Humor
Marshall was known for his quick wit and a good sense of humor. On hearing of his nomination as vice president, he announced that he was not surprised, as "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state." One of his favorite jokes was about a woman with two sons, one of whom went to sea and one of whom was elected vice president; neither was ever heard of again. On his election as vice president, he sent Woodrow Wilson a book, inscribed "From your only Vice."
His humor caused him trouble during his time in Washington. He was known to greet citizens walking by his office on the White House tour by saying to them, "If you look on me as a wild animal, be kind enough to throw peanuts at me." This prompted Wilson to move Marshall's office to the Senate Office building, where he would not be disturbed by visitors. In response to a proposal to the board of the Smithsonian Institution to send a team to excavate for ruins in Guatemala, Marshall suggested that the team instead excavate around Washington. When asked why, he replied that, judging by the looks of the people walking on the street, they should be able find buried cave-men no more than six feet down. The joke was not well received, and he was shut out of board meetings for nearly a year.
His serious remarks could get him in trouble as well. Some of his public utterances in 1913, in which he appeared to advocate radical ideas in regard to the inheritance of property, caused much criticism.
Marshall's wit is best remembered from a phrase he introduced to the American lexicon. During a Senate debate in 1917, as Senator Joseph L. Bristow cataloged a long list of what he felt the country needed, Marshall leaned over to one of his clerks and said, "What this country needs is more of this; what this country needs is more of that." He then quipped, loudly enough for most of the chamber to hear, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar", which provoked laughter from a number of senators.
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Famous quotes containing the word humor:
“Men’s happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Carlyle’s humor is vigorous and titanic, and has more sense in it than the sober philosophy of many another. It is not to be disposed of by laughter and smiles merely; it gets to be too serious for that: only they may laugh who are not hit by it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)