The clever compiler, like a good chef, must not only know what to select but in what order to present it.  Knowledge consists in being able to find a thing when you want it and accordingly an attempt has been made to pigeonhole each joke where it would be most useful.  Such a classification is at best a difficult and debatable question, and numerous cross references have been 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