"There were four of us" - Bibliografia para uma história do humor seco

"I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
Um estudioso que diz e publica uma frase destas em 1889, só pode ser um percursor do Humor Seco. Pelo que me parece pertinente incluí-lo na bibliografia deste Mestrado. Seguem alguns excertos e respectivo link.

Pela pertinência das questões que levanta mais, que responde:
"Are We As Interesting As We Think We Are?
Should Women Be Beautiful?
Do Writers Write Too Much?
Should We Say What We Think, Or Think What We Say?
Is The American Husband Made Entirely Of Stained Glass?
What Mrs. Wilkins thought about it?
Shall We Be Ruined By Chinese Cheap Labour?
Why We Hate The Foreigner?"

Jerome, Jerome kapkla. Idle Ideas in 1905. Linha nº qualquer coisa.


Pela reflexão de temas de utilidade universal:
"I heard of a man once who had a clock that he used to say was of no good to any one except himself, because he was the only man who understood it. He said it was an excellent clock, and one that you could thoroughly depend upon; but you wanted to know it--to have studied its system. An outsider might be easily misled by it.
"For instance," he would say, "when it strikes fifteen, and the hands point to twenty minutes past eleven, I know it is a quarter to eight."
His acquaintanceship with that clock must certainly have given him an advantage over the cursory observer!
But the great charm about my clock is its reliable uncertainty. It works on no method whatever; it is a pure emotionalist. One day it will be quite frolicsome, and gain three hours in the course of the morning, and think nothing of it; and the next day it will wish it were dead, and be hardly able to drag itself along, and lose two hours out of every four, and stop altogether in the afternoon, too miserable to do anything; and then, getting cheerful once more toward evening, will start off again of its own accord."

Jerome, Jerome kapkla. Clocks. Linha nº qualquer coisa.


Pelo surrealismo:
"The most extraordinary dream I ever had was one in which I fancied
that, as I was going into a theater, the cloak-room attendant stopped
me in the lobby and insisted on my leaving my legs behind me."

Jerome, Jerome kapkla. Dreams. Linha nº qualquer coisa.