Benjamin Franklin's Humor

5. Making Friends Overseas 1757–1774

85 Making Friends Overseas 5 MAKING FRIENDS OVERSEAS 1757–1774 As Pennsylvania’s agent in London, Franklin had to wait three years for the courts to make proprietor Thomas Penn pay his fair share for provincial defense. Franklin used that time and two more years enjoying club life, honors, and new friends among leaders of the liberal religious, intellectual, cultural, and political communities, enlarging the circle with visits to France, Germany, Ireland, and Scotland. The universities of Saint Andrews and Oxford granted him honorary doctorates. He attended the coronation of George III. Conviviality, congeniality, and ceremony left little time for composing anything other than official or technical reports. Accustomed to using humor for attack or defense in business and politics, he found it also useful in relieving pressures of public service by writing “familiar letters.” James Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1645–1655) had popularized composing familiar letters as written conversation—“We should write as we speak,” said Howell.1 The pen, he said, should impersonate the mind in motion as it processes news, jokes, anecdotes, and impromptu aphorisms, such as “One foot cannot be up till the other be down.” The allusions that bubble up in the process and the language too should be adjusted to the readers whose assumptions and attitudes the writer shares and also to the role assumed by the writer. Franklin had already developed this BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S HUMOR 86 style in impersonating characters such as Silence Dogood and Poor Richard. He now followed fashion by impersonating his own mind in motion, as when writing to his only surviving sister, Jane Mecom, about the vanity of dogmatizing. He recollects verses from Howells (misremembered as “an Ancient Poet”) merely to show that every doggerel hath its day. You may remember an Ancient Poet whose Words we have all Studied and Copy’d at School, said long ago, A Man of Words and not of Deeds. Is like a Garden full of Weeds. ’Tis pity that Good Works among some sorts of People are so little Valued, and Good Words admired in their Stead; I mean seemingly pious Discourses instead of Humane Benevolent Actions. . . . When you mention Virtue, they pucker up their Noses as if they smelt a Stink; at the same time that they eagerly snuff up an empty canting Harangue, as if it was a Posie of the Choicest Flowers. So they have inverted the good old Verse, and say now A Man of Deeds and not of Words Is like a Garden full of—— I have forgot the Rhime, but remember ’tis something the very Reverse of a Perfume.2 As in conversation, Franklin would of course adjust to his company . In the spirit of fun, he teases his landlady’s twenty-oneyear -old daughter, Polly Stevenson, for fuzzy thinking while he himself misremembers an anecdote from John Selden’s Table Talk (1689) about Lady Cotten interrupting her husband as he speculates on whether an old shoe once belonged to Moses or to Noah.3 This Prudence of not attempting to give Reasons before one is 87 Making Friends Overseas sure of Facts, I learnt from one of your Sex, who, as Selden tells us, being in company with some Gentlemen that were viewing and considering something they call’d a Chinese Shoe, and disputing earnestly about the manner of wearing it, and how it could possibly be put on; put in her Word, and said modestly, Gentlemen , are you sure it is a Shoe?4 In writing to a more sophisticated acquaintance, Birmingham typographer John Baskerville, Franklin alludes to technical details to ridicule a pretentious critic of Baskerville’s new typeface and puns on the double meaning of character as respecting persons or printers’ type. Let me give you a pleasant Instance of the Prejudice some have entertained against your Work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a gentleman concerning the Artists of Birmingham, he said you would be a means of Blinding all the Readers in the Nation, for the Strokes of your Letters being too thin and narrow, hurt the Eye, and he could never read a Line of them without Pain. I thought, said I, you were going to complain of the Gloss on the paper, some object to; No, no, says he, I have heard that mentioned , but it is not that; ’tis in the Form and Cut of the Letters themselves; they have not that natural...