Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1878 — The Small Joker Plague. [ARTICLE]

The Small Joker Plague.

The man who professes to be amusing is usually such a bore that we overlook his wit when he has any. Small jokers, the great talkers, are more plagnc than pleasure. They worry us when we want rest, and are so afraid of our missing their point that they extinguish any possible amusement by overestimating if not by explaining it. For company, the sprightly man is better than the witty man, and the sprightly woman better than either; but who ever heard of a funny woman? Yet, on the average, women greatly exceed men both in liveliness and wit. A good joker should have a short memory, both jest he should remember and repeat the jokes of others, and lest he should He troubled by remembering them when he repeats his own. If he has constantly to think whether he said this or that in the same company before, be will lose all the freshness, which is an important element in his success. Ib is no doubt, a mistake consciously to repeat;' but when itis done unconsciously it is of very little consequence, so long as the repetition is merely verbal. The best fun does not bear repetition or description, bnt vanishes when written down. All Sidney Smith’s recorded jokes would not' account for the great reputation he had as a wit; but tit was well said of him, as of many other funny men of slighter pretensions, that after you had been in his company yon remembered, not so much the witty things he said, as the amount of laughing you yourself had undergone. —London Saturday Review. “ Poortkllow! He died in poverty I” said a man of a person lately deceased. “That isn’t anythin*,” exclaimed a seedy bystander. “Dying in poverty is no hardship. It's living in poverty that pots the thumbscrews on afellow.” An Atlanta (Ga.) physician urges the Legislature to restrtetthe sale of opium and chloral, the widespread use of which jf doing irreparable harm,