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[244] 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 humorist,” the still more dangerous assumption that America produced nothing else. The European popularity of this “American humor” was in part based, no doubt, upon the natural feeling of foreigners that something new is to be demanded of a new country, and this novelty is more naturally looked for, by the mass of readers, in costumes and externals than in the inward spirit.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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