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There is considerable truth and point in calling Haliburton ‘the Apostle of American Humor.’ As to progenitorship, the fact is that Benjamin Franklin is the ‘father’ of indigenous American humor. In 1765 Franklin sent to a London newspaper what is the first example of that species of satiric burlesque, that preposterous or extravagant nonsense, said with a grave air of veracity, which is accepted as the characteristic matter and manner of American humor. Franklin was versatile in genius and so variously occupied in his long career that hardly can he be regarded as systematic in any calling. Yet he was as systematic as a humorist and satirist as he was in anything else. He began his literary career as a humorist when, in 1722, he contributed pseudonymously to The New England Courant the series of imitative Addisonian skits known as the ‘Silence Dogood Papers.’ Seven years later, he continued his humor in The Pennsylvania Gazette with the sprightly letters of ‘Busybody,’ ‘Anthony Afterwit,’ ‘Alice Addertongue,’ and ‘Bob Brief,’ and with satiric burlesques in A Meditation on a Quart Mug, A Witch Trial at Mount Holly, and other squibs. Quite systematic was the humor of Franklin’s Prefaces to Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-1758) and of some of the aphoristic wit and wisdom in the Almanacks when the epigrams or maxims were Franklin’s own invention, as, for instance, ‘Never take a wife till you have a house (and a fire) to put her in.’ Though most of the proverbial wisdom in Poor Richard was borrowed, the form and wit—the ‘Yankee smartness’—of it were Franklin’s creation, and he became the ‘father’ of all those New World humorists who wrote aphoristic wit and wisdom, down to Haliburton and from Haliburton down to Westcott (‘David Harum’). Masterpieces in mordant satire worthy of Dean Swift are Franklin’s Of the Meanes of disposing the Enemies of Peace (1760), An Edict by the King of Prussia (1773), Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One (1773), Speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim (an ironical justification for the enslaving of the Christians by Mohammedan Africans, 1790). Also to be mentioned are Franklin’s bagatelles (1778-80), written during his stay at Passy, France, of which the most famous are The Ephemera, The Story of the Whistle, The Morals of Chess, and The Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout.