FullReads

I have gone steadily through them, one by one. My main impression is of wonder and horror at the amount of hebdomadal labour implicit in them. Who writes for them? Who does the drawings for them–those thousands of little drawings, week by week, so neatly executed? To think that daily and nightly, in so many an English home, in a room sacred to the artist, sits a young man inventing and executing designs for Chippy Snips! To think how many a proud mother must be boasting to her friends: `Yes, Edward is doing wonderfully well–more than fulfilling the hopes we always had of him. Did I tell you that the editor of Natty Tips has written asking him to contribute to his paper? I believe I have the letter on me. Yes, here it is,’ etc., etc.! The awful thing is that many of the drawings in these comic papers are done with very real skill. Nothing is sadder than to see the hand of an artist wasted by alliance to a vacant mind, a common spirit. I look through these drawings, conceived all so tritely and stupidly, so hopelessly and helplessly, yet executed–many of them–so very well indeed, and I sigh over the haphazard way in which mankind is made. However, my concern is not with the tragedy of these draughtsmen, but with the specific forms taken by their humour. Some of them deal in a broad spirit with the world-comedy, limiting themselves to no set of funny subjects, finding inspiration in the habits and manners of men and women at large. `HE WON HER’ is the title appended to a picture of a young lady and gentleman seated in a drawing-room, and the libretto runs thus: `Mabel: Last night I dreamt of a most beautiful woman. Harold: Rather a coincidence. I dreamt of you, too, last night.’ I have selected this as a typical example of the larger style. This style, however, occupies but a small space in the bulk of the papers that lie before me. As in the music-halls, so in these papers, the entertainment consists almost entirely of variations on certain ever-recurring themes. I have been at pains to draw up a list of these themes. I think it is exhaustive. If any fellow-student detect an omission, let him communicate with me. Meanwhile, here is my list:

Mothers-in-law
Hen-pecked husbands
Twins
Old maids
Jews
Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers (not Russians, or other foreigners of any denomination)
Fatness
Thinness
Long hair (worn by a man)
Baldness
Sea-sickness
Stuttering
Bad cheese
“Shooting the moon’ (slang expression for leaving a lodging-house without paying the bill).

You might argue that one week’s budget of comic papers is no real criterion–that the recurrence of these themes may be fortuitous. My answer to that objection is that this list coincides exactly with a list which (before studying these papers) I had made of the themes commonest, during the past few years, in the music-halls. This twin list, which results from separate study of the two chief forms of public entertainment, may be taken as a sure guide to the goal of our inquiry.

Let us try to find some unifying principle, or principles, among the variegated items. Take the first item–Mothers-in-law. Why should the public roar, as roar it does, at the mere mention of that relationship? There is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion of a woman with a married daughter. It is probable that she will sympathise with her daughter in any quarrel that may arise between husband and wife. It is probable, also, that she will, as a mother, demand for her daughter more unselfish devotion than the daughter herself expects. But this does not make her ridiculous. The public laughs not at her, surely. It always respects a tyrant. It laughs at the implied concept of the oppressed son-in-law, who has to wage unequal warfare against two women. It is amused by the notion of his embarrassment. It is amused by suffering. This explanation covers, of course, the second item on my list–Hen-pecked husbands. It covers, also, the third and fourth items. The public is amused by the notion of a needy man put to double expense, and of a woman who has had no chance of fulfilling her destiny. The laughter at Jews, too, may be a survival of the old Jew- baiting spirit (though one would have thought that even the British public must have begun to realise, and to reflect gloomily, that the whirligig of time has so far revolved as to enable the Jews to bait the Gentiles). Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which alone can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. The British public has never got used to them, to their faces and tricks of speech. The only apparent reason why it laughs at the notion of Frenchmen, etc., is that they are unlike itself. (At the mention of Russians and other foreigners it does not laugh, because it has no idea what they are like: it has seen too few samples of them.)

So far, then, we have found two elements in the public’s humour: delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar. The former motive is the more potent. It accounts for the popularity of all these other items: extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness, stuttering, and (as entailing distress for the landlady) `shooting the moon.’ The motive of contempt for the unfamiliar accounts for long hair (worn by a man). Remains one item unexplained. How can mirth possibly be evoked by the notion of bad cheese? Having racked my brains for the solution, I can but conjecture that it must be the mere ugliness of the thing. Why any one should be amused by mere ugliness I cannot conceive. Delight in cruelty, contempt for the unfamiliar, I can understand, though I cannot admire them. They are invariable elements in children’s sense of humour, and it is natural that the public, as being unsophisticated, should laugh as children laugh. But any nurse will tell you that children are frightened by ugliness. Why, then, is the public amused by it? I know not. The laughter at bad cheese I abandon as a mystery. I pitch it among such other insoluble problems, as Why does the public laugh when an actor and actress in a quite serious play kiss each other? Why does it laugh when a meal is eaten on the stage? Why does it laugh when any actor has to say `damn’?

If they cannot be solved soon, such problems never will be solved. For Mr. Forster’s Act will soon have had time to make apparent its effects; and the public will proudly display a sense of humour as sophisticated as our own.