Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 1917. NO HUMOUR IN GERMANY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1721, 5 June 1917, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 1917. NO HUMOUR IN GERMANY.

PROFESSOR Stephen Leacock, of the Department of Economies and Political Science in the McGill University, Canada, claims that humorous literature is the most democratic form of literature. One proof of the democracy of. humour, he says is its absence in Germany. Is there anyone not a German to whom the German joke appeals? The German joke, like the peace of God, passeth all understanding. Real humour is universal in its appeal; its popularity .extends beyond national boundaries. Mark Twain has been translated into e-Very language, and be is as funny in French or modern Greek as be is in English, in exchange for Mark Twain wc import Tartarin. Charles Dickens is die properly of all the world; we think of hint ns a great,humorist instead of as a man who wrote to amuse the English. But German humour does not cross the Rhing. The world knows German philosophy and German science and German scholarship, hut it knows nothing of German humour. And the reason for this must be that there is no German humour to know. This whole business of Gorman philosophy and German scholarship is tremendously over-rated! The Germans have been giving us an unintelligible mass of words, and we have felt obliged to think that this mass of words contained'profundities of thought. One good thing dial: Avar is doing for our colleges is to clear out German philosophy —to sweep away great masses of statistics and facts that we have imported from Germany, that have simply cluttered up our educational system. Our American economic schools have been suffused with (Terman theories and German methods. Now we are getting rid of all this lumber.'The only German humour the existence of which I Avill admit, concluded Mr Leacock, is the old German folk-humour —fjtrcAvelpoler,” and the like. Hut this folk-humour antedates modern Germany by centuries. It is a part of our old Teutonic heritage. - And “StreAvelpeter” has no place in what to-day is considered humour in Germany.