XXIV

ON SEEING A JOKE

Almost any man can make a joke, but it sometimes requires a clever man to see one.  It is said that a Scotsman “jokes wi’ deeficulty.”  What we really mean is that it is often difficult to see a Scotsman’s jokes or even to know whether he is joking or being serious.  As a matter of fact, the Scots are an unusually humorous race.  They make jokes, however, with the long faces of undertakers, and one is sometimes afraid to laugh for fear of appearing frivolous on a solemn occasion.  I have in mind one brilliant Scottish professor who, whether he is jocular or serious, invariably monologises in the tones of a man condoling with a widow.  He half-shuts his eyes and folds his hands, and, for the first minute or two, takes an evil delight in leaving you in doubt whether he is launching into a tragic narrative or whether he will suddenly look up through his spectacles and expect to see you laughing.  His English friends are in a constant state of embarrassment because they know that he is a humorist of genius, but his humour is so subtle that they do not trust themselves to see the point when it comes and laugh at the right place.  Now, there are only two things that can make the professor look sterner than he looks while giving birth to a joke.  One is, if you laugh too early:  the other is, if the great moment comes and you don’t laugh at all.  He makes no complaint, but he sits back in his chair, looking like an embittered owl.  And everybody else in the room has a sense of ghastly failure—­his own failure, not the professor’s.  To miss seeing a joke is, in some circumstances, far worse than to miss making the point of a joke visible.  If one were in the position of a Queen Victoria, one might, of course, quench the professor by merely saying:  “We are not amused.”  But even Queen Victoria, when she said this, did not mean that she had not seen the joke but that she had seen it and didn’t like it.  It is not only the subtle and Scottish jokes, however, that are at times difficult to see with the naked eye.  There is also the joke that hits you in the eye like a blow and blinds you.  Captain Wedgwood Benn referred to a joke of this kind in the House of Commons on the authority of Mr Stephen Gwynn.  A judge of the Irish High Court, he related, was recently travelling on a tram which was held up by Black-and-Tans.  The Black-and-Tans, who, like the Most High, are no respecters of persons, called on the judge to descend, using the quaint colloquial formula:  “Come down, you Irish bastard; put up your hands.”  Captain Wedgwood Benn does not unfortunately possess a twentieth-century sense of humour, and he did not see this particular joke.  The comedy of a judge’s being addressed as an Irish bastard did not strike him.  I doubt if half-a-dozen members of the House of Commons realised the beauty of the joke till Sir Hamar Greenwood got up and explained it.  “I happen to know the