Mr. Lincoln's Funybone: Wherein the White House Joker Retells His Best Yarns and Fables

Abstract

It has taken me more than four years to get around to cataloguing this book. It is a breezy book of 136 pages, including a bibliography at the end. Each anecdote begins on a page of its own. A number of the stories are fables. A young man wants to marry the farmer's daughter and cries out to the farmer in the field I want your daughter. The farmer answers Take her and the man walks away shaking his head and saying It's too durned easy (12). A hog charges two boys. One goes up a tree. The other catches the hog by the tail and shouts to his friend to help him. Help you what? Answer: Help me let go of this damned hog! (27). More of the stories strike me as good jokes, like that of the teacher who is about to punish a boy with dirty hands. If you can show me any other hand in this room as filthy as that, I will let you off. The boy promptly produces from behind his back his other hand (109)! One of the stories uses GGE as the basis for a cartoon over which Lincoln and Secretary (of the Treasury?) Chase have a laugh. The golden goose of the cartoon takes gold coins and turns them into greenbacks. Had Chase perhaps called for the first-time issuance of paper money?