Abstract

The "Comic Paper" Question

A large portion of the public approaches the comic-paper problem in the same spirit in which a gentleman approached the whiskey tax. The country has plenty of humor, and plenty of humorists. It fills whole pages of numerous magazines and whole columns of numerous newspapers with really good jokes every month. It supplies great numbers of orators, and lecturers, and diners-out with little stories, which of their kind, which is excellent, cannot be surpassed. There is probably no country in the world, too, in which there is so much going on an the time of the fun which does not need local knowledge or coloring to be enjoyed, but will bear exportation, and be recognized as the genuine article in any English-speaking part of the world. Moreover, there is in the real American stories an amount of suggestiveness, a power of connotation, to borrow a term from the logicians, which cannot be affirmed of those of any other country. A very large number of them are real contributions to sociology, and of considerable value, too.