The funniest men are Coolidge, Mussolini, Dawes and the Prince of Wales.

The funniest vocations are farming, preaching, prize-fighting, medicine, dentistry and law.

The funniest sports and pastimes are radio, dancing, golf, baseball and swimming.

The funniest things are automobiles (Fords), oil (petroleum), coal, taxes and movies.

In the general list of funny objects and things appear cosmetics, silk stockings, laundries, chewing-gum, weather, cost of living, divorce, evolution and the tariff.

The interpretation of the findings is not easy. It is difficult to understand what is funny about laundries, straw votes, and say silk stockings. Something, naturally, in the last case must be accorded to the point of view. It appears, too, that men are funnier in the concrete, while women are funnier in the abstract. Out of the fifty-nine characters named in jokes, only seven are women. Less than two per cent of all the jokes about persons are about women. This contradicts the popular idea that "wit has trained its sharpest weapons upon women." Nearly all jokes about women are of the impersonal type, but Queen Marie, Elinor Glyn, Eve, and Countess Cathcart are distinguished by special mention.

Republicans are shown to be funnier than Democrats, a point most clearly perceived south of the Ohio. Congress seems to be about 160 times as amusing as Parliament, and fully four times as funny as the League of Nations. Babies, backseat drivers, and millionaires make

exactly the same score. Bulls and puns comprise about one seventh of the total a far larger proportion than one would expect when we consider that we are separated by three thousand miles from the native habitats of the two-Ireland and Punch.

Eight hundred of the college jokes defied classification, not because they were subtle but because they were foolish. Two thirds of all were the sorriest sort of puns. The rest were about equally distributed among petting and queening, kissing, woman's dress, bootlegging and drinking, ridicule of marriage, stupid acts, bad class-room conduct, modern engagements, freshmen and flappers. Perhaps from this, one may safely infer what is. on the college student's mind.

From this display one might also well infer that it was the college comics Miss Repplier had in mind. when she reported American humor diverting but not funny. Apparently college humor has its well-springs a long way from the great classics of humor, and has been concisely if not accurately described as flat, stale, stupid and undergraduate. It is pardonable because those who produce it are apprentices of the art.

In contrast to the purposeless inanity of the awkward collegian are the shrewd jokes of the seasoned writer. Four fifths of current magazine humor (barring the puns) has a recognizable social motive. It is directed against narrowness, bigotry, incompetence, false pretense, egotism, extravagance and dishonesty. It strikes at inefficiency, graft, lawbreaking, and arrogance of officialdom. It helps promote the arts, reform character, and solve political

and social problems. The thief, the grafter, the gunman fear laughter more than they fear the shackles and the jail. The tyrant fights shy of the satirist; a Napoleon is always unfriendly to witty and humorous men.

It is not sufficient to take humor at its face value; much that appears in the funny column could more appropriately be edged with black. Therefore, after the nine thousand jokes were classified, a random sampling of two hundred jokes was made and submitted to a small number of competent judges. The competence of these judges may be brought into question when it is stated that they found only five per cent of the jokes very funny, forty-five per cent fairly funny, and fifty per cent not funny at all. This is merely mentioned as a fact and does not mean to encourage subscribers to funny papers to ask for a rebate. .

Having had the two hundred jokes evaluated, they were thrown into test forms, one hundred jokes to each test. These tests were given to approximately a thousand individuals including college students, professors, elementary and high school students, an unselected group not in school, and to a score of married couples. The papers were scored by comparing the judgments of these individuals with the judgments of the previously mentioned competent judges. The answers that agreed with the judges' answers were counted right; those that did not agree were counted wrong. Each person also rated himself on his own sense of humor.

higher than do women. This is especially true of single men.

Married women have a keener sense of humor than their husbands, but are more modest about claiming superiority.

No one rated himself wholly lacking in his sense of humor.

College students and college professors think they have a keener sense of humor than test results show them to have.

Law students appear to stand ready to laugh at anything.

Only one joke was found that no one would laugh at. This was in a college comic, and it has a mysterious, cryptic something about it, that makes one suspect that, like vegetable soup, it has more in it than appears on the surface. Its author announces, however, that the joke is innocent of all subtlety. Any audience to whom this joke is told, at once becomes wary, reacting somewhat in the same way an untrained pointer "freezes" at a stone. As this is probably the only joke ever perpetrated that would not induce a laugh from some one, it should be given immortality. Its sense and substance are as follows:

Irate old gentleman (who has just fallen into a washtub): "Who's knocking?"

Street car conductor: "Nobody's knocking. This is the seventh of April!"

A joke that ranked high in the esteem of a person from the range country was marked close to zero by several city dwellers. It ran thus: An Italian from Portland, Oregon

gon. When he returned to Portland after a few weeks' exile, one of his friends asked, "Well, Tony, how did you like Eastern Oregon?"-to which Tony replied, "Ah, I no laka da Eastern Org. No spagett, no macadarone, too much jack-a-da-rab!" The suburbanites simply didn't have the background to appreciate this joke.

