| Show ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF JOKES readers of the newspapers and periodicals sometimes wonder where the myriads ot jokes which are annually printed come from john A macey editor of tho department of humor ot a leading weekly tries in an in the atlantic monthly to throw light on their origin and metamorphoses according to mr macey we are a of humorists everybody who can make jokes Is doing so and almost everybody who cannot make thrim is trying the best jokes usually are not those which are manufactured to order the untrained joker mr macey says often has a story which the professional humorist cannot equal in a years invention for the sunday supplement jokes rise ready made out of life and are born with the huo and form of its fragmentary truths but while some of the printed jokes rise out of real life and a few are original with those who stand sponsor for them most of them are old friends more or less disguised and some have been recurring perennially enni ally since adam delved and eve span mr macey gives a list of subjects which are at the present time serving american as bases for their humor among those which are familiar to all readers are old maid grass widow irishman poet bachelor sausages high finance mil I 1 walkee waukee beer amateur actor breakfast food new rich borrowing lending sea serpent automobile policeman tramp lover boarding house occasionally an ancient story is re and fixed unchanged on some living person henry ward beecker vas credited with saying possibly god could have made a better berry than the strawberry but certainly he never did izaak walton attributed that remark to dr william butler who died in years ago prof blackie ot edinburgh put a notice on his door that he would not hear his classes that day A wag erased the c blackie discovered the erasure and struck out the last year the story appeared with the name ot prof genung of amherst substituted for that of blackie but usually the joke Is somewhat altered on each appearance pe arance it it happen to impress mankind as particularly funny it Is sure to bo worked into arery form into which generations of ingenious minds are capable of torturing it how many hundreds of variations have been played for example upon the mother in law joke the boston culture and baked beans jokes and the one about irishmen making bulls clays declaration that he would rather be right than president has been the foundation ot many american cismas the gentleman will be neither retorted speaker reed to a statesman who quoted it as applicable to himself As the fellow did not say id rather be wrong than alce president a politician ia reported aa having said ahoi an nomination was being pressed upon him pd rather be irish than right and irishman Is said to have exclaimed in tho heat ot argument youre more likely to be was the purported rejoinder full of old jests as the humorous columns ot tho newspapers and tho humorous weeklies are no reader who ia not hopelessly dull or hopelessly bilious would wish to see them abolished As mr macey says though originality ia everlastingly possible it Js everlastingly scarce and always has been and there are few ot us who do not prefer to laugh at the good old joe millers rather than bo provided with nothing at all wherewith to provoke a laugh |
