When I had written "now".
I tracked the bounder to his den
Through private information:
I said "Good afternoon" and then
Explained the situation:
"I'm not a fussy man," I said.
"I smile when you put 'rid' for 'red’
And 'bad' for 'bed' and 'hoad' for 'head'
And 'bolge' instead of 'bough'.
When 'wone' appears in lieu of 'wine'
Or if you alter 'Cohn' to 'Schine',
I never make a row.
I know how easy errors are.
But this time you have gone too far
By printing 'not' when you knew what
I really wrote was 'now'.
Prepare," I said, "to meet your God
Or, as you'd say, your Goo or Bod
Or possibly your Gow."
A few weeks later into court
I came to stand my trial.
The Judge was quite a decent sort,
He said "Well, cocky, I'll
Be passing sentence in a jiff,
And so, my poor unhappy stiff,
If you have anything to say,
Now is the moment. Fire away.
You have?"
I said "And how!
Me lud, the facts I don't dispute.
I did, I own it freely, shoot
This printer through the collar stud.
What else could I have done, me lud?
He's printed 'not'..."
The Judge said "What!”
When you had written 'now'?
God bless my soul! Gadzooks! " said he
"The blighters did that once to me.
A dirty trick, I trow.
I hereby quash and override
The jury's verdict. Gosh! " he cried.
"Give me your hand. Yes, I insist,
You splendid fellow! Case dismissed."
(Cheers, and a Voice "Wow-wow! ")
A statue stands against the sky,
Lifelike and rather pretty.
'Twas recently erected by
The P.E.N, committee.
And many a passer-by is stirred,
For on the plinth, if that's the word,
In golden letters you may read
"This is the man who did the deed.
His hand set to the plough,
He did not sheathe the sword, but got
A gun at great expense and shot
The human blot who'd printed 'not'
When he had written 'now'.
He acted with no thought of self,
Not for advancement, not for pelf,
But just because it made him hot
To think the man had printed 'not'
When he had written 'now'."
A Note on Humour
It will not have escaped the notice of the discerning reader that the foregoing stories and in-between bits were intended to be humorous, and this would seem as good a time as any for me to undertake the What-is-Humour essay which every author is compelled by the rules of his Guild to write sooner or later.
In the sixteenth century they called humour 'a disorder of the blood', and though they were probably just trying to be nasty, it is not a bad description. It is, anyway, a disorder of something. To be a humourist you must see the world out of focus. You must, in other words, be slightly cockeyed. This leads you to ridicule established institutions, and as most people want to keep their faith in established institutions intact, the next thing that happens is that you get looked askance at. Statistics show that 87.03 of today's askance looks are directed at humourists, for the solid citizenry suspect them and are wondering uneasily all the time what they are going to be up to next, like baby-sitters with charges who are studying to be juvenile delinquents. There is an atmosphere of strain such as must have prevailed long ago when the king or prince or baron had one of those Shakespearian Fools around the castle, capering about and shaking a stick with a bladder and little bells attached to it. Tradition compelled him to employ the fellow, but nothing was going to make him like it.
"Never can understand a word that character says," he would mutter peevishly to his wife as the Fool went bounding about the throne room jingling his bells. "Why on earth do you encourage him? It was you who started him off this morning. All that nonsense about crows!"
"I only asked him how many crows can nest in a grocer's jerkin. Just making conversation."
"And what was his reply? Tinkling like a xylophone, he gave that awful cackling laugh of his and said 'A full dozen at cockcrow, and something less under the dog star, by reason of the dew, which lies heavy on men taken with the scurvy'. Was that sense?”
"It was humour."
"Who says so?"
"Shakespeare says so."
"Who's Shakespeare?"
"All right, George."
"I never heard of any Shakespeare."
"I said all right, George. Skip it."
"Well, anyway, you can tell him from now on to keep his humour to himself, and if he hits me on the head just once more with that bladder of his, he does it at his own risk. Every I time he gets within arm's reach of me—socko! And for that I pay him a penny a week, not deductible."
Humourists are often rather gloomy men, and what makes them so is the sense they have of being apart from the herd, of being, as one might say, the eczema on the body politic. They are looked down on by the intelligentsia, patronized by the critics and generally regarded as outside the pale of literature. People are very serious today, and the writer who does not take them seriously is viewed with concern and suspicion.
