men in their cups. Next, we were warned that it is unseemly
and unChristian to laugh at a fellow-man's discomfiture--an awkward social
situation, a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a
poem spoilt by a printer's stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma that to
laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently grown into vigor
multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial, national and professional.
Not many years ago a censorship of Irish jokes was established, and this
was soon followed by an index expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our
colored fellow citizens promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the
expense of their race are "in bad taste"; and country life enthusiasts
solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing short of
national disasters. A recent press report informs us that the suffragette
joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits throughout the
country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic servants, stenographers,
politicians, college professors, and clergymen are organizing to establish
the right of being ridiculous without exciting laughter.

But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an old-fashioned aid to
digestion, more or less discredited by current medical authority? It is
time we learned that laughter has a social significance: it is the first
stage in the process of understanding one's fellow man. Professor Bergson
to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your intellect
alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy. You can not
laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a
Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a
Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in
the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world
laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.

When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a
book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person
observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school
readers narrated, with naive surprise, this maiden was destined to become
Franklin's faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect
such a result. The stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults
before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of
the sentimental value