An unsigned editorial from the Buffalo Express, August 19, 1869
INSPIRED HUMOR
The New York World is not generally regarded as a humorous paper, but once in a while the arid solemnity with which it projects a comical idea into the body of one of its heaviest editorials would make Artemus Ward turn in his grave. For example, observe this, in Tuesday's leader: "The Democracy of New York this year must elect a Democratic Legislature, an honest and incorruptible Democratic Legislature; an able and experienced Democratic Legislature." And again: “The Democratic party has for its task to completely redeem the State and the nation from Republican corruption, extravagance, and misrule."
The humor of those two sentences rises to sublimity. And the manner of their expression has all that seemingly dense unconsciousness about it which is the soul of all true humor. Two better things than those remarks have not been said this year. The bare idea of an incorruptible Democratic New York Legislature is a burst of humor so grand, so enormous in its proportions, so supernatural in its conception, and withal so solemn and awe-imposing, that the provincial mind contemplates it with humbled posture and reverent head uncovered, feeling that the ground is holy and that the Presence that speaks is the dread and mighty Momus his very self.
The other joke, of loading down the astounded Democracy with such a task as the redeeming of anything or anybody from corruption, extravagance and misrule, is fully as colossal as its brother. There is a volcanic magnificence about these two jests that facinates while it terrifies the beholder. The pair should be placed on record together among the precious archives of the nation, and sent down to posterity as the most stupendous achievement which the world of humor gave birth to in this eventful nineteenth century.
But they should thus be preserved with notes attached in explanation that this severely virtuous Democracy is the Democracy whose devotees plunged the nation into a monstrous civil war; burned colored orphan asylums; conducted the Andersonville prison; respected Andrew Johnson; removed Mr. Lincoln in an abrupt and peculiarly Democratic way; instituted the Ku-Klux-Klan; ran for Vice President the melancholy fragment which whisky had left of what was once Francis P. Blair; sapped the public Treasury under Johnson by all the devices known to fraud; voted early and always for repudiation; and whose party's crowning work is its government of New York city; a party whose religion is to war against all moral and material progress, and who never were known to divert to the erection of a school house moneys that would suffice to build a distillery. The explanatory notes should go with the jokes, by all means.