Something that has always intrigued me about Abraham Lincoln is, not surprisingly, his sense of humor. As far as I can tell, he’s the first American President to have one.
That’s because the term “sense of humor” really wasn’t in common usage until the eighteen-sixties and seventies. In the eighteen-forties and fifties, it was called “the sense of the ridiculous,” and didn’t have the positive connotations that “sense of humor” has today. Back then, what was ridiculous was what invited ridicule. Funniness and cruelty went hand in hand. Of course, they still do a lot of arm-in-arm strolling in our day as well.
In the movie “Lincoln,” Tommy Lee Jones, as the sarcastically vilifying Thaddeus Stevens, exemplifies the funny-cruel connection. Many of his vilifications were too nasty for the Congressional Globe (predecessor of the Congressional Record), but this one was recorded: “There was a gentleman from the far West sitting next to me, but he went away and the seat seems just as clean as it was before.”
Lincoln’s humor was very different because, for one thing, it was actually “humor” as the word was defined in his time. We don’t make the distinction between “wit” and “humor” anymore, but in the nineteenth century people did. Wit was sarcastic and antipathetic while humor was congenial and empathetic. It’s the difference we note now when we distinguish between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” Lincoln was much more about “laughing with” than “laughing at.” And when “laughing at,” it was often himself he was mocking.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his homeliness, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?” And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor.
You can comb through thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile. Here’s his sourpussed cabinet:
True, the extended exposures required for photographs of that era made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty. And though there is only a hint of smile in his photographs, it hints at what Lincoln knew too well: that, as Mark Twain pointed out, “the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.”
Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much humor was considered a liability. And that was the case for Lincoln. A journalist covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates commented that “I could not take a real personal liking to the man, owing to an inborn weakness for which he was even then notorious and so remained during his great public career, he was inordinately fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories.”
So here’s hoping that he would be inordinately fond of some of these New Yorker cartoons about him. Or at least smile upon them.
