Any one who knows me well knows that I am, among other things, a self-admitted history buff, especially when it comes to The American Civil War and one of my favorite historical figures, Abraham Lincoln.
I recently read Backstage At The Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands At Ford's Theatre, by Thomas A. Bogar. It was a very well-written account of a little known part of the tale that was the first successful presidential assassination in American history. It was also very well orchestrated by an actor who understood his role in history.
One interesting factoid was the numerous times John Wilkes Booth came in contact with the Lincoln family. His brother, Edwin, spared the life of Lincoln's son, Robert, as he almost fell from a train platform in New Jersey. Pictures taken during Lincoln's first inauguration show Booth standing almost directly behind Lincoln on the steps of the Capitol Building. But, it was his last great act that engraved his name in the history books.
One hundred fifty-six years ago last month, a theater full of people laughed the most consequential laugh in American history. A murderer knew exactly when they would do it and used the noise to cover his assassination of the president of the United States. That fateful line was: “I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old man-trap.”
Upon delivery, the house exploded. But today, it is baffling - unfunny, seemingly unworthy of its place in history alongside Abraham Lincoln’s death. An indignity. We tend to think of people from long ago as credulous, unsophisticated fuddy-duddies. Like our grandparents, only lamer. So we read the fatal joke and conclude the audience was just . . . wrong. In her very excellent and well-written travelogue Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell finds wry humor all over history, yet dismisses this line as indecipherable. She pities the park rangers who have to quote it on tours of Ford’s Theatre, now a National Historical Site under Department of the Interior.
In fact, we are the ones who have it wrong. The last words Lincoln heard were funny. And smart. Humor on stage is about context, which the sentence lacks when isolated in writing. Live theater is also about delivery and the relationship between actors and audience, which develop over the performance. Literally, you had to be there.
Maybe the time has come to restore the dignity of that 1865 audience.
“Our American Cousin,” a play written by British polymath Tom Taylor, is a fish-out-of-water comedy like “The Beverly Hillbillies” or “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” A Vermont hick named Asa Trenchard - a blunt, boorish, American sort - appears among posh English society as the heir to a family fortune. He refuses to take a bath, says “skedaddle” and calls milk “cow juice.” But he is savvier than he seems.
The punchline moment arrives as something of a comeuppance for Mrs. Mountchessington, who is exactly as you would picture a character with that name. She hides her contempt for the American, schmoozes and flatters him. She wants him to marry her daughter and promises they do not care about his money, just true love.
He announces that he is delighted to court said daughter for love alone, since he has renounced the inheritance and will never be rich. Her disappointment is palpable, as is her greed. She beats a hasty retreat.
After she leaves - as John Wilkes Booth waits - actor Harry Hawk, alone on stage, delivers his line. Sockdologizing. Man-trap. Fifty feet away, stage left, house right, four yards high, Booth oozes into the president’s box, unheard.
Onstage, any remaining doubts about Asa Trenchard are obliterated. One line confirms what the audience suspected: The clodhopper is, in fact, a shrewd judge of character. Add to that a dose of naughty sauce (“man-trap”) - always good for a snicker. And the word “sockdologizing”? Sounds funny, for one, and it was downright elegant. The playwright seems to have invented a neologism derived from American slang of the time: A “sockdologer” meant a truth delivered as a defining moment in a situation, an intellectual coup de grace. Altogether, those 14 words are a checkmate, voiced in Trenchard’s vulgar patois. Voilà: He is crude, but a merry cynic. A quick, deep joke.
Bang!
So to speak.
If you are not laughing, it is likely because you are not in the moment. You were not watching it happen. How to provoke a guffaw loud enough to cover a gunshot? A showstopping laugh line takes careful setup, possible only when an audience knows the characters and trusts the show. By Act 3, Scene 2, playgoers are invested. They have let down their guard. From individuals, an audience is forged.
There was also the context outside Ford’s Theatre: 156 years ago, the Civil War had been over for just five days; the previous week, Lincoln had walked through Richmond - the fallen capital of the Confederacy - only lightly guarded. Safety and normalcy were returning, and a little frivolity, a hit comedy from overseas, was a relief.
It also happens that performers’ descriptions of getting a huge laugh - slayed ’em, I killed, punchline - echo violence. And experiencing such mirth sounds like injury: split my sides, in stitches, busting a gut.
If your whole job involves knowing how to ease an audience into a vulnerable, relaxed state you know where humor can punch them with maximum precision - and precisely when nobody in the president’s box would be alert to a threat. Booth, an actor, was in the business of knowing audiences. It made him the most dangerous man in Washington that night.
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” is a joke about missing the point, but Harry Hawk wrote to his parents that it really had been going well that night, that Mrs. Lincoln had been laughing all the way through and especially liked that line.
It is too bad, in a way, because it is hard to imagine anyone laughing at it ever again.
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