Among the political comic journals of America mention may be made of Puck, the rough and gaudy cartoons of which have often what the Germans would call a packende Derbheit of their own that is by no means ineffective.  Of the other American—­as, indeed, of the other British—­comic papers I prefer to say nothing, except that I have often seen them in houses and in hands to which they seemed but ill adapted.

Among the characteristics of American humour—­the humour of the average man, the average newspaper, the average play—­are its utter irreverence, its droll extravagance, its dry suggestiveness, its naivete (real or apparent), its affectation of seriousness, its fondness for antithesis and anti-climax.  Mark Twain may stand as the high priest of irreverence in American humour, as witnessed in his “Innocents Abroad” and his “Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.”  In this regard the humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wholly escape a charge of debasing the moral currency by buffoonery.  It has no reverence for the awful mystery of death and the Great Beyond.  An undertaker will place in his window a card bearing the words:  “You kick the bucket; we do the rest.”  A paper will head an account of the hanging of three mulattoes with “Three Chocolate Drops.”  It has no reverence for the names and phrases associated with our deepest religious feelings.  Buckeye’s patent filter is advertised as thoroughly reliable—­“being what it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”  Mr. Boyesen tells of meeting a venerable clergyman, whose longevity, according to his introducer, was due to the fact that “he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.”  One of the daily bulletins of the captain of the large excursion steamer on which I visited Alaska read as follows:  “The Lord only knows when it will clear; and he won’t tell.”  And none of the two hundred passengers seemed to find anything unseemly in this official freedom with the name of their Creator.  On a British steamer there would almost certainly have been some sturdy Puritan to pull down the notice.  One of the best newspaper accounts of the Republican convention that nominated Mr. J.G.  Blaine for President in 1884 began as follows:  “Now a man of God, with a bald head, calls the Deity down into the melee and bids him make the candidate the right one and induce the people to elect him in November.”  If I here mention the newspaper head-line (apropos of a hanging) “Jerked to Jesus,” it is mainly to note that M. Blouet saw it in 1888 and M. Bourget also purports to have seen it in 1894.  Surely the American journalist has a fatal facility of repetition or—?

American humour has no reverence for those in high position or authority.  An American will say of his chief executive, “Yes, the President has a great deal of taste—­and all of it bad.”  A current piece of doggerel when I was in Washington ran thus: 

    “Benny runs the White House,
      Levi keeps a bar,
    Johnny runs a Sunday School—­
      And, damme, there you are!”