It is
amused by suffering. This explanation covers, of course, the second
item on my list--Hen-pecked husbands. It covers, also, the third and
fourth items. The public is amused by the notion of a needy man put to
double expense, and of a woman who has had no chance of fulfilling her
destiny. The laughter at Jews, too, may be a survival of the old Jew-
baiting spirit (though one would have thought that even the British
public must have begun to realise, and to reflect gloomily, that the
whirligig of time has so far revolved as to enable the Jews to bait
the Gentiles). Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which
alone can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians, Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. The
British public has never got used to them, to their faces and tricks
of speech. The only apparent reason why it laughs at the notion of
Frenchmen, etc., is that they are unlike itself. (At the mention of
Russians and other foreigners it does not laugh, because it has no
idea what they are like: it has seen too few samples of them.)
So far, then, we have found two elements in the public's humour:
delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar. The former motive
is the more potent. It accounts for the popularity of all these other
items: extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness,
stuttering, and (as entailing distress for the landlady) `shooting the
moon.
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