SOURCE: "American Humor," in The College Omnibus, edited by James Dow McCallum, revised edition, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1934, pp. 272-81.

In this excerpt from the essay originally published in America as Americans See It, Seldes describes American humor writing before the Civil War as distinctly democratic, reflecting an emphasis on the common citizen appropriate to a young democracy that was distrustful of things European.

There is a specific change in the direction of American humor, and this corresponds roughly to the great political change worked by the Civil War. Humor, like idealism, lags behind the facts. It desires to be familiar, so that long after the motor car has become safe and practicable, small boys cry "get a horse" and cartoonists still picture a rube with straw behind his ears a generation after the farmer has become a businessman. So it is not to be expected that the social...