SENSE OF HUMOR.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VIII, Issue 2194, 14 January 1886, Page 2

SENSE OF HUMOR.

The sense of humor has rightly been described as the sixth sense. " Life is a jest"—to most of us a dubious one— but, nh! " the humor of it." He who discovers not where the laugh comes in, is as much to be pitied as an unhappy wight in a garden cf fragrant flowers with a cold in his head. It is a sad fact that there are very many who like to be likened to such an afflicted being. The sense of humor, like many other good things, is the possession of the minority. Yotljiore is no faculty the ordinary mortal prides himself so much upon as his sense of humor. The possession of the five other

senses lie is conscious does not atone for the absense of the sixth. If he ia blind he does not blink the fact, and wears spectacles-blue ones if necessary. If he is deaf, he presents an oar-trumpet to Ins friends without the slightest compunction, but if he feels that the laughtor of life ia to him ,bufc dumb show, ho is desperately careful to conceal his infirmity. To this end he laughs lustily "and uproariously, often when the true humorists are glum and silent. He will go through hysterics over the modern farcical comedy. The idea of a drunkon husband hoodwinked by a series of ingenious lies the wife he has deceived is rapturously funny to the moral cripple with only five senses. With the morbid solfconsciousness of many sufferers under physical or moral defect he strives to conceal his infirmity by airing it on every possible occasion. He continually buttonholes his friends with some "duced good story," which, it need hardly be said, turns out in recital to be more "duced" than "good." The primary object, however, is gained. The world never discovers that its boisterous humorist is only playing a part. On the contrary, with its usual gullibility, it laughs and applauds and votes him a "duced good story-tellerV and "!! infernally amusing fellow.'•'■ He ca.n, he " floored" in a trice by a volume of" Happy Thoughts," or of Alice in Wonderland,' without recourseto the heavier tomesofThackerayorDickens. But, after all, the imposition is a harmless one. If ho bores the minority, he pleases the majority, and the best thing the humorous minority can do if it cannot laugh with him, is to laugh at him,