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but also for their vast comic potential. Indeed, the nineteenth century saw
the rise of a veritable genre of seismic humor. this is not as incongruous as
it might sound. the romantic writer Jean Paul theorized that humor is an
inversion of the Kantian sublime. Like the sublime, its effect derives from
the tension between the finite and the infinite. the sublime comes from the
attempt to grasp, via reason, something that exceeds the reach of imagina-
tion. humor instead leads from awe of the infinite to a contrasting sense
of the puniness of the finite; it “fastens us tightly to the sensuous detail.”
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earthquake humor released the tension latent in the juxtaposition of the
scales of seismic force and human life.
the jokes typically came at the expense of some blustering fellow who
was reduced to whimpers, fled outside in his underwear, was somehow
knocked by the shock into a compromising position, or hadn't got word
that what had transpired was in fact an earthquake. In the last instance, the
lesson was that those who failed to read the morning paper might become
laughingstocks themselves. Predictably, racial minorities were often targeted
for ridicule. After a shock in Brooklyn, the
New York Herald
described the
“ludicrous sights” on the Lower east Side, where Jewish immigrants were
throwing their belongings from tenement windows into the streets below.
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Outside of big cities, the jokes strained with the desperation of small-town
editors hungry for news. After a tremor in the Pacific Northwest in 1872,
one paper promised “a great many serio-comic incidents, bordering on the
ludicrous.” A headline in an Olympia paper ran, “A Lively Shaking Up—
Fright of Women and Children—Universal Consternation—Laughable and
Other Incidents.” typical of these incidents was the plight of an initiate at
a Masonic lodge, who mistook the earthquake for part of the rites, while
the Masons fled. Newspapermen who delighted at the prospect of reporting
quakes were another butt of seismic humor. “More earthquake,” read one
headline: “Several clocks were stopped . . . restless people waked up, timid
people kept awake, everybody set to talking, some to trembling, others to
laughing and editors to writing.”
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the jokes rose to about the same level
in central europe (see figure 3.2). Anecdotes of the Zagreb quake of 1880
described a young officer falling into the arms of a businessman's wife, a
master cobbler grabbing his apprentice's hair to steady himself, and apart-
ment dwellers running upstairs to demand that their neighbors quit moving
the furniture around.
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In one satirical sketch, a tremor makes a henpecked
husband stumble, and his wife—oblivious to the earthquake—accuses him
of being drunk. After seeing the news reports, she does her best to make it
up to him: “Wife (crooning even more): '[Calls him by his nickname] Come
on, be nice. I'll never do it again. As far as I'm concerned, every day now an
