Part 32 (2/2)
”You don't say so!” I exclaimed.
”None!” he went on. ”I can't tell one tune from another.
I don't know _Home, Sweet Home_ from _G.o.d Save the King_.
I can't tell whether a man is tuning a violin or playing a sonata.”
He seemed to get prouder and prouder over each item of his own deficiency. He ended by saying that he had a dog at his house that had a far better ear for music than he had. As soon as his wife or any visitor started to play the piano the dog always began to howl--plaintively, he said--as if it were hurt. He himself never did this.
When he had finished I made what I thought a harmless comment.
”I suppose,” I said, ”that you find your sense of humour deficient in the same way: the two generally go together.”
My friend was livid with rage in a moment.
”Sense of humour!” he said. ”My sense of humour! Me without a sense of humour! Why, I suppose I've a keener sense of humour than any man, or any two men, in this city!”
From that he turned to bitter personal attack. He said that _my_ sense of humour seemed to have withered altogether.
He left me, still quivering with indignation.
Personally, however, I do not mind making the admission, however damaging it may be, that there are certain forms of so-called humour, or, at least, fun, which I am quite unable to appreciate. Chief among these is that ancient thing called the Practical Joke.
”You never knew McGann, did you?” a friend of mine asked me the other day.
When I said I had never known McGann, he shook his head with a sigh, and said:
”Ah, you should have known McGann. He had the greatest sense of humour of any man I ever knew--always full of jokes. I remember one night at the boarding-house where we were, he stretched a string across the pa.s.sage-way and then rang the dinner bell. One of the boarders broke his leg. We nearly died laughing.”
”Dear me!” I said. ”What a humorist! Did he often do things like that?”
”Oh, yes, he was at them all the time. He used to put tar in the tomato soup, and beeswax and tin-tacks on the chairs. He was full of ideas. They seemed to come to him without any trouble.”
McGann, I understand, is dead. I am not sorry for it.
Indeed, I think that for most of us the time has gone by when we can see the fun of putting tacks on chairs, or thistles in beds, or live snakes in people's boots.
To me it has always seemed that the very essence of good humour is that it must be without harm and without malice.
I admit that there is in all of us a certain vein of the old original demoniacal humour or joy in the misfortune of another which sticks to us like our original sin. It ought not to be funny to see a man, especially a fat and pompous man, slip suddenly on a banana skin. But it is.
When a skater on a pond who is describing graceful circles, and showing off before the crowd, breaks through the ice and gets a ducking, everybody shouts with joy. To the original savage, the cream of the joke in such cases was found if the man who slipped broke his neck, or the man who went through the ice never came up again. I can imagine a group of prehistoric men standing round the ice-hole where he had disappeared and laughing till their sides split. If there had been such a thing as a prehistoric newspaper, the affair would have headed up: ”_Amusing Incident. Unknown Gentleman Breaks Through Ice and Is Drowned._”
But our sense of humour under civilisation has been weakened. Much of the fun of this sort of thing has been lost on us.
Children, however, still retain a large share of this primitive sense of enjoyment.
I remember once watching two little boys making snow-b.a.l.l.s at the side of the street and getting ready a little store of them to use. As they worked, there came along an old man wearing a silk hat, and belonging by appearance to the cla.s.s of ”jolly old gentlemen.” When he saw the boys his gold spectacles gleamed with kindly enjoyment.
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