AMERICAN HUMOR.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1922, Page 5

AMERICAN HUMOR.

REV. R. J. CAMPBELL’S STORIES. The Rev. R. J. Campbell told some amusing stories of his recent visit to America in a lecture at the City Temple recently After he had gone through the fatiguing examination at the Customs Office on arriving at New York, he said he asked the officer if he looked like a Russian jßolshevik that he should be treated with so much suspicion. “Well, doctor,” said the officer, “to be honest, I rather think you do!” In California the unfailing humor of the people was expressed in shop signs and advertisements. A roadside hotel which he passed had the following sign: “Leave your thirst here, and call lor it when you come back.” On a restaurant menu was printed: “If a wifie cannot cook, do not divorce her. Eat here and keep her for ,a pet,” Dr. Campbell had something to say of the American reporter. After giving his views, carefully prepared, on a number of questions of the hour to a party of Pressmen, he was asked casually what he thought of short ■skirts. Quite jocularly he replied, “Rather hygienic, aren’t they?” Next morning the Hearst, newspapers headed the interview, “English preacher favors short skirts." They expanded his remark to a column, in the course of which he was made to say, “Puritanism will never lower the skirts of an English girl one half-inch.” The anti-British Hearst papers represented war and they desired war. The pro-British Americans could also be outspoken, and he had heard one preacher say with great emphasis “If 1 had my way I would bury William Randolph Hearst fifty fathoms deep under the greenwood tree. On the _Resurrection Morn, if 1 saw the angel“with the trumpet approach the spot, I would run up to him and say, ‘Gabriel, don’t blow.’ ”