John Smith
“The Life of John Smith” is the biography of an absolutely ordinary man. Nothing ever happened in his life that happens in the lives of those who go on to be termed “great men” in their biographies. The closest something really special ever came was when he met a girl and fell in love, setting up the rare use of a memorable metaphor in the work of the author that draw much of its power from humor:
“Her mere presence made Smith feel as if he had swallowed a sunset”
Josh Billings
Josh Billings is a name forgotten to history. He was at one time widely considered America’s foremost humorist. And then a guy named Samuel Clemens started writing. In a short bit of historical analysis titled “American Humour” Leaock offers an example of the humor of Billings which was at least partially, it seems, very deeply versed in the humor of metaphorical associations through simile:
“The effeminate man is a weak poultiss. He is a cross between root beer and ginger-pop with the cork left out of the bottle overnight. He is a fresh water mermaid lost in the cow pasture with his hands filled with dandylions. He is a sick monkey with a blond mustash. He is as harmless as cent’s worth of spruce gum and as useless as a shirt button without a button hole.”
“How to Make a Million Dollars”
Part of ironic humor of this story is that it is told by a narrator who is clueless in the art of metaphor. In fact, he is distinctly incapable of detecting any difference between the literal and figurative; to him, it is all literal. This leads inexorably to the final lesson in how to become rich when he learns straight from a millionaire exactly how another very rich old man acquired his wealth:
"`…Why he made it by taking it out of widows and orphans.’
`And how, I asked pretty cautiously, `did he go at it to get it out of them?’
`Why, the man answered, "he just ground them under his heels, that was how.’”
Equipped now with the secret to making a million dollars, the next two paragraphs which comprise the rest of the story are comprised of the narrator trying to figure how one literally goes about getting widow and orphans into a situation where they can be literally be crushed under foot, noting also that he has since learned that clergymen are also particularly easy to grind money out of.
Leacock the Economist
Leacock was educated in the discipline of economics. He even studied under America’s greatest economist, Thorstein Veblen. The foundation of Veblen’s critique of capitalism was that it was bound to transform from a producer economy into a consumer economy and that the pursuit of leisure would bring about problems most other leading economists could not see and rejected when hearing Veblen’s theories. More than a few stories blend Leacock the humorist with Leacock with economist, including “Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich” in which one character robustly voices a rather Veblenesque perspective punctuated with metaphor:
“Luxury…is the curse of the age. The appalling growth of luxury, the piling up of money, the ease with which huge fortunes are made…these things are going to ruin us. Mark my words, the whole is bound to end in a tremendous crash.”
“The Woman Question”
The level of patriarchal fear that inspires deep-seated misogynistic attitudes expressed freely and guiltlessly by the narrator of this story begins right off the bat. He gets only two sentences in before revealing the essential quality of his own character as he describes the setting of the situation which sets off his jeremiad on the question of women’s equality to men:
“I was sitting the other day in what is called the Peacock Alley of one of our leading hotels, drinking tea with another like myself, a man. At the next table were a group of Superior Beings in silk, talking.”
If the meaning isn’t clear, “Superior Beings” refers to women. And the tone is ironic.
