Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, Flashing His Wit)

"If I really had two faces, do you think I'd hide behind this one?”— Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), responding to Stephen A. Douglas’ charge in a debate that he was “two-faced,” quoted in Richard Norton Smith, “Lincoln v. Douglas: Ambition and Humor on the Illinois Campaign Trail,” Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, Grand Valley State University, 2006

Twenty years ago, watching a trailer for Wayne’s World, I groaned when I heard Garth’s line about Tia Carrere’s Cassandra: “If she were a president, she would be Baberaham Lincoln.” But I suspect that Abraham Lincoln let loose more than his share of groaners in life, too.

You don’t get a sense of it from the grave, godlike figure in the Lincoln Memorial, nor even in the more human-sized statue outside the New-York Historical Society that I snapped a few months ago (pictured here). But Lincoln loved to laugh, and to bring others in on the joke.

Some of his humor would be regarded today as politically incorrect: heavily ethnic-based, for instance. These were the kind of tales he’d relate in the company of other circuit rider attorneys in Illinois when they had lots of time to kill. 

Additionally, as Joshua Wolf Shenk demonstrated convincingly in his fine study, Lincoln’s Melancholy, humor was a defense mechanism to help the President ward off the depression that plagued him most of his life.

But many of his jokes, such as his response to Douglas, were strategic. They defused the impact of his homely appearance and, in the wild guffawing that ensued in this case, made the audience forget what Douglas was referring to in the beginning. 

The impact was similar to the “Fala” speech, FDR's hilarious counterpunch to (true) GOP charges that he’d sent a government plane to retrieve his beloved Scottie when the dog was inadvertently left behind on a trip, or Ronald Reagan, facing a potentially devastating question at an early Presidential press conference, asking, “'How can you say that about a sweet fellow like me?''

It’s difficult to think of another President who better illustrates what one of Lincoln’s 20^th-century successors in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower, meant by the following: "A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done."