“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.