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 a