ourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly in the street you
will discover that the reason is not only recondite, but ultimately
religious. All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really
theological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man. They
refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things
around him and yet is at their mercy.

Quite equally subtle and spiritual is the idea at the back of laughing
at foreigners. It concerns the almost torturing truth of a thing being
like oneself and yet not like oneself. Nobody laughs at what is entirely
foreign; nobody laughs at a palm tree. But it is funny to see the
familiar image of God disguised behind the black beard of a Frenchman or
the black face of a Negro. There is nothing funny in the sounds that are
wholly inhuman, the howling of wild beasts or of the wind. But if a man
begins to talk like oneself, but all the syllables come out different,
then if one is a man one feels inclined to laugh, though if one is a
gentleman one resists the inclination.

Mr. Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first two
forms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. He
could not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese. I can
tell him at once. He has missed the idea because it is subtle and
philosophical, and he was looking for something ignorant and foolish.
Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallen
on the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across a
great mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from the
inorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of
matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself. And
it is only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that the
democracy condescends to joke. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokes
about marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind. But the democracy
would never deign to joke about Free Love, because Free Love is a piece
of priggishness.

As a matter of fact, it will be generally found that the popular joke is
not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The vulgar joke is
generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact. For
instance, it is not in the least true that mothers-in-law are as a class
oppressive and intolerable; most of them are both devoted and useful.
All the mothers-in-law I have ever had we