OCR Text |
Show . - . - ( I I Dorothy Dix Talksl i- THE FAMILY HUMORIST ji 1 By. UQRQTFnr Dfx The N' LlHH? lilj r--j i j Xo one will deny that humor is the ! talt that savors life. There aro so nany things over which we must either eith-er laugh pr cry, and it is so much better bet-ter for us individually, and so much Pleasantcr for. those with whom we come in contact, for us to guffaw instead in-stead Qf howl. Especially Is this true of famillifc. Humor is the oil jipon the troubled waters of domesticity. So far as the happiness of a household is concerned, , 1 It Is better for the husband -to be able I to make jokes when things go amiss than it is for him -to be able to make ; millionE, while in retaining a husband's hus-band's affections and keeping him toons in the bolief that he has married mar-ried tho Right One, it avatleth a woman wo-man more to have a funny bono than . it does to have a Grecian profile. Lucky is tho man who, when he sturabl&s oft of the straight and nar-row nar-row path for an inch or two, once In ' a blue moon, has a wife who rallies . i him good naturedly about being a ; rundorr and applies ice cloths to his aching brow, instead of one who sees aothlng grotesque or amusing in a i Hla'd od plow horse kicking up his '" ?,eels occasionally and trying to jump 1 ihe pasture hars. ' hL!Jcky Is 01(1 ife Possessing .a hus band who finds, her arithmetic a per-PciuaJ per-PciuaJ source of amusement, and who 1 'aughs at her on the. first of the month w not being able to make her al lowance hold out, instead of reading the riot act to her. Lucky the children whose parents laugh instead of spank, and who think it funny when Johnnie shaves tho cat with papa's safety razor, and when Mary is discovered trailing mother's best evening dress down the street, playing lady, Instead of having a father fa-ther and mother who consider these youthful peccadilloes evidences of tho truth of tho doctrine of the total depravity de-pravity of Infants. Undoubtedly the ability to turn tho Homo Page into a Comic Supplement does much to make the family circle a pleasant place in -which to live, but a. sense of fun is like a good many other things in the world. It is desirable de-sirable only in the right place and time and with tho correct application. And tho most pestiferous pest on earth is the family humorist who sharpens shar-pens his wits on the peculiarities and weaknesses of thoso of his own household, house-hold, and makes their foibles and mistakes mis-takes a peg on which to hang his cruel jokes. He is the man who makes a Roman holiday by holding his wife up to ridicule. ridi-cule. All of his choicest batch of humorous hu-morous anecdotes center around somo silly blunder his wife has made, or somo weakness that she possesses. Mostly they have to do with her not knowing which is the business end of a check, and of thinking that she still has money In the bank- as long as she has blank checks in her book. Or they deal with her efforts to economize by selling a seventy-five dollar suit of clothes for seventy-fivo cents to the garbage man; or tho panic she got into when she thought tho baby was lost, or they hinge upon some secret of her toilet, her age, or the fact that sho is named Matilda instead of Maida. We all know men whose whole stock in trade of merry Jests are jokes of which their wives are the butts. We have all sat at dinner tables and pretended pre-tended to be amused and simply ached to throttle the men who were willing to make their wives figures of fun to get a laugh, while the poor woman listened lis-tened with quivering lips and tear filled eyes, trying to be sports and to look as if they enjoyed being lampooned lam-pooned and guffawed at. Another pleasing trick of the family humorist is to flay his victim alive with the lashes of ridicule, which hurt worse than the whip of Scorpions of tradition. Perhaps his wife is slow of body and slow of mind. He is never nev-er weary of taunting her with her heaviness and dullness. Perhaps his wife may be a foolish woman with fuddled judgment He stabs her with sarcastic references to her Solomon . like wisdom and perspecicaty. Perhaps Per-haps his wife is an over anxious mother. mo-ther. He makes oven that sacred passion pas-sion a thing to laugh and sneer at. Wife baiting can go no further than this, for thero is nothing that hurts like ridicule, nothing that wo so fear and dread; nothing against which we aro so helpless to defend ourselves. The wife whose husband makes fun of her personal peculiarities, and grows sarcastic over her mistakes, envies en-vies the woman whose husband merely mere-ly beats her up when ho grows peevish peev-ish v.'itn her. Another place where the familv humorist hu-morist simply scintillates is in leasing leas-ing children. He delights in miniic-ing miniic-ing little Bobbie's pronunciation until little Bobbie grows perfectly insane with baffled rage. He thinks it is exquisitely ex-quisitely funny to reduce little Mary to tears, by pretending to steal her dolly. And he tells the things that little Willie has told him in the deepest confidence con-fidence right before little Willie, and tho grown ups scream with laughter and little Willie dies a thousand deaths of agony as his sensitive little soul shrivels up within him. How any human being can be callous cal-lous enough to try to be funny at the expense of a helpless little child; how anybody can be brutal enough to torture tor-ture a child by teasing it for amuse ment, passes the comprehension of any save those committed to the gospel gos-pel of frightfulness, but it is a common enough sport in the family circle. Father will hold little Johnnie up for the diversion of his friends with no pity for little Johnnie's suffering. Mother will make her friends lauch by telling the secret that Mary whispered to her of what little Tommie Perkins said to her as they came home from the school entertainment, without any pity for the torture she is putting Mary through, and these humorous parents never dream that their 111 advised ad-vised jokes shut the door of their children's chil-dren's confidence against them. The family humorist is also strong on personal defects. Strangers havo the decency not to mention our af- flictions to us, but in the family circle (Ave feel that we arc absolved from handling each other with any human consideration. It is one's own near relatives that dub the lame boy "Lim-py," "Lim-py," and call the dull one "Silly Bill," and who brand the girl with Titian locks "Red Top," and the thin one Bones," and the stout one, "Fatty." It doesn't take much wit to be runny run-ny at the expense of other people's defects, de-fects, or their misfortunes. It is easy enough to get a laugh at the expense of the poor cripple dragging his scarecrow scare-crow figure along with grotesque movements, or at the poor, meek, timorous ti-morous little man hen-pecked within an inch of his life by his shrew of a wife, or at the big, fat, blousy, stupid girl who looks like a performing elephant ele-phant when she tries to imitate tho tricks by which cute little kittenish girls ensnare the affections and get the attentions of men. The family humorist finds an inexhaustible in-exhaustible source of mirth in other people's ambitions. It is to laugh at him to hear of a boy's aspirations to riso to a high place, or a girl's dream of being something more than a domestic do-mestic drudge. It is said that Cervantes Cer-vantes laughed Spain's chivalry away. Certainly many parents have laughed their children's fame and fortune away, becauso you can destroy energy ener-gy and paralyze effort quicker by ridicule ridi-cule than inany other way. And the family humorist breaks up matches by pointing out defects in a youth or a maiden that can bo caricatured carica-tured until they take away every vestige ves-tige of romance and put out tho little flame of fancy that might have grown into a great passion. For wc cannot love those at whom wo laugh, and who have been made ridiculous in our oyes. Thus does the family humorist become be-come a pest and one that should bo suppressed, for valuable as humor is in tho family circle, wo want only those who laugh with us. Never those who laugh at us. I nn |