Josh Billings

Born Henry Wheeler Shaw in Massachusetts in 1818, he became famous under the pen name Josh Billings. After trying several kinds of work, he found his audience as a humor writer whose deliberately odd spelling and plainspoken style made his jokes feel conversational and instantly recognizable.

His newspaper pieces, lectures, and books brought him wide popularity in the United States during the late 1800s. Readers were drawn to the mix of folksy wisdom, satire, and common-sense comedy that ran through his work, and he remained a well-known public figure until his death in 1885.

Today, he is remembered as an important American humorist of the nineteenth century and as a distinctive comic voice from the years before modern stand-up and syndicated columnists took shape.