Lincoln’s humor was very different because, for one thing, it was actually“humor”as what the word meant in his time. We don’t make the distinction between“wit(风趣)”and“humor”anymore; but in the nineteenth century people did. Wit was unpleasant and offensive while humor was pleasant and sympathetic. It’s the difference we note now when we distinguish between“laughing with”and“laughing at”. Lincoln was much more about“laughing with”than“laughing at”. And when“laughing at”, it was often himself he was teasing.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his plain looking, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one? ”And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor.
You can comb through thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile.
True, the long exposures(曝光)required for photographs of that time made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty.
Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much humor was considered a problem. And that was the case for Lincoln. A journalist covering the Lincoln-Douglas debate commented that“I could not take a real personal liking to the man, owing to an inborn weakness for which he was even then notorious and so remained during his great public career, he was extremely fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories. ”
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