SENATE

FORWARDLOOKER—­“The Senate has a plan to settle labor disputes.”

CYNIC—­“If labor would devise a plan for settling Senate disputes, we might have peace.”

The more we read about the Senate the more we understand the word “jazz.”

SENATORS

“What is your position on this great question?”

“My position,” replied Senator Sorghum, “is somewhat like that of a tight-rope walker.  I don’t want to stop to argue or show off.  What I want to do is to get across to solid ground.”

“The interrogation ‘Where did you get it?’ causes me much less apprehension,” confessed Senator Smugg, “than the feeling that some day the public may learn the answer to the question ’Where did you put it?’”—­Puck.

SENSE OF HUMOR

SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT (cross-questioning the terrified class)—­“And now I want you boys to tell me who wrote ‘Hamlet.’”

FRIGHTENED BOY—­“P-p-please, sir, it-it wasn’t me.”

That same evening the superintendent was talking to his host, the squire of the village.  The superintendent said: 

“Most amusing thing happened today.  I was questioning the class over at the school, and I asked a boy who wrote ‘Hamlet.’  He answered tearfully, ‘P-p-please, sir, it wasn’t me.’”

After loud and prolonged laughter, the squire said: 

“That’s pretty good, and I suppose the little rascal had done it all the time!”

British and American Humor

Having observed in a London omnibus a notice warning passengers to be careful as they alight, which is couched in these terms:  “Cinema actors risk their lives for pay!  Don’t do it for nothing!” a New York journalist remarks that “an American advertisement on that subject would be serious; the British are more flippant in their seriousness than the Americans.”

It seems as if this critic (writes a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian) never saw the notices posted in the trains used for conveying American troops in France during the last six months of the war.  Tho drawn up at American headquarters, these notices are quite as “flippant in their seriousness” as the one he quotes.  One of them ran: 

THREE KINDS OF FOOLS

1.  Fools.

2.  Damned fools.

3.  SOLDIERS WHO RIDE ON TOPS AND SIDES OF CARS.

A great many American soldiers have already been killed as a result of riding on tops of cars.

There is only six inches clearance between tops and sides of cars and tunnel arches.

There is only six inches clearance between tops and sides of cars and bridge superstructures.

There is only a slight clearance between sides of cars and signal-towers.