Who Was the First Winker?

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 11, 14 January 1936, Page 2

Who Was the First Winker ?

“If the first winker did not wink as a variant of his habitual expression of the comic, but was instead an unfortunate individual afflicted with a ner-

vous twitch which acted at a critical juncture, with unlooked-for results, he was undoubtedly observed by someone gifted with a rich sense of humour who perceived its comic possibilities and forthwith adopted it and practised it, and was in turn imitated, until finally in the course of generations it achieved perfection at the hands of the Wellers and their kind,” writes "J.W.” in the "Birmingham Post.” "Sam, indeed, winked perpetually in the sheer exuberance of a limitless fund of fun. With a wink he marked his sense of the ridiculous, his appreciation of the funny side of things. It was at once the means of amusing others and a vent for his own inherent waggishness. And I suppose the same is true in part of most of us.

"Only tho humourless individual does not wink; only the benighted being without a gram of folly in his composition who remains oblivious to the wink’s relation to the great family of fun.

"For the rest of us it is the passport to risibility, as universal in its appeal as Mickey Mouse (a great winker), as unfailing in its broad effect as anything possibly can be this side of the Styx. "Who, by the way, was the first winker? I hesitate to accept Henry VIII as the inventor of the wink, for all that Chaucer fails to mention it by word or implication—he who of all men might have been, expected to expatiate on so human and eloquent a gesture had Medieval England really winked.

"Surely the wink is older in it 3 origin than the Tudors. Yet if Henry did not invent tho wink, most certainly he made it popular. One need only consider literature, before his time consistently ignoring it and after a 3 consistently remarking it, to observe the influence the First Winker in the Land exercised in this respect. "Falstaff, Shylock, Caliban, Mistress Quickly, and lago winked across Elizabethan stages; Sir Peter Teazle, Millamant, Mrs. Pinchwife, Horner, Boniface, and Lady Fanciful (to say nothing of wily innkeepers winking knowingly at guests and afterwards at all they saw and heard) pursued a winking course through Restoration comedy with the . second Charles as mentor and tho Laughing Cavalier to bring refinement to its execution.

"No need thereafter to look back. Whatever wo may have been before, we became a nation of winkers then. And so we have remained. And so we shall remain, so long at least as there is something to wink, at, and somebody to see us wink. For the essence of the wink’ is humour. And life never gets anyone down who can drop his eyelid first,”.