Violence and obviousness are thus
the essential factors. The surest way of making a thing obvious is to
provide it in some special place, at some special time. It is thus
that humour is provided for the public, and thus that it is easy for
the student to lay his hand on materials for an analysis of the
public's sense of humour. The obviously right plan for the student is
to visit the music-halls from time to time, and to buy the comic
papers. Neither these halls nor these papers will amuse him directly
through their art, but he will instruct himself quicklier and
soundlier from them than from any other source, for they are the
authentic sources of the public's laughter. Let him hasten to
patronise them.
He will find that I have been there before him. The music-halls I have
known for many years. I mean, of course, the real old-fashioned music-
halls, not those depressing palaces where you see by grace of a
biograph things that you have seen much better, and without a
headache, in the street, and pitiable animals being forced to do
things which Nature has forbidden them to do--things which we can do
so very much better than they, without any trouble. Heaven defend me
from those meaningless palaces! But the little old music-halls have
always attracted me by their unpretentious raciness, their quaint
monotony, the reality of the enjoyment on all those stolidly rapt
faces in the audience.
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