“Don’t shoot too high. Aim low, and the common people will understand you.”

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin.   

Lincoln stories afford perhaps the best examples of the varied uses of the funny story for serious purposes. They also exemplify the allusive power of the fable at its best. “There was, perhaps, an outside for each thing as it stood alone,” writes Carl Sandburg of the Illinois Aesop, “while inside of it was a fable.” Lincoln stripped off the husks and laid bare the association of ideas that lies at the heart of things, so that the anecdote becomes a form of sympathetic magic, by which like attracts or produces like. By using common experience as a frame of reference, Lincoln was able to reduce a complicated situation to its lowest common denominator. And by drawing upon familiar images, symbols, allusions, and incidents, he found the shortest route between himself, his hearers, and his subject. Thus the anecdote brings people as well as things together, in a sympathetic association that binds speaker with audience and the members of the audience with one another. It is a process of collaboration, with everybody meeting everybody else halfway. Provided, of course, that the raconteur follows Lincoln’s advice to lawyers: “Don’t shoot too high. Aim low, and the common people will understand you.”