ENGLISH HUMOUR.

Evening Post, Volume LXIII, Issue 87, 12 April 1902, Page 3 (Supplement)

ENGLISH HUMOUR.

In tho Pall Mali Magazine for March, Mr. Max Beerbohm is severe upon the I British sense of humour. It is appealed to (he says, after a painstaking analysis : of the comic papers) by endless varia- ! tions upon only a few themes, which he catalogues as follows: — Mothers-in-law, henpecked husbands, twins, old maids* Jews, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, niggers (not Russians, or other foreigners of any denomination), fatness, thinness, long hair (worn by a man), baldness, seasickness, stuttering, "bloomers," bad , cheese, "shooting tho moon" (slang expression for leaving a lodging-house without paying the bill), red noses. "Let us try," continues Mr. Beerbohm, "to find some unifying principle or principles among the variegated items. Take the first item— Mothers-in-law. Why should the public roar, as roar it does, at the mere mention of that relationship? There is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion of a woman with a married daughter. It is probable that she (will sympathise with her daughter in^ any quarrel that may arise between husbona and j wife. It ia probable, also, that .she will, as a mother, demand for her daugh- |. ter more unselfish devotion than the daughter herself expects. But this does not make her ridioulous. The public laughs not at her, surely. It always re.spects a. tyrant. It laughs, at the implied concept of the oppressed son-in-law, who has to wage unequal warfare against two women. It is amused by the notion, of his embarrassment. It is amused by suffering. This explanation covers, ofcourse, the second item on my list — henpecked husbands. It covers also the third and fourth items. The public is amused by the notion of a needy man put to double expense, and of a woman who has had no chance of fulfilling her destiny. The laughter at Jews, too, may be a survival of the old Jew-baiting spirit. Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which alono can , explain wqy the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germane, Italians, niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. The British public has never got. used to them, to their faces and tricks of speech. The only apparent reason why it laughs at tho notion of Frenchmen, etc., is that ' they are unlike itself. (At the mention of Russians and other foreigners it does not laugh," because it has no idea what they are like; it has seen too few samples of them.) So far, then, we have found two elements in the public's humour— delight in Buffering, contempt •for the unfamiliar." Mr. Beerbohm is

unfair. Nor can he, of all men, afford to throw a stone at the caricaturists. There is no kindliness in his own work, which for heartlessness, hideousness, and absence of humour can scarcely be equalled by a certain class of Continental lampoonists.