Marley's ghost: just indigestion?

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means wagging then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave I

Book blurb: my daughter fell off her chair

I was very familiar with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I read it when I ws a youngish man as had everybody I knew on the block, because it was a huge book. I had enjoyed it enormously, laughed and appreciated it, and then subsequently—almost more satisfyingly—I bought it for my daughter, when she was about thirteen or fourteen. If you ever wanted to put something on a cover of Hitchhiker’s Guide, not that anybody should pay particular attention to me and my daughter, you could put “my daughter fell off her chair,” because she did . . . there was a bang behind me and I turned round in a slight panic thinking something terrible had happened. In fact what had happened was that she’d literally fallen off her chair laughing. The other thing which was very appealing and nice about that particular experience was that she found the book so beautiful, funny and kind of funky that she read me almost all of it in order for me to share it. And it was just such a treat to watch her face and see her reading enormous chunks.

Bill Nighy, in Robbie Stamp, "Interview with Bill Nighy—Slartibartfast," Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), Kindle loc. 3449

"She laughed at my jokes."

Alan Milne married Dorothy de Selincourt in 1913. This, of course, was before my time, and since they didn't talk to me about those early days (why should they?), I have to rely now on my father's autobiography for information. Not that he gives much. However, two sentences are all I need for the present. The first is: "She laughed at my jokes."

Surely this is the one absolutely vital qualification for a professional humorist's wife: that she should laugh at his jokes. Jokes are delicate things and my father's were especially delicate. Was it funny? Only someone's laughter would tell you. Only someone's laughter would encourage you to go on trying to be funny. It is true that a writer writes first to please himself and that his own satisfaction with what he has done is perhaps his greatest satisfaction. But writing is a means of communication. It is not enough to speak; you must also be heard. The message must be received and understood. Also a writer needs praise. At least my father did. He needed someone to say: "I love it, darling. It was awfully good." Of course, anyone who is well trained can say that without really meaning it, and I know that on one or two rare occasions my mother did. You can pretend to admire, but, unless you are a superb actress, you can't pretend to laugh. Laughter is genuine or else it is just a noise.

Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places (1975), p. 105 (published in UK in 1974).

Humor in two genders or two languages

"Do you think you’d have your same sense of humor, if you’d been a woman from the start?"

I shrugged. "I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe the humor is what I needed to survive."

"I didn’t think she was all that funny before," said Tori a little self-consciously. "Actually. When you were a boy? Your jokes always seemed so panicked, or something."

"Maybe," said Sarah, "this is your original sense of humor? And what you had before was the replica?"

I knew what she was getting at, but it made my head hurt. It reminded me of something James Thurber once said at a party, in Paris, when a woman told him how much funnier his work was in French. "I know," said Thurber. "It does tend to lose something in the original."

Jennifer Finney Boylan, I’m Looking Through You (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), pp. 244-45. (Page break between “was in” and “French.”)