Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/78

 She laughed, and said I was a funny gentleman.

That's my luck again. When I make serious observations, people chuckle; when I attempt a joke, nobody sees it. I had a beautiful one last week. I thought it so good, and I worked it up, and brought it in artfully at a dinner-party. I forget how exactly, but we had been talking about the attitude of Shakespeare towards the Reformation, and I said something, and immediately added, "Ah, that reminds me; such a funny thing happened the other day in Whitechapel." "Oh," said they; "what was that?" "Oh, 'twas awfully funny," I replied, beginning to giggle myself; "it will make you roar;" and I told it them.

There was dead silence when I finished—it was one of those long jokes, too—and then, at last, somebody said: "And that was the joke?"

I assured them that it was, and they were very polite, and took my word for it. All but one old gentleman, at the other end of the table, who wanted to know which was the joke—what he said to her, or what she said to him; and we argued it out.

Some people are too much the other way. I knew a fellow once, whose natural tendency to laugh at everything was so strong that, if you wanted to talk seriously to him, you had to explain beforehand that what you were going to say would not be amusing. Unless you got him to clearly understand this, he would go off into fits of merriment over every word