...Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats, and all of them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little hunch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut -- see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat.... You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair-and-square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see....
Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Our responses to humor are conditioned by a variety of factors. Thus, while our responses are sometimes intellectual (wit), at other times our responses are more emotional (mirth) or physiological (laughter). A number of books have been written that seek to capture our response to humor, which folks building a private library around this theme often find useful:
Because every response to humor is unique, there is no set way to build a private library of literary humor. Most folks usually just collect whatever appeals to them:
One of the oldest and most popular forms of literary humor also is the most pithy. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge characterized the epigram thusly:
What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
Although the modern epigram is modeled after those of the ancient Roman poet Martial, the Western tradition actually is much older, dating back to votive inscriptions at ancient Greek sanctuaries. The form was especially popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, where it frequently is encountered in the works of authors as diverse as John Donne, Alexander Pope and Voltaire:
While the poetic form of the epigram has found favor among more modern authors like William Butler Yeats and Ogden Nash, the prose form may well be more infamous, as one of its most famous practitioners was Oscar Wilde:
It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
Although they did not start out that way, epigrams as we know them today are essentially a sub-set of an equally ancient but more prolix form of humor known as satire....
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