Funny guy, for a President

Louis Mazur has a column in The New York Times on Lincoln:

On Tuesday, 28 January 1862, George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer and philanthropist, and Henry Ward Bellows, a Unitarian minister and president of the United States Sanitary Commission, called on the President to discuss reform of the Army medical bureau. The next day, Strong, an inveterate diarist, wrote at length about the meeting, and included a Lincoln story in dialect so as to capture the president’s diction. The elitist Strong described the backwoods president as “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla, in respect to outside polish (for example, he uses “humans” as English for homines), but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger.”
The President was also good with a yarn. “He told us a lot of stories,” Strong reported. In response to a discussion about the pressure from abolitionists for the president to take action against slavery, Lincoln said:

Wa-al that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad— ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ’em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrellin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, ‘Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.’

It was a characteristic Lincoln moment. He deflected the question of what he would do about slavery; he used the story as a device to explain his policy; in a display of folksy wisdom, he got his listeners to laugh.
Lincoln loved to tell stories. Anyone who met with him commented on his endless supply of anecdotes and jokes. Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish exile who worked in the State Department, observed: “In the midst of the most stirring and exciting— nay, death-giving— news, Mr. Lincoln has always a story to tell.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found it delightful: “When he has made his remark, he looks up at you with a great satisfaction, & shows all his white teeth, & laughs.” Walt Whitman saw something else in Lincoln’s storytelling; he thought it was “a weapon which he employ’d with great skill.”
The President’s storytelling and joke-making served multiple purposes. No doubt the verbal skills, honed while riding circuit as a Western lawyer, helped make him popular with judges and juries alike. His ability to tell a funny story and laugh heartily must have raised his spirits and help offset the other extreme of his temperament, a melancholy that often left him saddened and depressed. If his physical appearance was gawky, even off-putting, his joke-telling drew people to him and made him likable. Lincoln shrewdly used stories and parables in more complex ways as well. They would disarm opponents, or offer an easily digestible truism that seemed to support whatever position he might be taking.
Not everyone was charmed. Richard Henry Dana, United States attorney for Massachusetts, lamented that Lincoln “does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis.” What bothered Dana the most was that the president resorted to parables where principles were needed: “He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post. It is not difficult to detect that this is the feeling of his cabinet.”
Dana did not comprehend what Lincoln’s friends well understood: Storytelling was at the core of the president’s character. “The habit of story-telling,” recalled Hugh McCulloch, who was comptroller of the currency from 1863 until his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury in March of 1865, “became part of his nature and he gave free rein to it, even when the fate of the nation seemed to be trembling in the balance. Story-telling was, to him, a safety-valve, and that he indulged in it, not only for the pleasure it afforded him, but for a temporary relief from oppressing cares; that the habit had been so cultivated that he could make a story illustrate a sentiment and give point to an argument.”
Although Lincoln’s storytelling is well known, it is more difficult to ascertain which stories he most likely told, as opposed to the many ascribed to him. Part of the problem is that the stories belong to the oral, not the written, culture of the nineteenth century. Lincoln built his repertory of stories while traveling as a lawyer in the 1840s and 1850s. Once he became President, everyone seemed to have a story to tell about Lincoln as a storyteller. Publishers rushed to press with titles like 1863’s Old Abe’s Joker, or Wit at the White House, but few, if any, of the chestnuts included in these volumes can be traced directly to Lincoln. Asked once by General Godfrey Weitzel how many of the stories attributed to him were actually his, Lincoln apparently replied, “I do not know, but of those I have seen, I should say about one half.”
Even where, as with Strong’s account, we can verify a story or joke as being told by Lincoln, we are handicapped by being able only to read it, not hear it. A visitor once remarked that Lincoln’s stories seemed dull in print, “unless you could give also the dry chuckle with which they are accompanied, and the gleam in the speaker’s eye, as, with the action habitual to him, he rubs his hand down the side.”
One of the best accounts of Lincoln’s use of stories comes from Henry C. Whitney’s Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, published in 1894. Lincoln’s friend from Illinois and a frequent visitor to the White House, Whitney recounted “on excellent authority” that a distinguished visitor left the White House disgusted after being interrupted by “a silly, grotesque, and inapplicable anecdote.” The visitor complained to one of Lincoln’s secretaries: “Now, you say that Lincoln’s stories always have some object or moral; please tell me what object or moral such an absurd, irrelevant, clownish story could possibly have?”
“What object?” exclaimed the secretary. “The most necessary object in the world at that time: to get rid of you and get to his business, and, according to your own story, he did it.”
During the 1864 presidential election, political opponents tried to turn Lincoln’s storytelling into a campaign issue. In a popular print, Columbia Demands Her Children! (photo), the Goddess of Liberty is shown pointing to the president who has called up more troops, and demands, “Mr. Lincoln give me back my 500,000 sons!!!” The bewildered president responds, “Well the fact is — by the way that reminds me of a story!!!” The storytelling was the work of a babbling, befuddled man who was trying to distract the nation from the momentous issues of the day.

Lincoln’s stories were not always for a general audience. He enjoyed vulgar puns and fell easily into racial humor. According to the journalist Joseph T. Mills, who recorded the exchange in his diary, Lincoln told an anecdote about a Democratic orator in Illinois who appealed to his audience by saying that if Republicans got into power, blacks would be allowed to vote. A white man came forward and when asked whom he would vote for said: Stephen A. Douglas. A black man then stepped forward and, when asked whom he would vote for, said: “Massa Lincoln.” His point seemingly proven, the orator yelled out, “what do you think of that,” to which “some old farmer cried out, I think the darkey showed a damn sight more sense than the white man.”
Mills went on to explain that “it is such social tête-à-têtes among his friends that enables Lincoln to endure mental toils & application that would crush any other man.” Others agreed. David Davis, an Illinois judge and the floor manager for Lincoln’s successful nomination at the Republican convention in 1860, wrote to the president’s close friend Leonard Swett: “It is a good thing he is fond of anecdotes and telling them for it relieves his spirits very much.” Lincoln’s secretary William O. Stoddard reported: “Lincoln says that he must laugh sometimes, or he would surely die.”
Lincoln’s stories served as much more than idle entertainment. One might even argue that, by providing a needed outlet for the president and offering colloquial wisdom about matters of policy, they helped the Union win the war.

Rico says it's a damn shame no recording devices were invented while Lincoln was alive; it'd be great to hear him... (Kennedy once alluded to having to lunch 'the most illustrious group of brains ever gathered in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone', but he was probably the funniest President since Lincoln.)