.

Why are there no cricket or football stories, I wonder? Possibly
because they are team games; a team is a crowd, and I never heard of a
joke against a crowd. A crowd is an impersonal thing, and no one can
joke about an impersonal thing. I never heard of a joke about the moon
or a turnip. Yet are there not jokes against a nation, and a nation is
a crowd? Take the joke about the Scot who was brought up at Bow Street
for being drunk and disorderly. The magistrate, before passing
sentence, asked the accused if he had anything to say for himself.

"Weel, ma lord, it was like this. I travelled frae Glesga to London
yesterday, and I got into bad company in the train."

"Bad company?"

"Aye, ma lord. When I got into the train at Glesga Central I had twa
bottles o' whuskey in my bag, and . . . a' the other men in my
compartment was teetotal."

That looks like a joke against a long-suffering race, but is it so in
reality? Make the traveller an 'Oodersfield' man on his way to see the
Cup-tie Final at Chelsea, and it is not changed in essence. Only it
has become a convention that the Scot is a hard drinker. It is the
personal touch that makes the joke, and it is the individual that we
laugh at.

I presume that the typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to
Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to
a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one
expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about
extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success must know
what the crowd repressions are. Dickens is a great humorist because he
knew by intuition what the crowd would laugh at. And that brings me to
the subject of human types.

Broadly speaking there are two types of man. One is called an
extrovert (Latin, to turn outwards); he identifies himself with the
crowd, and he lives the life of the crowd. Lloyd George and Horatio
Bottomley are typical extroverts; they seem to know instinctively what
the crowd is thinking, and unconsciously they speak and act as the
crowd wants them to speak and act. Dickens was another, and that is
why he has so universal an appeal.

The other type, the introvert type, turns inward. They do not identify
themselves with the crowd. What the public wants does not concern
them; they give the crowd what they think it ought to want. This class
includes the thinkers, the men who are in advance of their time. An
int