PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23707, 14 January 1939, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

Never appears a New Year or Birthday Honours List but the thought arises of the glamour of titles. Say what you will, a title of any sort has its joys and its thrills. It puts the Cabinet Minister and his lady into the seventh heaven. With it the newly qualified medical student is “throned on highest ecstasy.” It makes a local Mayor or M.P. or school committee chairman view life as a happy valley, down which he follows the trickling stream of ambition to the brimming river. No human being, it is said, ever experiences a rapture so intense as an American bishop from a Western State when he first hears himself called “ my lord ” at a London dinner party. But among titles, nothing beats a peerage. And since, in the words of the old proverb, “ great deservers grow intolerable prosumers,” I presume to declare my own preference for an earldom. By common agreement, by euphony, by dignified association, an earldom is the most impressive of all peerage titles, graded as they are carefully as vintages. Preferable is an earldom even to a dukedom. Did not the fourteenth Early of Derby decline to be degraded to a brand-new duke? And 'tis an earldom that is usually selected by English Prime Ministers when they leave the Commons for the Lords—and surely they should know. Such Prime Ministers as Benjamin Disraeli and John Russell had a full basket of titles to choose from.' and earldoms were their choice: In 1880 a member of the House ol Russell, in which there are certain Whiggish traditions of jobbery, was fighting a hotly-contested election. His ardent supporters brought out a sarcastic poster; “ Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield—he made himself an earl and the people poor.” To which a rejoinder was instantly forthcoming: “John Earl Russell —he made himself an earl and his relations rich.”

The amount of truth in the two statements was about equal. If you bask in the sun of an earldom you can call your wife a countess, your daughters may all marry brewer kings or Woolworth millionaires, and your eldest son is “my lord ” —as every footman knows: Two little boys, respectively the eldest and the second son of an earl, were playing on the front staircase of their home, when the eldest 'fell down into the hall below. The younger called out to the footman who had picked his brother up, “ Is he dead? ” “ Killed, my lord,” was the instantaneous reply of a servant who knew the instantaneous devolution of a courtesy title.

Coming as it does right home to us—to every fireside —radio humour is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward through the ether. Critical correspondents during the past week, writing in unminced words, have roundly condemned some radio announcers for “ their laborious efforts to be funny,” their determination “to be funny or bust,” their “uninteresting embellishments ” even of the weather reports, “ their humour at times perfectly idiotic” and “more suitable to the children’s hour.” These condemnations raise, as with a stroke of the wand, one of the most difficult problems of the world. For humour is an uncharted sea. It' is a bottomless abyss. It has as many varieties as taste—and, as we know, “de gustibus non disputandum.” It is national and racial, too. Much English humour to an American is as enlivening as a wet blanket. Some American humour to an Englishman is mere boisterous hilarity or a concatenation of wise cracks. And French humour, again, is different from both. But the varieties of humour are not merely horizontal —they are vertical. Humour, like man himself, grows up. It has its stages of maturity The humour that shakes with laughter the midriff of a boy may chill the grown up man down to zero or exasperate him up to boiling point

Of little or no help in this chaos of humour are the professional philosophers According to Aristotle, “we laugh at some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive.” Kant declared the source of humour to be “ a sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Bergson the French philosopher has maintained that “ in all laughter there is hostility.” Herbert Spencer explained laughter as “occurring when our nervous energy is agog for a big thing_ and a little one follows.” Ludovici recently identified laughter with “ the showing of teeth in animals.” Freud taught that laughter is merely “an economy of psychic expenditure.” And Max Eastman, writing on the basis of laughter, states that “all laughter goes back to the tickling in the cradle,” and he likens adult laughter to “ an accessory mechanism which enables us to free-wheel ourselves from life’s passions and for a time to be playful.” Does radio humour follow Kant or Freud or Spencer, or is it based on Ludovici and Eastman? There must be much more in humour than meets the eye or strikes the ear. Artemus Ward could convulse with laughter his English audiences by such apparently anaemic jests as “ I was born in the State of Maine—of parents,” and (as he pointed to the Nevada Mountains on the map) “ The highest part of that mountain is the lop.” But Artemus Ward, like Will Rogers, could split the sides of his audiences by merely twiddling his thumbs. Such men do not grow on every blackberry bush, nor are they found behind everv microphone.

