‘How is it there with 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.   

No one can claim an American origin for all the American anecdotes in this book. Traveling anecdotes go back a long way in time and space. And what keeps them traveling is the need for a constant supply of memorable, quotable, handy illustrations, old and new, to keep pace with the constant recurrence of similar traits and situations. If an anecdote “brings out the characteristic of some individual,” says J. Frank Dobie, “it will before long find itself attached to another individual, illustrating a similar characteristic in him.” Being both versatile and adaptable, the traveling anecdote is never quite the same at any two times, even when told by the same person. The raconteur is under no obligation to tell a story exactly as he heard it. But he is under obligation to his audience to make the story fit the time, place, and occasion. He must also put something of himself into it, give it the stamp of his own personality. “A story you hear,” says George Papashvily, “is a letter that comes to you from yesterday. It passes through many hands and each one adds his postscript, ‘So it was with me, brother.' And when you tell it you send a letter to tomorrow, ‘How is it there with you?’ ”