The capitalizing of the audiences’ laughter we have set down in
  the following statistics, ranged in the order of their value. 
  An audience will laugh loudest at these episodes: 

  (1) When a man sticks one finger into another man’s eye.

  (2) When a man sticks two fingers into another man’s eyes.

  (3) When a man chokes another man and shakes his head from side
  to side.

  (4) When a man kicks another man.

  (5) When a man bumps up suddenly against another man and knocks
  him off his feet.

  (6) When a man steps on another man’s foot.

[1] The great success of the return of Weber and Fields to vaudeville in 1915-16, with excerpts from their old successes, is only one more proof of the perennial value of sure-fire business.

Human nature—­as we have analyzed it, with results that will be told you by the cashier at our bank—­will laugh louder and oftener at these spectacles, in the respective order we have chronicled them, than at anything else one might name.  Human nature here, as before, insists that the object of the attacks—­the other man—­be not really hurt.

Now, let us tell you how we arrived at our conclusions.  The eye is the most delicate part of the body.  If a man, therefore, pokes his two forefingers into the eyes of another man without hurting them, then human nature will make you scream with mirth; not at the sight of the poking of the fingers into the other man’s eyes (as you who have seen us do this trick night in and night out have imagined), but because you get all the sensations of such a dangerous act without there being any actual pain involved in the case of the man you were watching.  You laugh because human nature tells you to.  You laugh because the man who had the fingers stuck into his eyes might have been hurt badly, but wasn’t.

The greatest laughter, the greatest comedy, is divided by a hair from the greatest tragedy.  Always remember that!  As the chance of pain, the proportion of physical misery, the proportion of tragedy, becomes diminished (see the other items in the table), so does the proportion of laughter become less and less.  We have often tried to figure out a way to do something to the other’s kneecap—­second in delicacy only to the eye—­but the danger involved is too great.  Once let us figure out the trick, however, and we shall have capitalized another item that may be listed high in our table.  Here is how you can verify the truth of our observations yourself: 

You have seen those small imitation tacks made of rubber.  Exhibit one, put it on a chair, ask a stranger to sit down—­and everybody who is in on the joke will scream with mirth.  Try it with a real tack, and everybody will take on a serious face and will want to keep the man from sitting down.

6.  What George M. Cohan Has to Say