Right at the basis of all humour lie three axiomatic truths which, taken in conjunction, have appalling consequences: “ Few men possess a sense of humour,” “Every man on earth claims to have it,” and “ There is an exquisite unconscious humour in the man who thinks he is humorous and it not, and yet jests with a will.” As Swift says:

’Tis never by invention got, Men have it when they know it not The world is therefore full of humour from end to end. As a great Scottish humorist has said, “ So many Scotsmen are humorous because so many Scotsmen are not.” Wordsworth had no sense of humour, but he was certain he had. Yet he condemned Scott’s “ Waverley ” for “the lack of a higher condiment of humour than the author possesses ” Wordsworth for the nonce was humorous, for burnout may lie in the situation. Lamb was without question a great humorist. Yet he loved Swift’s punning jest of the Oxford scholar who, meeting a porter carrying a hare through the streets, accosted him with the extraordinary question, “ Prithee, friend, is that thy own hair or a wig? ” An anaemic jest? Not to Lamb, for Lamb’s imagination visualised the situation. He, explains it thus:

Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner party, it would have been vapid: to the mistress of lire house, it would have shown less wit than rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place and person: the pert look of the inquire

ing scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter, the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first part of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second: the place, a public street, not favourable to a frivolous investigation . . all put together constitute a picture. Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvas. And Punch would have made it immortal. The same Max Eastman, writing authoritatively on Humour’, quotes rapturously the following “ humorous ” story—calling it “ a perfect chrysolite.” It may serve as a sense of humour test; A man entered a baker’s shop, and asked the baker whether he could bake him a cake in the form of the letter S. The baker said that he had never’baked a cake in the form of an S. but he thought he could manage it if the customer would give him a week to prepare the necessary tins. The customer agreed, the tins were prepared, the cake baked, and proudly passed out to the customer when he called a week later. “ Oh, but you misunderstood me,” said the customer. “ you have made it a block letter, and I wanted one in script.” “That's all right," said the baker. “ give me anothei week, and I will bake one in script.” Again the tins were prepared and the cake baked. When the customer called a week later he was delighted. “Would you like to take it with you, or shall I send it? ” asked the baker. “Oh no. don’t bother,” said the customer: “Just give me a knife and fork and I’ll eat it right here.”

Says Eastman, “ This story threatened me with collapse, and did actually debilitate me during two days. If it does not appeal to you I can offer only one suggestion. Read it again carefully and then, with full knowledge of its stages, try to write it out carefully in your best hand. If you can do this without falling off your chair there must be something wrong with you—or with me.” Is Eastman leg-pulling, or is he not 9 Is there something wrong with him. with you, or with me?

Writes the Clyde correspondent of a Southland weekly; - « Never beiore has the sight ot camps in these parts been more prominent by motorists from all over the prbvince. Tents of all colours and trailers with harems are seen in all secluded gullies.

Lyrical expression alone can do justice to the theme presented.

Oh harcm-scarem town of Clyde, Town of the fine and storied- past. What secrets now you seem to hide, TUI even the Old Man stands aghast! YoUr motor camps were quite all right, With merry laughter ail the day. And picnic fires aglow at night, And perhaps sometimes a' roundelay. The cars were all that cars should be— Not bought from second-hand retailer; And finer could there never be Than each commodious brand-new trailer. Now trailers should be full of things That cars themselves can hardly take. Things which a camper always brings Wherewith to boll and fry and bake. But no Clyde trailer had such stuff As mostly into trailers goes. The trailers here were full of fluff— In fact, were mere seraglios. And all those trailer-sounds that rose Like clattering of pots and pans. Were bickerings of Megs, and Flos And jabberings of Dots and Anns. So if such sounds of household strife Should strike a passer-by to Scare ’im, Let him for heaven’s sake flee away There’s danger In a touring harem.

A post-mortem story: Dear Civis,—Having found out just how:it was that the Nationalists got such a bad beating in ,the last election, I pass the discovery on to you. Peter (aged 11) arrives home whistling with the consciousness of a good deed well done. He looks to mother for an understanding sympathy as he unfolds the tale which follows:

My word. Mum, I reckon we’ve given those chaps something to think about.”

(Mother chides, warns, scolds him. but it was water running off a duck’s back). “Well, those Labour chaps called our man a ‘sod.’ Would you stand for that? So I got lan (also aged 11) to help me—and I reckon we’ve given those Labour chaps something to think about for a while.”

This in a primary school not a hundred miles from Invercargill. —I am, etc.. Mother.

Which calls to mind an earlier little Peter, an earlier great victory, and an earlier grandfather instead of a later mother. It is Southey’s tale of old Kaspar and his grandson Peterkin, who finds in his garden some debris of the Battle of Blenheim. " Now tell us what ’twas all about," Young Peterkin, he cries . . . “ Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for . . . And what good came of It all.” “ It was the English," Kaspar cried, "Who put the French to rout; But what they fought each other for I never could make out; But everybody said,” quoth he, “ ’Twas a famous victory.” What a deal of difference a couple of centuries have made in the youthful mind! Civis.