Recently, I have been reading Fred Kaplan's excellent book, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. One of the things that I enjoyed discovering about Lincoln was his penchant for bawdy humor.
Apparently, Lincoln didn't mind salting his language with vulgarities and obscenities as well as the occasional dirty joke. Of course Lincoln was a product of a poor, uneducated background and no doubt grew up hearing some choice words and impolite stories.
More below the fold.
As a young man struggling to find his voice as a writer and storyteller, Lincoln often resorted to biting and bawdy satire to make his point. One example occurred when Lincoln's sister Sarah, who was married to Aaron Grigsby, died in childbirth. The Lincolns believed Sarah might have been saved if Grigsby had sent for a doctor earlier. As a result, bad blood developed between the Lincolns and the Grigsbys. When Josiah Crawford threw a wedding party for Aaron's brothers Reuben and Charles, the Lincolns were snubbed and Abe retaliated. As Kaplan explains:
The record is unclear as to whether Lincoln connived to have each brother brought to the bedroom intended for the other as a hostile joke or whether the mix-up occurred for other reasons. The incident became the subject of ridicule in the Pigeon Creek community.
Lincoln, just 20 years old, fanned the flames of that ridicule by writing a poem about the incident called "The Chronicles of Reuben." Later, another Grigsby, Nat, remarked:
The Satire was good--sharp--cutting, and showed the Genius of the boy: it hurt us. . . ." The neighbors "burst their sides with laughter," Dennis Hanks remembered.
(snip)
The humor of the poem was profane and obscene, a semi-doggerel version of the barnyard anecdotes that became a staple of Lincoln's storytelling. From the start he was attracted to off-color jokes. Earthy, naturalistic, and frank, he told stories and used language considered appropriate only for male ears.
Here's an example of a couple of verses from the poem as recalled by John Romaine:
"Reuben & Charles have married 2 girls / But Billy has married a boy . . . Billy and natty agree very well / Mamma is pleased with the match. / The Egg is laid but won't hatch." And Billy, another Grigsby son, is told by the woman who has rejected his marriage proposal, "you Cursed ball head / My Suitor you never Can be / besides your low Croch proclaims you a botch / and that never Can anser for me."
Kaplan sums up:
Sterility, impotence, and physical inadequacy, subjects rarely discussed in the Victorian parlor, were suitable but scandalous ploys in the kind of rough satire that Lincoln wrote, and jokes about such subjects were part of the usual repartee of male frontier life. ...Lincoln apparently enjoyed the widely expressed frontier humor of same-sex relationships.
According to Kaplan, Lincoln was greatly influenced by the Scottish writer Robert Burns, particularly his poem "Tam O'Shanter." Kaplan says:
The indecorous aspect of Burns' storytelling that fit most aptly into Lincoln's oral culture was the realistic earthiness of its language. The speech of ordinary people had as part of its natural expressiveness the pithy coarseness of vulgarity, from the slightly off-color to the obscene. ...The best and deepest humor was, Lincoln understood, humanistic: The most effective storytelling for a wide audience riveted attention by appealing to common language and daily experience. It was also linguistically transgressive, drawing on the language of excretion and sexual explicitness, an immersion in the profane, the mixed and often dark nature of life.
(snip)
Many of his stories were what the Victorians called "smutty."
Since these were rarely written down, only a few examples remain:
He frequently told the story of how an Englishman kept a picture of George Washington in a privy, since it had the effect of making "an Englishman S-h-t...." "In the morning after My Marriage," Christopher C. Brown told William Herndon, "Lincoln met me and Said--'Brown why is a woman like a barrel--' C.C.B. could not answer. Well Said Lincoln--You have to raise the hoops before you put the head in.'"
Henry Whitney recalled how Lincoln once went after a witness who thought himself a great ladies man:
"...[Lincoln said,] 'there is Busey--he pretends to be a great heart smasher--does wonderful things with the girls--but I'll venture that he never entered his flesh but once and that is when he fell down & stuck his finger in his--'; right out in open Court."
Once a farmer asked Lincoln why he didn't put his stories in a book. Lincoln replied,
"Such a book would stink like a thousand privies.'" Whitney commented, "I can't think he gloated over filth however. I think that...he had great ideality and also a view of grossness which displaced the ideality."
Kaplan wraps up by again quoting Whitney:
"The great majority of [his] stories were very nasty indeed. I remember many of them but they do us no good." Apparently, they did Lincoln good. They helped him politically and professionally. And rather than displacing his "ideality," they expressed an element of his personality and experience inseparable from his moral idealism. Like Mark Twain, he had a genius for pithy narrative, and a sense that his stories and obscenities expressed something crucial about the underlying flaws in the universe and the inexplicable darkness of the human situation. And often the darkness found its best expression in humor.
I'm not sure I entirely swallow Kaplan's lofty conclusions regarding Lincoln's earthy humor. I suspect, being the rough frontiersman, that Lincoln told dirty jokes for the same reasons as most people: they're naughty, they're funny, and they're a path to acceptance. Regardless, it sounds like (gulp) Lincoln is someone you'd want to have a beer with.
So, kossacks, take a page from Lincoln and share your favorite dirty jokes in the comments.