The Sense of Humour.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 42, 22 June 1908, Page 1

The Sense of Humour.

Are We all Humourists ?

I have been lately trying in vain to find someone who can ” explain to me in pluiu words, What is Humour ? I asked an anonymous but prominent humorist—a man of nearly sixty, who writes for a leading comic paper, and has spent a strenuous life in attending strictly to the business of making jokes for sale —and he confessed that he really did not know. People never laugh at my best jokes,” he said sadly. “ I’ve got a box full of them at home that no editor will buy. 1 don’t like to waste them, so now and then I take one out, and work it off in an after-dinner speech; but that special joke is invariably the one that is received in pained silence, and as often as not Bomebody comes to me privately afterwards about it, and that makes me feel so ashamed of the thing that in self-defence I pass it off as one of Mark Twain’s. ‘He never made a more delightful, one,’ I say, laughing as heartily as I can ; ‘he told it to me himself and it simply threw me* into fits. Capital,’ I say, 1 isn’t it ?’ That leaves them uncomfortable ; for nobody has the pluck to admit that he has not a sufficient sense of humour to be able to see a joke by an acknowledged humorist, and they request me, as a favour, to repeat it. I do so, and they jot a rough note of it on a shirtcuff, and the next minute I see them feverishly telling it to others as Mark Twain’s latest; and by fche time I come away half the clubroom is in hysterics over it, and going off in such roars that the waiters can’t hear the orders, and come out gnashing their teeth, and run mad in the • corridors. I have arrived at the coaclusion,” he added, with a - sigh, “that nobody has any actual sense of Humour; and though several of us have a fit of it at intervals, we soon recover, and are our miserable selves again until the next time.” “ Oh, but how about you ?” I protested. “ You must have a sense of humour, or you couldn’t make the jokes you do.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “ Are they jokes ?” he said. “Bo“many people think not that I have my doubts. What’s A joke to one man is no joke to another ; and who is to decide which of them has the most reliable sense of humour ? Why, if I were to name the man who seems to me to be the greatest living humorist, you would want to hide behind something and call a policeman. They don’t label his work comic; everybody else refers to it as dignified, impressive, learned, and takes him quite seriously ; and it’s my belief that that’s why he goes about looking gloomy and reserved, I know what you feel like when you make jokes that the public doesn’t appreciate. He isn’t Hie only one. I assure you I look forward eagerly for every new work by some of our noted professors and poets and novelists. Directly Mudie delivers **» them, I sit down and grin and chuckle and laugh over them till my wife grows uneasy, and rushes to pat me on the back and saves me from choking.

But when she and our relations read the same books I have observed them shed real tears over those novels ; and they tell me they can’t understand the poetry and the scientific and philosophical works a bit, and can’t make out what it is I find in them that is amusing. Then where’s the use of your asking me What is Humour ?” he concluded. “ I don’t know. Nobody knows ; but not one man in a million is unaffected enough to say so.” I wasn’t so surprised at this as he seems to have anticipated that I should be, for I had often suspected something of the kind myself. I recollect how, when I was a small boy, after I had been to my first pantomine, my sole ambition was to be a clown, By way of testing my capabilities for the part, I made an inimitable butter-slide opposite our house, and concealed myself in the garden to see who saw the joke. It was an elderly gentleman who involuntarily performed the other part of the programme —a stout, pompous gentleman, who came on in a tall hat and white waistcoat, smoking a cigar, and carrying a black bag and an umbrella in his hands. He planted his right foot firmly on the slide, and immediately ricocheted all the way down it in a fashion that even in my most sanguine dreams I had not imagined possible ; but he didn’t so much as smile. He collected his hat and bag and umbrella, and a little loose cash that also belonged to him, and the things he said, and the expression on his face ns he looked at the crack in the pavement and stared round, gave me such a shock that I forgot it was a joke until-he had gone on and it was too late to laugh. Still, I was not disheartened’; you can’t expect to do a thing well at the first attempt. I remained iu my place of concealment and waited patiently to see if a more appreciative humorist would have a turn, and presently it was an errand-boy. He went so suddenly that I didn’t know he was going till I caught sight of his boots in the air, and bobbed out in time to see him upside down on the kerb, with his head in his basket and a leg of mutton in the gutter. Unfortunately, I was so interested that he removed the basket and sat up before I could dodge down, and instead of enjoying the incident with me, he came into our garden and behaved so inconsiderately that I could not get my hat on over the bump for nearly a week after. One or two failures of this fort convinced me that life is leal, life is

earnest; and if you want to be respected and happy you can’t be too serious. It is a mad world, as Shakespeare said, and nobody has any sense of humour except in lucid intervals. As my friend who writes for the comic paper pointed out, hardly anyone is willing to admit this. Indeed, if you put the question, you will find that everybody claims tp have a sense of humour, and gets indignant if you doubt it; but it’s a good job they haven’t for if everybody really had, the world would have died with laughing at itself long ago. As it is, we are not tickled with any suggestion of humour in the grave and solemn fashion with which we conduct a modest, ordinary, quite average citizen from behind his counter, and hang gold chains round his neck, and dress, him in large, uncomfortable, old-fashioned robes and obsolete cocked hat, and send him with outriders, and a man to sit beside him in a wig, and a man to walk in front of him with a Bword that’s too big to wear, and another man to blow a trumpet—all because he is going out somewhere to have a bit of dinner. And it doesn’t strike us as iu the least amusing that when an intrepid explorer returns from carrying his. life iu his hand through all manner of inaccessible regions we go to him and say, in effect: “ You are a brave and important person. Come and meet us this day fortnight, and let us all eat something together.” If he is a daring warrior back from a brilliant campaign; a great author who has issued an uncommonly successful book; a popular actor who has bought a play that is having a long run; a scientific genius who has discovered a wonderful cure for a deadly disease; or a high-think-ing theologian who has solved the mystery of the universe—no matter which it is, w r e serve them all alike: “ You have done nobly,” w r e say to each of them, in effect; “ you have saved your country, you have won eternal renown—come and eat something.” He generally feels flattered, and comes; and our societies and clubs put their hands iu their pockets, one after the other, and stand him a seven - and - sixpenny meal of meat and potatoes, and whatever else is iu season, and let him choose his own drink. I own that I have vague fancies that there is something odd and inadequate about this, but it is the custom of the country, and I daren’t laugh, because, if I did, people would call me vul-gar-minded, and talk of my shocking bad taste. At the same time, if it were permissible, it would be a relief to me occasionally if I might smile when it crosses my mind that, instead of feeding the hungry, it is not until a man has scored a noisy success and has a bank account, and can afford four meals a day, and more if he could eat them, that we go and beg him to allow us to give him a dinner. Is it true, I wonder, that we have no humorists nowadays ? Or, on the other hand, are we all humorists, ready enough to laugh at each other, but restrained by a sort of professional jealousy from laughing at each other’s jokes ? —A. St. John Adcock, in the “ London Magazine.”