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Laughter is the best medicine

assemblyman-eph.blogspot.com

Originally aired on February 14, 1997 - In part 129 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson gives examples of how Abraham Lincoln used humor to become a master storyteller.

#129 – The Wit of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday we mark this month, was a colorful yet mystic man – a kind of prairie Socrates brimming with wilderness wit and frontier sagacity. Laughter was Lincoln’s medicine, his safety valve. As he bore the fearful burdens of his office, laughter was at times the outlet Lincoln needed to preserve his sanity. He was a man who not only loved to laugh; he had to have laughter for sheer survival. Once chastised for his storytelling, the smiling Lincoln had an instant change of mood and answered sadly: “I laugh because I must not weep – that’s all, that’s all.”

Some of Lincoln’s jokes were mindless one-liners. His own absentmindedness, he said, reminded him of “the story of an old Englishman who was so absent-minded that when he went to bed he put his clothes carefully into the bed and threw himself over the back of the chair.”

Lincoln sometimes would use a quip to turn down gently a request he did not wish to make or could not. Late in 1863, in refusing a man who wanted a pass to go to Richmond, Lincoln said: “I would gladly give you the pass if it would do any good, but in the last two years I have given passes to 250,000 men and not one of them has managed to get there yet.”

The tall and awkward Illinois lawyer once reacted to an overly long report by observing that the document was “like the lazy preacher who used to write long sermons and the explanation was that he got to writing and was too lazy to stop.”

Of a long-winded, unpopular politician, Lincoln once commented: “He can compress the most words in the fewest ideas of any man I ever met.” And when a vain, attention-grabbing officer died, Lincoln reacted succinctly. “If General X had known how big a funeral he would have”, Lincoln said, “he would have died long ago.”

Some of his best stories were about himself. He liked to tell about the time he was splitting rails. A stranger passing by yelled at him. Lincoln looked up and saw the man aiming a gun at his head. “What do you mean?” he asked shakily. The stranger answered that he had promised to shoot the first man he met who was uglier than he. Lincoln stared at the man’s face for a moment and then declared: “If I am uglier than you, then blaze away!”

His pithy remarks made a point; his stories were brief and painted a picture. Many of his tales are not too funny when one reads them. But they were not meant to be read. They were meant to be told by a master storyteller with a mobile face: a man with a flexible tongue and a superb sense of timing.

Lincoln worked an audience with exquisite skill. As he unfolded a story, fun danced in his eyes and grotesque expressions appeared on his face, until all the features appeared to take part in the performance.

He justified his habit of telling anecdotes with these thoughts: “They say I tell a great many stories; I reckon I do, but I have found in the course of a long experience that common people – common people – are more easily influenced and informed through the medium of a broad illustration than in any other way; and what the hypocritical may think, I don’t care.”

A Lincoln scholar summed it up well: “In the human forest the tall tree that was Lincoln would have been stunted had it not been for the strong nourishing juices of humor that helped give it both sustenance and vitality.”