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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, Chapter 9: the Western influence (search)
from Maine, Josh Billings from Massachusetts, and Orpheus C. Kerr and Eli Perkins from New York. The prince among these jokers was Artemus Ward, who as a lecturer glided noiselessly upon the stage as if dressed for Hamlet, and looked as surprised as Hamlet if the audience laughed. The stage was dark, and the performance was interrupted by himself at intervals, to look for an imaginary pianist and singer who never came, but who became as real to the audience as Jefferson's imaginary dog Schneider in Rip Van Winkle, for whom he was always vainly whistling. This unseen singer, we were told, would thrill every heart with his song, Is it Raining, mother Dear, in South Boston? or, Mother, you are one of my parents, and could, we were assured, extract a fiver from the pocket of the hardest-hearted man in the audience. This was the kind of platform humor which captured two continents, and substituted for the saying of M. Philarete Chasles in 1851: All America has not produced a humoris