Henry's
"Gentle Grafter." But here the imitation is as easy as it is
tiresome. The invention of pointless slang phrases without real
suggestion or merit is one of our most familiar forms of factory-made
humour. Now the English people are apt to turn away from the whole
field of slang. In the first place it puzzles them--they don't know
whether each particular word or phrase is a sort of idiom already
known to Americans, or something (as with O. Henry) never said
before and to be analysed for its own sake. The result is that with
the English public the great mass of American slang writing (genius
apart) doesn't go. I have even found English people of undoubted
literary taste repelled from such a master as O. Henry (now read by
millions in England) because at first sight they get the impression
that it is "all American slang."
Another point in which American humour, or at least the form which
it takes, differs notably from British, is in the matter of story
telling. It was a great surprise to me the first time I went out
to a dinner party in London to find that my host did not open the
dinner by telling a funny story; that the guests did not then sit
silent trying to "think of another"; that some one did not presently
break silence by saying, "I heard a good one the other day,"--and
so forth. And I realised that in this respect English society is
luckier than ours.
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