"Fiddle while Rome burns, would you?" they say to him, and treat him as an outcast.
I think we should all be sorry for humourists and try to be very kind to them, for they are so vulnerable. You can blot the sunshine from their lives in an instant by telling them you don't see what's so funny in that, and if there is something funny in it, you can take all the heart out of them by calling them facetious or describing them as 'mere humourists'. A humourist who has been called mere not only winces. He frets. He refuses to eat his cereal. He goes about with his hands in his pockets and his lower lip jutting out, kicking stones and telling himself that the lot of a humourist is something that ought not to happen to a dog, and probably winds up by going in for 'sick' humour like Lenny Bruce, and the trouble about being like Lenny Bruce is that the cops are always arresting you, which must cut into your time rather annoyingly.
This is no doubt the reason why in these grey modern days you are hardly ever able to find a funny story in print, and in the theatre it is even worse. Playwrights nowadays are writing nothing but that grim stark stuff, and as about ten out of every twelve plays produced perish in awful agonies, I don't think they have the right idea. If only the boys would stop being so frightfully powerful and significant and give us a little comedy occasionally, everything would get much brighter. I am all for incest and tortured souls in moderation, but a good laugh from time to time never hurt anybody.
And nobody has laughed in a theatre for years. All you hear is the soft, sibilant sound of creeping flesh, punctuated now and then by a sharp intake of breath as somebody behind the footlights utters one of those four-letter words hitherto confined to the cosy surroundings of the lower type of barroom. (Odd to reflect, by the way, that when the word 'damn' was first spoken on the New York stage—in one of Clyde Fitch's plays, if I remember rightly—there was practically a riot. Police raided the joint, and I am not sure the military were not called out.)
The process of getting back to comedy would, of course, be very gradual. At first a laugh during- the progress of a play would have a very eerie effect. People would wonder where the noise was coming from and would speculate as to whether somebody was having some sort of fit. "Is there a doctor in the house?" would be the cry. But they would get into the way of it after a while, and it would not be so very long before it would be quite customary to see audiences looking and behaving not like bereaved relatives
at a funeral but as if they were enjoying themselves.
The most melancholy humour today is, I suppose, the Russian, and one can readily understand why. If you live in a country where, when winter sets in, your nose turns blue and has to be rubbed with snow, it is difficult to be rollicking even when primed with two or three stiff vodkas.
Khrushchev in the days when he was out and about was probably considered Russia's top funny man—at least if you were domiciled in Moscow and didn't think so, you would have done well to keep it to yourself—and he never got beyond the Eisenhower golf joke and the Russian proverb, and if there is anything less hilarious than a Russian proverb, we have yet to hear of it. The only way to laugh at one was to watch Khrushchev and see when he did it.
"In Russia," he used to say, making his important speech to the Presidium, "we have a proverb—A chicken that crosses the road does so to get to the other side, but wise men dread a bandit," and then his face would sort of split in the middle and his eyes would disappear into his cheeks like oysters going down for the third time in an oyster stew, and the comrades would realize that this was the big boffola and that if they were a second late with the appreciative laughter, their next job would be running a filling station down Siberia way. There may come a time when Russia will rise to He-and-She jokes and stories about two Irishmen who were walking along Broadway, but I doubt it. I cannot see much future for Russian humourists. They have a long way to go before they can play the Palladium.
I see, looking back on what I have written, that I have carelessly omitted to say what Humour is. (People are always writing articles and delivering lectures telling us, generally starting off with the words 'Why do we laugh?' One of these days someone is going to say 'Why shouldn't we?' and they won't know which way to look.) I think I cannot do better than quote what Dr. Edmund Bergler says in his book on The Sense of Humour. Here it comes:
'Laughter is a defence against a defence. Both manoeuvres are instituted by the subconscious ego. The cruelty of the superego is counteracted by changing punishment into inner pleasure. The superego reproaches the ego for the inner pleasure, and the ego then institutes two new defences, the triad of the mechanism of orality and laughter.'
What do you mean, you don't know what he means? Clear as crystal. Attaboy, Edmund. Good luck to you, and don't laugh at any wooden nickels.
P. G. Wodehouse, Plum Pie
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