#reader i laughed

"The Fashionable Novel": drawing by Paul Gavarni, a detail in Petits fashionables c. 1830s.

Compare with an excerpt from the satirical "How to Write a Fashionable Novel" by Frederick Marryat, originally published 1833 in his own Metropolitan magazine, in the form of a dialog between the characters of Arthur Ansard (A.), and his friend Barnstaple (B.)

“Well, now, Captain, I tell you what, you call your Britain, the Mistress of the seas, yet we whipped you well, and you know that.”

“Oh! yes—you refer to the Shannon and Chesapeake, don’t you?”

“No! not that time, because Lawrence was drunk, they say; but didn’t we whip you well at New Orleans?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“No? oh, Captain!”

“I say you did not.—If your people had come out from behind their cotton bales and sugar casks, we’d have knocked you all into a cocked hat; but they wouldn’t come out, so we walked away in disgust.”

“Now, Captain, that’s romancing—that won’t do.” Here the little ones joined in the cry, “We did beat you, and you know it.” And, hauling me into the centre of the room, they joined hands in a circle, and danced round me, singing:

“Yankee doodle is a tune, Which is nation handy. All the British ran away At Yankee doodle dandy.”

— little girls (belonging to his host, a middle-class American woman) torment Captain Marryat, a British War of 1812 veteran, in Diary in America.

replied to your

photoset

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ahahahahah. Because I am the exact breed of...

I love that one of humanity’s weird traits if laughing when you get nervous or scared. Like, it’s such a human response, humor. I think about it a lot when I see those “humans are space orcs” posts, about how weird a response it is and how weird it would seem to an outsider.