Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-85) wrote his deliberately misspelled crackerbox
philosophy under the pen name Josh Billings. He employed “dialect,
ridiculous spellings, deformed grammar, monstrous logic, puns,
malapropisms . . . and anticlimax,” becoming one of the most popular
literary comedians of his time. Shaw’s many humorous newspaper columns and
books, beginning with Josh Billings, His Sayings (1865), may have
something to do with our word for “to kid” or “fool around.” The
expression was used in a similar sense about eighteen years before the
humorist began writing in 1863, but his salty aphorisms probably
strengthened its meaning and gave the term wider currency. Despite many
theories the origin of josh remains unknown. Webster’s and a number of
dictionaries suggesting that the word is a merging of joke and bosh.