THAT IMPORTANT FUNNY BONE!

Gisborne Times, Volume LXI, Issue 9771, 31 July 1924, Page 3

THAT IMPORTANT FUNNY BONE!

WIVE-S WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR.

A man told mo (writes Dorothy Dix) that he did not marry until lie was forty-five years old because he was determined net to marry any woman who did not have a sense of humor, and it took him that time to find one. A wise man! It is a million times more important for a woman to have a well-developed funny-bone than it is for her to have a Grecian profile, yet when men decide to marry they pick out a girl for a wife because she has soulfufbiue eyes, without observing whether they look on the funny side of life or take a dark, pessimistic view of it. Which is one reason why domestic life is no merry jest to the average husband-. It is absolutely essential for a woman to have a sense of humor if she is to he an agreeable partner, because a ■woman’s existence is made up of little, nagging things at which she must either laugh or cry. If she cannot laugh them off, they get on her nerves, and she goes to pieces. Neurotic, haggard women, who cannot see a joke, fill asylums and sanatoria and divorce courts. The women who wear the smile that won’t come off get to be fair, fat and forty, and you couldn’t got their husbands awiay from them. It is the lack of a sense of liumor that causes women to make tragedies instead of comedies out of trifles. Take the servant trouble, for instance. Women worry themselves over tlHei mistakes of an inexperienced) maid, and it never occurs to them that the blunders arc screamingly funny incidents that they pay mostly to see imitated in theatres. Of course, no one wants the soup to be seasoned with sugar instead of salt, hut the mistress who cm get a laugh instead of a headache out of tho mistakes of her maid saves her own face and 1 that of the girl, whom she later trains into being a good servant. Whether a woman makes a success or failure of matrimony depends altogether on whether she has a, sense of humor or not. If she can see. heir husband as. one of the most mirthprovoking, side-splitting, uproarious human jokes that Nature ever perpetrated she will he happy. But if she sees him as ail Awful Problem, or a subject for reformation, neither one of tliemi will ever know a happy hour. The women who wreck marriages are the ones who take their husbands seriously, and who get tragic every time their husbands look at another woman, or fail to come homo ut the appointed hour and who weep when their husbands forget an anniversary or fail in some little attention they consider their due. The women 1 who keep their husbands enslaved from the altar to the grave are the women who laugh over their little faults and peculiarities. They make a joke of their husband’s weakness for a prettv face; they have a dozen funny stories .to tell about bow thoy helped their husbands out of scrapes, and, instead of feeling illused when their husbands forget their birthdays, they go out and buy themr selrves a particularly nice present, ;which he pays for without a murmur because be knows that a wife with a ser.’se of humor is worth anything she costs.him. A sense of humor is just the sense of proportion that enables us to see thirlcra in their true relation to life. It is the thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that gives us the courage to smile instead of cry.