Maisie Gay, Figure of Fun

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 654, 4 May 1929, Page 24

Maisie Gay, Figure of Fun

Old Jokes A lways Win

COMEDIENNE TELLS HOW SHE GETS LAUGHS

Do people go to the theatre to be ! educated? To be thrilled? To be interested in some problem? Don’t you believe jt! The ninety and nine out o £ the proverbial hundred go simply and solely to get a laugh, writes Maisie Gay in an Australian paper. Jack Point, in “The Yeoman of the Guard,” found that the old jokes are the best. And it is an absolute truth. The oldest joke in the vaudeville business is. “Why does a chicken cross the road?” Yet it goes, even to-day. People love old familiar friends, and they are a bit shy of new jokes and gags, just as they are a little uncertain about new friends. Old friends? Rather. Why, it is said that there are only seven root jokes in the world—all the rest are variants —just as there - are only seven plots. One of these plots, by the way, is a joke. Likewise it is the first eternal triangle. Here it is: A beautiful young wife was dying. Holding her husband's hand, she said brokenly, “Henry, before I go I have a confession to make. I have been wicked unfaithful untrue. I —l love another.” To which he replied, “Yes, Aiabella, I know it. That is why I have poisoned you.” Jack Point—- or that great humorist, his author, W. S. Gilbert, understood this a thousand times better than I. “Is that the best you can do?” says the crusty Lieutenant of the Tower of one of Jack's jokes. “I don’t think much of it.” “It has always been much admired,” says Jack; “you would come in time to like it.”

One generation after another has listened to the same jokes with, perhaps, slight variations, in the belief that they were brand-new products of its generation. To-day those same jokes appear, their hair bobbed, their, dresses shortened, their whiskers trimmed—substantially the same, outwardly different.

The cynic says all men and some women like to laugh. A German philosopher said, “Heaven gave man humour and woman patience”—to endure man's humour, I presume Oh, bless you! I can be a cynic too. * For thirteen years, thirteen long and cheery years, I have been a principal performer in musical comedy and revue In London. A star, if you please. I hate being called a “comedienne,” and prefer to be known as a “character woman.” But my job has been to get laughs. And without one hint of self-conceit (ahem!) I may say I get them. How? I don’t know. Who can psycho-aualyse such things? T think one plucks humour out of the ether. But there it is again, London audiences know me as a laugh-getter, as a figure of fun, and if r walk on as sedately and sadly as Anne Bo ley n on her way to the scaffold, people will giggle and say, “Isn’t she a trick?” Now do you see what I mean about old friends?

Now, how do I get my laughs on the stage? Frankly and freely, then, I'll tell you. I get ’em in three ways. (1) By a movement of the hand. (2) An unexpected inflection of the voice. And (3) w-ith my eyes. Honest, that’s all there is to it. I’ve never sat down on a pin and got up hurriedly. I’ve never made a comic trip on the stage. I don’t boast of this restraint, but it’s not my way. Hand, voice, and eye. That’s my bag of tricks.

I am free to confess, and I’m sorry for it, that the obvious will ever raise a laugh in the theatre. Break a plate, mention sausages or beer, and there is a cachinnatory response immediately.