Shaping Things To Come

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 5

Shaping Things To Come

writes to us to-day charges us with shaping things to come by laughing at present things; or encouraging others to laugh at them; or at least presenting them as possible subjects for laughter. Of course we are guilty. We do wish to shape things to come by changing present things and, if laughter helps to change them, we shall go on encouraging laughter. In that respect we agree with the preacher who said some years ago in a Presbyterian pulpit that if prohibitionists were half as funny as drunk men the battle for prohibition would be easy. The battle against poverty would be easy too if the rich everywhere could be made ridiculous., The trouble is that the rich are not all ridiculous: they are often brave and wise and tolerant and generous, and in those cases laughter alone would not help Lazarus. It might even injure him, and cartoonists usually come to his aid with tears. That has been done in the cartoon of which our contributor complains. It is done every day all over the world, and offends only when it fails. But it is not a failure or an offence because it misses its mark now and again. We are all solemn sometimes, and some of us are so solemn all the time that the cartoonist can’t prevail against us. It is. difficult to make a Catholic see a joke against the Pope or induce a Royalist to laugh at a King; though successes in both fields have been recorded. It is even Seno that Communists have aughed at Stalin and Nazis at Hitler, but if it has happened no one has heard about it. Cartoonists usually sow their seeds in soil in which there is a chance at least of a strike, but some necessarily falls on the footpath. | CORRESPONDENT who