Neither the Irishman, Scotchman, nor Englishman, as such, can be made to yield much fun, if sketched alone. It is when ranged alongside of each other, and measured by the English middle-class standard of propriety, that they become entertaining.
In a homogeneous society, like that of the United States, none of this material is to be found. The New Englander, to be sure, furnishes a type which differs from the Middle-States man or the Southerner or Westerner, but none of them differs enough to make him worth caricaturing. His speech, his dress, his modes of acting and thinking so nearly resemble those of his neighbors in other parts of the country that after the comic writer or draughtsman had done his best or his worst upon him, it would remain still a little doubtful where the joke came in. The Irishman, and especially the New York Irish voter, and his sister Bridget, the cook, have during the past ten years rendered more or less service as butts for caricaturists, but they are rapidly wearing out. They are not many-sided persons at best, and their characteristics have become associated in the American mind with so much that is uncomfortable and repulsive in domestic and political life, that it becomes increasingly difficult to get a native to laugh at them. It must be confessed, too, that the Irish in America have signally belied the poet's assertion, "_Coelum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt_." There is nothing more striking in their condition than the almost complete disappearance from their character, at least in its outward manifestations, of the vivacity, politeness, kindliness, comical blundering impetuosity, and double-sightedness, out of which the Irishman of the stage and Jo Miller's Irishman who made all the bulls were manufactured in the last century. Of the other nationalities we need hardly speak, as the English-speaking public knows little of them, although the German Jew is perhaps the most durable material the comic writer has ever worked on.
The absence of class distinctions here, too, and the complete democratization of institutions during the last forty years, have destroyed the reverence and sense of mystery by shocking which the European comic paper produces some of its most tickling effects. Gladstone and Disraeli figuring as pugilists in the ring, for instance, diverts the English public, because it gives a very smart blow to the public sense of fitness, and makes a strong impression of absurdity, these two men being to the English public real dignitaries, in the strict sense of the word, and under the strongest obligations to behave properly. But a representation of Grant and Sumner as pugilists would hardly make Americans laugh, because, though absurd, it would not be nearly so absurd, or run counter to any so sharply defined standard of official demeanor. The Lord Chief-Justice playing croquet with a pretty girl owes nearly all its point, as a joke, to the popular awe of him and the mystery which surrounds his mode of life in popular eyes; a picture of Chief-Justice Chase doing the same thing would hardly excite a smile, because everybody knows him, and has known him all his life, and can have access to him at any hour of the night or day. And then it must be borne in mind that Paris and London contain all the famous men of France and England, and anybody who jokes about them is sure of having the whole public for an audience; while the best New York joke falls flat in Boston or Philadelphia, and flatter still in Cincinnati or Chicago, owing to want of acquaintance with the materials of which it is composed.