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placed wherever it was thought they might
direct the reader to the subject wanted.
With these few explanatory words, the editor presents this little volume,
sincerely hoping that it may prove a friend in need to all who seek the
relaxation of humor, and a lifesaver to that legion of humble men
whose knees tremble when the chairman speaks those fateful
words--"The next speaker of the evening...."
M.D.M.
November, 1922.

INTRODUCTION
What can be more fitting than that a compiled book should have a
compiled introduction? Why should one with great pains and poor
prospects of success attempt to do what has already been well done?
Knowing that all readers of this book have a sense of humor and that
they will approve our decision we begin with a quotation from an
article[1] by Mr. E. Lyttelton.
[Footnote 1: The Nineteenth Century. July, 1922.]
The Divine Gift of Humor
The subject of humor has an attraction peculiarly its own, because it
deals with a mystery which yet is pleasantly interwoven with the daily
life of each one of us. We often say of one of our neighbors that he has
no sense of humour. But he often laughs; he never spends a day without
at least trying to laugh, tho it remains but an attempt, an effort, an
aspiration after something which he seems to have lost but wishes to
recover. Either, that is, he remains grave when others laugh, or he
laughs, as Horace says, "with alien jaws," by constraint rather than
because he cannot help it. He has a confused idea that it is expected of
him. Such laughter is apparently the outcome of an uneasy sense of
duty, a dismal travesty of the real thing....
Certainly humour is a singularly elusive thing, and I doubt if anyone
alive can explain it; but its elusiveness gives it something of its charm;
and, moreover, the illustrations which are necessary to an inquiry into
its nature, its scope and meaning, are apt to be amusing without being
irrelevant.
Humour has often been roughly described as a sense of the incongruous.
More satisfying, however, is the following, which has been ascribed to
Dean Inge: It is a sense of incongruous emotions. As soon as we think
of the emotions being stirred we see that the strange difference between
humourous and unhumourous people is not an intellectual matter, but
follows the general law of emotional susceptibility, viz., that it is
independent of the reason and varies within wide limits with each
individual, and obviously with each nationality. Moreover, it appears
that, as it is compounded of two emotions, one man may feel one of the
emotions but be dull to the other, according to his temperament. It is a
matter of sensitiveness, and in sensitiveness no two of us are alike.

Crudely judged, then, humour may be described as a blessing of nature
bestowed on all, but in widely varying measure, so that in the case of
some of our acquaintance we deplore its non-existence, but never in
ourselves. Nobody really believes that he is wholly without it, partly
because, in proportion as the sense is really defective, the defect must
be in its own nature unperceived, but also because the gift is so
precious, so winsome, that no one could bear to believe that it has been
denied him. By a merciful law of nature, the delusion is unsuspected,
for assuredly, if any wholly unhumorous person once realised the full
extent of his privation, nothing could save him from "wretchlessness"
and despair.
I prefer to believe that, like the sense of beauty, the love of music, the
thrill of admiration for uncalculating heroism, we have here a wondrous
aid to us in our life's pilgrimage, but that if we trace it to a sense of our
self-interest, we not only vulgarize it, but we turn it into a caricature.
For there is in humour this singular property; its aroma is so subtle,
delicate and undefinable that the effort to buttress it upon coarse,
common utility is doomed to fail, and in the mere attempt humour
vanishes. There is something deliciously contagious about laughter that
is quite sincere and unthinking; whereas the only people who contrive
to be always absurd, but never amusing, are those who laugh from a
sense of duty.
Humour, then, in the young is restricted in scope, their experience of
life being small; in women it is quicker than in men, but shallower; in
the Scotch it is reticent, in the Irish voluble and refined, but cold. But
wherever it is found free from counterfeit, wholesome and contagious,
it is the offspring of man's heaven-bestowed power of seeing in the
meannesses of earth the true presence of the Divine.
Darwin says the causes of humor are legion and exceedingly complex