"LIFE'S FITFUL FEVER." ODD SYMPTOMS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIII, Issue 129, 1 June 1907, Page 9

"LIFE'S FITFUL FEVER." ODD SYMPTOMS.

(By Dr. F. H. Charity.) OLD JOKES.

A very old joko caught the writer's eyo in a Manawatu papei the other day. A smoker in Fox ton or some other township up country, when chided about the houses that ho could havo bought with his tobacco money, silenced a non-smoking commentator by requesting him, to point to the property that his self-denial had enabled him to secure. When tho writer was a dot of a boy that smoker and non-smoker were in New York, and they havo bobbed up In London, Quebec, Capetown, Sydney and dozens of other places. Every day an ancient jest is re\ivcd, given a new pair ol ooots and pushed out afresh into the highways. There is always a strong demand for the old jokos. Anyone who goes to a theatre knows that it is often tho oldest joko that draws the greatest Hugh. Iho new guip — perhaps very smart and extremely laughable — is regarded aE an intciloger, a trespasser that should be treated with scorn. Therefore it is greeted with stony silence. Perhaps the explanation is that audiences usually are not given much to thinking. They give themselves up to a couple of hours' ease. The scenery they can see ; that is simple. An old joke, an old gag, an old tag of morality strikes a key that has been often touched in the hearer's mind, and immediately, without effort, the listener has a sensation of merriment or sadness. , But the new thing? It involves a little menial gymnastics and the hearer declines ' the exercise ; he reserves his laugh till the old joke comes along. Human nature, too, is as conservative about its fun as about almost everything else. Onr fathers had wheaten bread ; then let us have the wheaten bread. Our fathers had tho old jokes ; therefore the old jokes arc good enough for us. Away with the upstarts. If there was ever any movement for the abolition of the old jokes, what an upro.tr there would bo among the world's comic papers, especially the British publications ! What would poor Punch do? Even tho Sydney Bulletin, which usually keeps a keen eye on hoary, peripatetic witticisms, would snffor a little. Any revolutionary suggestion of tho kind indicated would no doubt set the promoters of the comic papers banding together in protective unions and invoking the courts to issue injunctions against the fiends incarnate who aimed at tho destruction of tho feminine hat, the husband's pockets, the singer, the mother-in-law, the restaurant and boardinghouse steak, tho young wife's pie and the few other odd trifles that constitute the foundation of the British house of humour. After all, however, the old jokes have their meriti. They brighten the lives of the tellers, though they may sadden the receivers. Tho writer has known a man tell an old joke a thousand times, and the teller has laughed more •over his thousandth recital than over the first. Without that joke to tell that man might have become a morbid person, a politician or some other dreadful thing, but he preserved his respectability, and added to his days, for it is contended rightly that laughter stretches the mortal span. To take away an old joke from a man who_ is addicted to one is as sinful as cutting ofi his supply of fresh air. The daty of listening to a plenitude of old jokes is the penalty we have to pay for living. The longer we live, the larger grows the audible supply, j Therefore providence is kind in limiting i the days of man to three score years and ten. Poor Melchisedep must have ] suffered dreadful torture in his 900 th year and after. How he managed to breast the tide of old jokes that must have surged around him after he was, say, a couple of hundred years old is something which would baffle even m modern coroner's jury. That is the saddest part of old jokes ; they make us feel so very old. When the years are slipping past us, we do not turn our heads to see how far the stream ha* flowed ; that is dismal exercise. We keep our eyes ahead, and tell ourselves that we are still young. We feel it; we are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and still on a summer's day the blood chumps in our viens, and we are sixteen again. Someone tells us an old joke. Bang, thunder* and lightning. Those few words are a cyclone that whirl ns from sixteen to six hundred. Also, we confess to ourselves as our minds drift back to tha days when we first heard the jest, we must be getting very, very old, and tht lelief of the grave is not far awayStill, the oldest of jokes is always new to somebody. The haggard aged "proceed" is a fresh verb for the boy just leaving school. One of the priraardial jests comes as a latter-day revela- j tion to the child of seven. That is the joker's salvation. He knows that there is .ilv.-ays Eorco one who has not j heard his ch°stnut, and he makes it one of his missions in life to hawk it round to the hungry. Very often this i man of more or less one joke has the kindness of tho rattlesrake. He gives yon decent warning. He throws out a query : "Have you heard that stoi-y about Smith and Robinson?" and gives you a chance to break the record for the mile. That 'bankrupt baker" is about the most amusing of the old jokes that aro floating through Wellington just now. Some time, in the dim past, a "baker ■who did not know how to run his business, bankrupted himself, and did a glorious thing for the trade. Whenever it was desired to convince tho people that they weic getting their bread altogether too dirt cheap, and should stand another halfpenny on the tv/oponrnd loaf, that lovely bankrupt was dragged Into the arena by the coat-tails, whicn must be now well frayed from the frequent handling that they have received. That bankrupt should be made the patron saint of the .Master Bakers' Association. His name will doubtlessly) be handed down among their children's children. However, it is time that .he allegedly rumors businers of baking at 6d or 7il for r. 41b loaf produced a new bankrupt, for the other one is getting worn out. The bakers must too pr.iymg for a few more ten per cent, uses i/i the price of flour, which give them a chance to advance bread by sixteen p< r cent, each time. Another amusing old joke 's tho man . who is always selling out because tho leasehold policy has threatened to pievent him from amassing territory fey the square mil". He has Ot >n se'hiig out any time these ten years, lut at the last moment he has decided to stay and put up with a pittance of £ 10,000 a year. Lvery time that a L.md Jiill promises to s;ive the small man ': chsinco on the earth, that scarecrow, tho p.-nn-tom seller-out, is raked fi-.>m its lair by the grabbers who --.hrhk '.hai. capital is boing 'driven out ..f the ci-iintiy: And this old joke, like oth'jr old joke?, "catches on."

A new joke, nowever, ias • can .nfid>i by tho broad and deep-chested persons who mild rather see one Made «i g.i?s where three stalks of wheat <oi id crow. Dreading that the limits of their sheep and cattle runs might be curtailed by an cquitabb Land 13il>, th.-y cry out that ths promoters of tho legislation aro sinning against the r.t.in u.io rr.s carved out a liomc ?or himself in tho bush. It just wants :i if-tla serf- of humour to flout thesa faho prophets but a sense of humour is a lino n^&ef. in the community. The- abundance of old jokes is proof enough of th.it deficiency. Howjver, humour may be cultivated. The school syllabus is heavy enough, and hunnur is already iiK'lu.ied in it, but. it could bo fiiriher lightened by *he specific addition i-I this necessary object.