lone
can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans, Italians,
Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. The British public
has never got used to them, to their faces and tricks of speech. The
only apparent reason why it laughs at the notion of Frenchmen, etc., is
that they are unlike itself. (At the mention of Russians and other
foreigners it does not laugh, because it has no idea what they are
like: it has seen too few samples of them.)

So far, then, we have found two elements in the public's humour:
delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar. The former motive is
the more potent. It accounts for the popularity of all these other
items: extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness,
stuttering, and (as entailing distress for the landlady) 'shooting the
moon.' The motive of contempt for the unfamiliar accounts for long hair
(worn by a man). Remains one item unexplained. How can mirth possibly
be evoked by the notion of bad cheese? Having racked my brains for the
solution, I can but conjecture that it must be the mere ugliness of the
thing. Why any one should be amused by mere ugliness I cannot conceive.
Delight in cruelty, contempt for the unfamiliar, I can understand,
though I cannot admire them. They are invariable elements in children's
sense of humour, and it is natural that the public, as being
unsophisticated, should laugh as children laugh. But any nurse will
tell you that children are frightened by ugliness. Why, then, is the
public amused by it? I know not. The laughter at bad cheese I abandon
as a mystery. I pitch it among such other insoluble problems, as Why
does the public laugh when an actor and actress in a quite serious play
kiss each other? Why does it laugh when a meal is eaten on the stage?
Why does it laugh when any actor has to say 'damn'?

If they cannot be solved soon, such problems never will be solved. For
Mr. Forster's Act will soon have had time to make apparent its effects;
and the public will proudly display a sense of humour as sophisticated
as our own.

DULCEDO JUDICIORUM

When a 'sensational' case is being tried, the court is well filled by
lay persons in need of a thrill. Their presence seems to be rather
resented as a note of frivolity, a discord in the solemnity of the
function, even a possible distraction for the judge and jury. I am not
a lawyer, nor a professionally solemn person, and I cannot work myself
up into a state of indignati