Humorists: Old Fashioned Entertainment

An old-timey yarn from comedic monologist Cal Stewart.

By Sam Moore
Updated on April 2, 2024
article image
Wikimedia Commons/Charles H. Sykes/Animalparty
A bunch of old timers spinning yarns around the general store stove.

A century or so ago, the endless and varied sources of entertainment that there are today weren’t available–folks had to rely on themselves or people around them for entertainment. During the nineteenth century, the humorist became popular–men such as Artemus Ward and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) were big draws. They would travel from town to town by rail, hire a hall, put up playbills, and the residents of the town, as well as those from miles around, would flock to see their humorous monologues.

One of these was Cal Stewart, who specialized in comic monologues where he pretended to be Uncle Josh Weathersby, a homespun character who lived in an imaginary New England village named, “Punkin Center.”

The following is one of Stewart’s stage monologues that was included in a book called “Uncle Josh’s Punkin Center Stories,” which may be found on Gutenberg.org.

[Author’s Note: The “Annanias and Safiry” referred to are the husband and wife, Ananias and Sapphira, who, in Chapter 5 of the Book of Acts, sold some property and lied to Peter claiming that they donated all of it. For this transgression, they were both struck dead.]

A Meeting of the Annanias Club

Well, sometimes a lot of us old codgers used to git down to Ezra Hoskins’ general store, and we’d set ’round and chaw terbacker and whittle sticks and eat crackers and cheese and prunes and anything Ezra happened to have layin’ ’round loose, and then we’d git to spinnin’ yarns that would jist about put Annanias and Safiry right out of business if they was here now. 

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