MORE HUMORISTS

Evening Star, Issue 21890, 29 November 1934, Page 9

MORE HUMORISTS

WHAT THE W9ALD AWAITS I Have we, I wonder, lost the capacity to laugh with each other, and can we no longer find unction for our souls by laughing at ourselves ? Has the saving grace of humour lost its power to succour humanity in its fierce spiritual conflicts with adversity and despair? Above all, where are our humorists? Wit we have in plenty. But humour, I wages, is as rare as radium, writes Cecil Palmer in the ‘ Daily Mail.’ The present century has seen the decay of more than one of our national institutions, but I much doubt if a greater calamity has overtaken us than the decline and fall of the music hall. The old-time music hall was a place where men and women escaped for a brief space from the world of reality into the realm of fantasy. The music hall fostered and nurtured humour, and its talisman was laughter-laugh-ter that dissolved into tears, and tears that crvstallised into laughter. The Dan Lenos, the Mane Lloyds, and the Little Tidies of a past generation knew instinctively that a smile spelled failure with an audience thav. had come to indulge in hearty, healthy, rollicking laughter. 1 . I do not think it can be denied that the raw material of humour is the thing which really happens, the thing we see with our own eyes. The man who cannot respond to humour_ baffles me completely, for humour is almost entirely an affair of the heart, ft I may, presume to paraphrase Nietzche’s illuminating apothegm, the grand thing about humour is that it is a bridge and not a goal—a bridge slung across an abyss between the sublime and the ridiculous. ■ . Contemporary literature is fecund in people who can write wittily. It is distressingly poor in authors who really are humorists in the sense that Charles Dickens was one. The mental acrobatics of our epigrammatists are great fun, and they do not fail to produce a maximum number of smiles to the printed page. But where are the men to-day who can wield a pen with so much nervous artistry that we are shaken with uncontrollable, infectious, invigorating laughter? _ Humour, in essence, is a simple thing. It is, if you like, nonsense and utter foolishness. But whenever and wherever it is encountered, it is instantly recognised and universally acclaimed. It may be, and often js, prosaic and commonplace, but its authentic and unmistakable echo is laughter. Anything and everything is grist to its mill; even such absurdities as tripping over a mat, or fat men chasing hats which the wind has chosen for toys, or Crock’s laborious efforts to bring a grand piano and a piano stool together on working terms. But it cannot be too greatly emphasised that these and similar absurdities in human conduct do not require either invention or exaggeration —they just happen! Dickens could spot these things unerringly, and record them without sacrificing their indigenous humour and potential mirth. To-day the world is crying out for laughter, but, for the most part, our tears are in vain. We are thankful to the faithful few who have been able to resist the temptation to sacrifice friendship for the sadistic joy of cracking an epigram. For humour is a clean thing, and dies at the very approach of cruelty of heart and meanness of mind.