One of the judges ranked a given joke as virtually perfect "from the psychological point of view." Though it is risky business to lay an investigation open to attack by being too specific, it is admissible here because the judge can always take refuge in the saving phrase, "psychological point of view." Since it is a poor psychologist who cannot justify his own beliefs, the story is given herewith:

.

this case the judge says, "Incongruity and contrast are the chief sources of humor. In this story there is contrast between the gigantic horse and the small mule. A second important factor is the absence of sympathy. There is no need of sympathy here because the despised mule and not the noble horse is the butt of the joke. A third factor is the feeling of superiority. This is present because it is clear to the reader that the ignorance of the colored man defeats his own purpose, which was to give the mule a fair share of the load only. Unless the reader is acquainted with an important principle of physics this fact would not be known. Thus he is released from the inhibitions of pity, inferiority and proportion. His own ego is vastly expanded by the suggestion of mule and negro. He feels more moral, more intelligent, and wholly master of the situation. Laughter is inevitable.”

"Nossuh, nossuh, boss," answered the darky, "dis wuk don't hurt him none."

"But," persisted the traveler, "you don't mean to tell me that this little mule can do as much work as that big horse and not suffer for it?" "Nossuh, boss, he kain't do as much wuk, but I done fix dat all right. You see I's been givin' de mule de sho't end of de double-tree!"

Naturally, one would expect a judge who would declare any story perfect, to defend his position. In

The story usually marked highest by adults taking the test was a favorite of William Jennings Bryan. This is the way he told it. "A man

ing too much. I know it and I don't want to do it. I just can't help it and it isn't my fault. My friends keep asking me to drink and the first thing I know I get too much.' His friend said, 'I will tell you how to prevent it. After this, when you get all the whisky you want, and anybody asks you to have more, don't call for it; call for sarsaparilla.' 'But,' the man answered, "that's just the trouble. When I get all the whisky I want, I can't say sarsaparilla!"

Nearly every one taking the test tended to put a low estimate upon

satire and that form of wit which the Greeks called "educated scorn or insolence." One leaves the pages of humor with a rather firm conviction that the world is growing better, though one is not sure that humor and the sense of humor are likewise improving. Yet there is an unmistakable gain. Jokes are growing away from the gross and suggestive and toward the clean and the wholesome. They make more of human virtues and less of human frailties. They are more kindly, more sympathetic, and more truthful. They

contain less of the particular and more of the universal. It is easy to agree with Miss Repplier that, "After all the humorist's point of view is, on the whole, the fairest from which the world can be judged. It is equally remote from the misleading side-lights of the pessimist and the wilful blindness of the optimist. It sees things with uncompromising clearness, but it judges them with tolerance and good temper.' Americans, it appears, are learning the art of being humorous in an agreeable way.

M®

RS. PENCE wore a sensible gray hat, a plain gray longskirted suit, and always carried an umbrella. Her gray eyes had a habit of looking eagerly at every one and everything. Only the fine wrinkles around them bore out her frequent and rather proud assertion that she was sixty-five. There was something eager about her lips, too, and about her. walk with its short quick step.

This suggestion of eagerness showed even in the way she went to work each evening at six o'clock. From six until two she performed quietly and capably her duties as come-along lady for the Slagel Chinatown tours. At two o'clock she signed her time-card, gave it to the passenger agent, Moe Slagel, walked south on Broadway to the subway entrance, and boarded a train to Twenty-third Street. At half past two, after a toasted sandwich and a cup of tea at the corner restaurant, she turned west into Twenty-second Street, and five minutes later silently let herself into her room. On Sundays she rose at seven; other days she usually slept till noon. Afternoons she practised in water-colors, copying landscapes from advertisements in the magazines.

This had been her patient routine

for eighteen months that October evening when she asked Moe Slagel for a night off. He looked at her sharply.

"Night off?" His coarse voice lifted suspiciously above the roar of theater-hour traffic. "Night off?" he repeated. "What for?"

"Just a vacation," Mrs. Pence explained. "Only the one evening. I want to go somewhere."

"This is busy season," Moe objected. He counted the tickets in his hand. "See me later, next week maybe. You got all day off. Go somewheres in daytime.'

Mrs. Pence shook her head. "I can't," she said.

"Can't go in daytime?"

Moe laughed, suggestively. Mrs. Pence blushed. She couldn't tell Mr. Slagel where she wanted to go. It hardly seemed-well, it hardly seemed reasonable.

"Busy season," Moe said again. "Very well, sir," Mrs. Pence answered.

Moe watched her climb obediently into the great open bus, with its dozen rows of wide seats. She stood her umbrella against her knees, drew her long skirts about her properly, and peered up with lively, undulled interest at the gymnastics of roof-top electric signs. Slagel