The World, The Flesh, And H. Allen Smith PDF
Preview The World, The Flesh, And H. Allen Smith
The peculiar humor which is recognized as characteristically American might more accurately be called Midwestern, since it was not really heard until the western migration spilled over the Alleghenies and peopled the plains that stretched to the Mississippi and beyond. The Yankee (“built on hard luck and codfish") was already established as a comic rascal, and a caricature of the stolid Dutchman was a stock amusement, but both of these were European types merely transplanted to the colonies.
The Midwestern frontier, however, was something new in human experience and produced new responses. The carefully woven fabric of illusion that constitutes much of civilization offered little protection in forest, swamp and prairie. Life in the clearings, in the log cabins and the malarial river bottoms was hard, monotonous and depressing. The vast disaepancy between the vision that had brought them there and the actuality they found on arriving must have been almost unendurable to the settlers and laughter their only relief. Mark Twain, who as a child saw the last of the Midwestern frontier, said, ‘The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven."
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