[Ads-l] Quip Origin: There Are More Horses' Asses Than Horses

[Bill Mullins]

The 1928 dating of "The Book of a Thousand Laughs" seems to come from Gershon Legman, whose cite of the booklet in his 1964 The Hornbook seems to be the first place it is recognized.  Legman dates it because of its similarity to other similar works from that time, apparently.

Garson cites a joke about the death of Henry Ford as internal evidence that the book is from 1947 or later, but allows that this simply may be part of the set up of the joke and not referring to an historical event.

I think that internal evidence more strongly supports a date of late 1920s than a date 20 years later.
— There are multiple references to the "Great War", as WWI was called in the years before WW2; there are no references to WW2 (in fact, I don't see any references to specific events that could be dated after 1928).
— By asking "when were they most famous" about people named in the book,  (John Barrymore, Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin, Henry ford, Houdini, John Millais, John Ruskin, Lowell Sherman, von Hindenburg), I think 1928 is a better candidate for publication than ~1948.
-- There is one joke that dates itself as 1928: "Why do all the 1928 flappers pray on Sunday?"


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