From "The Universalist "(published in Cincinnati) , December 11, 1886
As we drift into the holiday season, we inevitably find ourselves trapped by that uncle, the one with an inexhaustible supply of stories we have suffered through a hundred times or more. Long ago, those hoary old anecdotes were known as “chestnuts,” and young men once carried a defense against them, the long-forgotten chestnut bell.
How did tired old tales get named for chestnuts? It remains a mystery. Several scholars cite an 1816 British melodrama, The Broken Sword by William Dimond (a play presented several times in Cincinnati through the 1840s). In one scene, a tedious old bore begins to relate an incident involving a cork tree. His comedic servant corrects him, insisting it was a chestnut tree. When the pompous braggart maintains it was a cork tree, the servant reminds his tedious employer that he has heard this same story 27 times. There are others who attribute the etymology to the minstrel routines of one William Emerson Redmond, who performed under the stage name of Billy Emerson and certainly flogged some stale but treasured gags as he toured the hinterlands. Redmond and his troupe frequently performed in Cincinnati in the 1870s and 1880s.
No sooner had the sobriquet been coined, than some wag invented a clever little device to protect against chestnuts. The chestnut bell seems to have originated during the summer of 1886 somewhere on the East Coast; Baltimore or Philadelphia occasionally gets the blame. By autumn the fad had landed in Cincinnati. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [September 12, 1886]:
“It is a funny little gong that the boys are carrying on their vest-bosoms. The chestnut bell is the latest wrinkle, and is the outcome of a long-felt want to protect the suffering community from the avalanche of gags and stale jokes which have prevailed for lo! these many years. When a professional story-teller starts on an antediluvian yarn which has a ‘Rip Van Winkle’ brand and walks with a crutch, the bell is sounded and the insufferable bore is brought to a halt.”
Although intended, perhaps as a good-natured jibe among friends, a humorous reminder to the long-winded that it was time to yield the floor, chestnut bells were so popular they appeared in all manner of environments. The chestnut bell certainly created hazards for the thespians of the day. The Cincinnati Enquirer [September 12, 1886] reported on the invasion of an early vaudeville show by chestnut bell-wearing fellows:
“All dudes are happy over the recent acquisition, and each one of the gentry wears one, which is used without the slightest pretext. On Monday night last week one of Tony Pastor’s troupe started to perpetuate an aged joke, when he was summarily rung off by two of the gallery gods, the audience vigorously applauding.”
The Cincinnati Post [December 25, 1899] published the memory of a man who had purchased a dozen chestnut bells during the craze and distributed them among his friends:
From "Cincinnati Enquirer," September 12, 1886
“When Sunday came I prepared to attend church like a dutiful son, and at the proper time Mother and I were seated in her pew. Just what the text was I can’t remember, but the minister had scarcely announced when six of my chestnut bells sounded among the congregation. The good man didn’t mind them in the least, but went ahead with his work. He was rung up on his hymn, and he was rung up every minute or two on his sermon, and though there was something amusing about it I was also half scared out of my boots. As I had brought the bells to town, I didn’t know but what he’d hold me responsible and open out on me. About the middle of his sermon he said something about Jonah, and eleven of those bells went ‘t-i-n-g!’ on him in succession. He stopped and looked around and then calmly said: ‘Will those people who are jingling keys kindly jingle a little softer?’”
The Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette [October 3, 1886] described the unhappy consequence of a client trying to explain his case in a law office while a clerk banged away on a new-fangled typewriter. Familiar with the chestnut-bell fad but ignorant of cutting-edge office equipment, the potential client became infuriated at the thought of a lowly clerk ringing his chestnut bell during his deposition, when all he was doing was hitting the carriage return. (And a whole generation of readers will have no idea what I just wrote.)
For every action, there is, as Isaac Newton insisted, an equal and opposite reaction, and so the Commercial-Gazette also reported about two salesmen spending a train ride regaling each other with tales from the road. At one point, recognizing the beginning of a familiar travelers’ legend, the other salesmen opened his jacket and rang his chestnut bell. Not to be outdone, the tale-telling huckster hauled a substantial organ pipe from his valise and gave such a bombastic toot that he startled all the other passengers in the car. “I keep this for just such occasions,” he explained.
After a year of ring-a-ting-tings, the venerable Saturday Review [July 30, 1887], noting that chestnut bells were “carried, nominally, like the revolver, for defense,” tut-tutted its dismay at the aggressive employment of this once-welcomed gadget:
“Is it really good for a country to have no old jokes, no venerable Joes, no standards of ‘fun’? Everybody cannot rise to a point of order or to the point of a joke with the acumen of a [Virginia Senator Harrison] Riddleberger. Even a great American declared, after years of investigation through the annals of medieval, classic, Egyptian. and Assyrian wit and humour, that there are only twenty-five original jests in existence, and that all known at the present day can be referred to one or another of these.”
Like all fads and crazes, the chestnut bell faded into memory. Some twenty years later, the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record [July 23, 1907] claimed the chestnut bell was legally censored:
“It invaded the theaters, and at minstrel shows its clamor was deafening. The village cut-ups and flirts found it especially to their liking, and walked the streets with it, attracting attention to themselves by ringing it. Nothing has as yet equaled the disturbing power of the chestnut bell except confetti. Confetti admittedly wins. The chestnut bell finally wore off. Local ordinances directed against it helped. There were some arrests, but the ordinances did more by reflecting the public sentiment’s revulsion against the misuse of the chestnut bell, which at one time seemed to have a useful career before it – like the Fool Killer.”
The assertion that some towns passed laws against the chestnut bell seems to be far-fetched and based on faulty memories. However, recollections of this gag contraption persisted. In the 1920s, the Cincinnati Post published a daily series of squibs submitted by readers about days gone by. On October 29, 1927, the Post published a memory from a contributor identified only as “R.M.” It read:
“Do you remember when small bells fastened, with a string attached, to your coat lapel, was rung when you sprang an old joke? They were called the chestnut bell.”
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