Editor Marshall P. Wilder opens this first volume of a ten-part anthology with a foreword that treats laughter as a selfless act: “Happiness and laughter are two of the most beautiful things in the world, for they are of the few that are purely unselfish.” This framing sets a tone of genial sociability for the collection, which gathers American humorous verse and prose from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The table of contents reveals a wide range of voices—from James Whitcomb Riley’s dialect poems to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” and a tall tale by Alfred Henry Lewis about a panther hunt. The volume’s humor often relies on regional speech, eccentric characters, and playful exaggeration, as seen in the excerpt from Lewis’s story, where a hunter describes his “misguided cap-an’-ball six-shooters” and a pack of “forty dogs if thar’s one.”

Dialect and Regional Voice

Several selections in this volume depend on nonstandard spelling and grammar to create character and setting. In Alfred Henry Lewis’s “Colonel Sterett’s Panther Hunt,” the narrator uses forms like “thar,” “hosses,” “bresh,” and “sperit,” marking his speech as rural Southern. Similarly, James Whitcomb Riley’s poems—such as “When the Frost is on the Punkin”—employ Midwestern dialect to evoke a specific time and place. This technique was common in American humor of the period, allowing writers to signal authenticity and class while also inviting readers to laugh at the speaker’s folksy phrasing. The effect is not merely decorative; it shapes the rhythm and pacing of the prose, as when the hunter reports that his heart “puts my heart to a canter” upon sighting the panther.

The Tall Tale and Exaggeration

Exaggeration is a recurring device in the anthology. In the panther-hunt excerpt, the narrator claims his six-shooter’s chambers “goes off together,” causing the other hunters to dodge his errant fire. The pack of dogs is described as “forty dogs if thar’s one,” each “proudly descended from fifteen different tribes.” Such hyperbole aligns with the American tall-tale tradition, where the humor lies in the gap between the event and its inflated telling. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (the “One-Hoss Shay”) uses a different kind of exaggeration—a logical absurdity—to describe a chaise built so perfectly that it falls apart all at once. The volume thus offers both rural braggadocio and learned wit, showing the range of American comic writing in the late nineteenth century.

Social Observation and Satire

Not all pieces rely on dialect or tall tales. Several authors use humor to comment on social types and institutions. In “The British Matron,” Nathaniel Hawthorne offers a satirical portrait of a self-satisfied Englishwoman. “The Curse of the Competent” by Henry J. Finn and “Similar Cases” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggest a vein of social critique running through the collection. Gilman’s poem, likely a parody of didactic verse, points to her later feminist writings. Meanwhile, “The Purple Cow” by Gelett Burgess is a short, memorable nonsense poem that became a cultural touchstone. These varied approaches indicate that the editor, Marshall P. Wilder, aimed to represent not just one style of humor but a spectrum—from gentle mockery of manners to outright absurdity.

Readers approaching this volume should be prepared for a mix of verse and prose, some of it in thick dialect that may require slow reading. The humor is often situational or character-based rather than joke-driven. Because this is only the first of ten volumes, the collection as a whole will likely broaden in tone and topic. Pay attention to the dates of individual pieces—they span several decades—and note how each author’s comic strategy reflects the literary conventions of its moment.