeded which not
only goes a good way to explain their failure here, but puts a
better face on some of their efforts--such as their onslaughts on
the friends of progress--than they seem to wear at first sight.
To furnish sufficient food for fun to keep a comic paper afloat,
a country must supply a good many strong social contrasts for the
professional joker to play upon, and must have a large amount of
reverence for social distinctions and dignities for him to shock.
Two-thirds of the zest with which foreign comic papers are read
is due to the fact that they caricature persons or social circles
with which the mass of their readers are not thoroughly familiar,
and whose habits and ways of looking at things they do not share
or only partly share. A good deal of the fun in _Punch_, for
instance, consists in making costermongers or cabmen quarrel with
the upper classes, in ridicule of Jeames's attempts to imitate
his master, of Brown's efforts to scrape acquaintance with a
peer, of the absurd figure cut by the "cad" in the hunting-field,
and of the folly of the city clerk in trying to dress and behave
like a guardsman. In short, the point of a great number of its
best jokes is made by bringing different social strata into sharp
comparison. The peculiarities of Irishmen and Scotchmen also
furnish rich materials to the caricaturist. He never tires of
illustrating the blunders and impudence of the one and the hot
patriotism and niggardliness of the other. The Irish Highlander,
who denies, in a rich brogue, that any Irish are ever admitted
into his regiment, and the cannie burgher from Aberdeen, who, on
his return home from a visit to London, says it's an "awfu' dear
place; that he hadna' been twa oors in the toon when bang went