PRIVATE JESTER.

Waikato Independent, Volume V, Issue 328, 24 January 1907, Page 6

PRIVATE JESTER.

AMERICAN COURT VALUES JOKE AT £1 EACH. Kings no longer employ their private jesters, but American millionaires apparently have adopted tins kingly privilege, and an American court has just fixed the standard rate of remuneration. The Jesters’ Union will see that the legal wage is paid in future. Captain Louis Ijams is the modern representative of the ancient profession. He declared that he was retained as private jester by the late Mr Abraham Brokaw, a millionaire, of Bloomington, Illinois. He was paid no salary, but Mr Brokaw promised to remember him in his will. When the will was read Mr Brokaw seemed to have played a practical joke on the jester, for Captain Ijams name did not appear in it. For once, however, the jester was serious. He entered suit in the County Court for £2OOO, and furnished an itemised bill for 1000 funny stories told by him to Mr Brokaw at .£2 a story. Mark Twain has declared that there are only live original jokes and that all others are variants of them, and Mr Brokaw’s heirs, m contesting his claim, quoted this as expert evidence, but the judge refused to receive it, and held that even if it were correct the labor of elaborating the basic jokes was quite as much entitled to compensation as original discovery. The judge, however, after hearing several of the stories repeated, decided that they were worth only £1 each, and gave judgment for Captain Ijams for £IOOO. He refused to allow a claim by Captain Ijams for compensation for protecting Mr Brokaw from fortune-hunt-ing widows, declaring that that honorable service was its own reward.