factors. The surest way of making a thing obvious is to
provide it in some special place, at some special time. It is thus that
humour is provided for the public, and thus that it is easy for the
student to lay his hand on materials for an analysis of the public's
sense of humour. The obviously right plan for the student is to visit
the music-halls from time to time, and to buy the comic papers. Neither
these halls nor these papers will amuse him directly through their art,
but he will instruct himself quicklier and soundlier from them than
from any other source, for they are the authentic sources of the
public's laughter. Let him hasten to patronise them.

He will find that I have been there before him. The music-halls I have
known for many years. I mean, of course, the real old-fashioned
music-halls, not those depressing palaces where you see by grace of a
biograph things that you have seen much better, and without a headache,
in the street, and pitiable animals being forced to do things which
Nature has forbidden them to do--things which we can do so very much
better than they, without any trouble. Heaven defend me from those
meaningless palaces! But the little old music-halls have always
attracted me by their unpretentious raciness, their quaint monotony,
the reality of the enjoyment on all those stolidly rapt faces in the
audience. Without that monotony there would not be the same air of
general enjoyment, the same constant guffaws. That monotony is the
secret of the success of music-halls. It is not enough for the public
to know that everything is meant to be funny, that laughter is craved
for every point in every 'turn.' A new kind of humour, however obvious
and violent, might take the public unawares, and be received in
silence. The public prefers always that the old well-tested and
well-seasoned jokes be cracked for it. Or rather, not the same old
jokes, but jokes on the same old subjects. The quality of the joke is
of slight import in comparison with its subject. It is the matter,
rather than the treatment, that counts, in the art of the music-hall.
Some subjects have come to be recognised as funny. Two or three of them
crop up in every song, and before the close of the evening all of them
will have cropped up many times. I speak with authority, as an earnest
student of the music-halls. Of comic papers I know less. They have
never allured me. They are not set to music--an art for whose cheaper
and more primit