When Humor Was Something You’d Take, Uh, Seriously

Man wuz created a littel lower then the angels--and he has bin a’gettin’ a littel lower ever sense.

--Josh Billings

Cacography is one of those puzzling words that if you don’t look it up in the dictionary you think it has something to do with the conversation of hens in a barnyard.

Gerhard Ehmann knows the true meaning because he’s steeped in cacography. I had to look it up.

My dictionary tells me it relates to bad handwriting and incorrect spelling. But the meaning is much broader. A literary reference book informs me that when Josh Billings studied the techniques of Artemus Ward and “adopted cacography, he became famous.” Both Ward and Billings were 19th-Century American humorists, which brings me around to Ehmann of Fullerton, the founding Dean of Instruction (March 2, 1959) emeritus of Cal State Fullerton. He has spent close to a lifetime collecting and studying, with quiet delight, the literature of American humorists from about 1860 to 1900.

The other day Ehmann shared the pleasure he derived from his humorists at a meeting of Los Compadres at the Sherman Library in Corona del Mar. He told us about three of his favorites: Billings, Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, while touching briefly on several others, including, of course, the monarch of them all, Mark Twain.

Alas, mourns Ehmann,nobody writes like those fellows anymore. Nobody uses cacography to make humorous points. It’s all Bob Hope one-liner stuff today. Nobody seems to have the time and patience now to sit down and read and let the author build character and atmosphere and develop the story. Ehmann believes this unfortunate tendency is linked to the speed of communication: “The head of the Communist Party dies and we know it in 15 minutes.”

As Artemus Ward penned decades ago, “We don’t know when we have been more so.”

“More so” saps a peck of energy from a man and shortens his attention span something terrible, if not worse.

Ehmann and I agree that man had better iron out this nervous kink in his brain or succumb to a dismal twitching end. And the best remedy to prevent the dismal twitch is some heavy doses of Ehmann’s beloved humorists.

After all, Ehmann reminds us, man had a bad start and it requires a constant program of improvement to overcome it. Ehmann quotes one of his favorite Twainisms: “Don’t forget--Man was created at the end of a week when God was tired.”

Ehmann cherishes his humorists because they give him the feeling of the times, the people and their emotions; they give him revelations of what lies behind history, the real human stuff.

He lists some of his humor’s general characteristics. It was largely socio-political humor, much of it written with misspelled words, odd turns of phrase and a wry practical way of looking at life.

For example, this little gem by Billings: “Never take the bull by the horn, young man, but take him by the tail, then you can let go.” Or another Billings: “A man with a pot of green paint can stand where he pleases on a ferry boat.”

Almost all of the major humorists shared similar beginnings. They were typesetters before the age of 15, roving about the country and subsequently becoming newspaper writers and editors. When there was space in the papers to fill up, they would take pen in hand and compose humorous essays to fill it.

Almost all of them wrote under pen names: Samuel Langhorne Clemens was Mark Twain; Henry Wheeler Shaw was Josh Billings; David Ross Locke was Petroleum V(esuvius). Nasby and Charles Farrar Browne was Artemus Ward.

And now, using the words of Ward, Ehmann bids “a welcome adoo,” while reminding us that the “female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which the land can boste.”

That is the kind of cacography that made some writers famous when the nation was slower, quieter, greener and not infekted with so much turrible more so . . .

I think I like it. Here’s to a cacographicalistickal less so!