I have enjoyed Gordon S. Wood's book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Before this book, I had not realized that Franklin had been an ardent defender of the British Empire before he performed a 180-degree reverse course and became the most ardent revolutionary, pushing to break the American colonies away from the British Empire.
In the middle of his history lesson, Wood made an observation about humor which I think is worth highlighting. One of Franklin's most memorable qualities was his sense of humor. He was a writer before he was a businessman, politician, or scientist. As a teenager, he cut his rhetorical teeth by learning from Addison and Steele's famous newspaper, The Spectator. Franklin had a biting wit, which he used to attack his political opponents.
As Wood points out, "This sort of sarcasm, indeed, satire in general, supposed commonly understood standards of rightness and reasonableness. Since a satirist like Franklin could expose to instantaneous ridicule only what was generally considered to be ridiculous by his readers, he necessarily believed he was on intimate terms with them and could count on their sharing his tastes and viewpoint" (115).
The British colonists in America and the residents of Britain had occupied the same shared moral world, but as the political and economic tensions increased during the 1750s and 1760s, their shared understanding started to diverge.
The example Wood uses is a piece where Franklin satirizes the Stamp Act. "In 1766, writing as Pacifus in the English press, Franklin proposed a solution to the Stamp Act crisis that Jonathan Swift would have loved." His Swiftian solution was: kill them all, then they will gladly pay taxes on stamps.
"Naturally, Franklin believed that his modest proposal was so harsh ... that no Englishman in his right mind would contemplate it. With such satirical exaggeration, Franklin assumed that he and his London readership were participating in the same moral universe, something his fellow Americans were coming increasing to doubt. Stamp Act or no Stamp Act, Franklin had not lost hope ..."
Humor is a tool with which one can pull together into one moral universe a diverse collection of people. Eventually, both the British and the Americans were too far apart for Franklin to be able to try to hold them together. The final straw was when the British called him before a hearing and chastised him severely for his efforts. After that, he broke with the British and became the most committed of the rebels. Humor can only take you so far before things snap.
