Excuse the interruption.
The story you are about to read was written by Stephen Leacock, one of the great Canadian humourists. He was born in England in 1896, brought to Canada as a boy of six. He was educated at Upper Canada College and took up teaching. His humour writing was known worldwide in the 1920s and was an influence on the humour of Jack Benny and Groucho Marx.
*Leacock died in 1944 and his works are now in the public domain. I’ve formatted this story to read easier on Steemit and of course, added some images not in the original. *
Thank you and back to the story
Slave No. 1 in his Club murmurs to Slave No. 2 that women have no sense of
humour. Slave No. 2 agrees, and Slave No. 3, overhearing from his armchair, says quite boldly, "They certainly have not."
After which quite a colloquy ensues among the slaves.
But when the wife of Slave No. 1 asks at dinner what was the talk at the Club, he answers, "Oh, nothing much." Yet his inmost feeling is that women have no sense of humour, and if a woman is witty, she has somehow come by it wrongly.
He daren't speak right out, but I will speak for him.
Having been asked to answer the question, "Are witty women attractive to men," I answer decidedly, "No." Having said this I dodge behind the Editor and explain it.
There are, of course, a lot of immediate qualifications to be made to it.
In the first place, are witty people in general attractive to anybody? Not as a rule. They get tiresome. It is terribly hard to be witty without getting conceited about it.
I used to be very witty myself, till I learned to be careful about it. People don't like it.
There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike — information and wit. Most people — most men at any rate — like to gather up information out of the “Digests”, which are the passion of the hour.
But they won't take it from you. You're not a “Digest”.
So, too, with wit. They've learned by experience that if they laugh at one thing, they'll have to go on.... So if this applies to men with men, it applies all the more to men with women.
Luckily women don't go in for information; or if they give it, it is so incorrect as to be harmless.
In the next place, it goes without saying that some witty women are attractive to some men. This, by a happy disposition of providence, happens to all kinds of women, like attracting unlike.
Hence witty women always have silent husbands. That's why they got married.
There is a particularly decent type of man who finds it restful not to have to talk.
Ten years later you'll see them enter a drawing room together. The host says to the man, "Looks like an early winter," and he answers, "Certainly does!" The host says, "Have a cocktail," and he answers, "Certainly will."
By that time his wife has started in on the conversation; he doesn't have to talk any more. People commonly call this type an adoring husband. He isn't. His wife is just a sort of fire screen.
The real adoring husband over talks his wife, over dominates her, pays with unexpected presents for easy forgiveness of his ill temper, and never knows that he adored her till it is too late, because now she cannot hear it....
We will add another qualification, that one reason why some men don't care for the society of witty women is because of their own egotism. They want to be “it”.
A wise woman sitting down to talk beside such a man will not try to be witty. She will say, "I suppose you're just as busy as ever!"
All men, you see, have the idea that they are always busy, and if they are not, a woman can soon persuade them that they are.
Just say, "I don't see how you do it all," without saying what all is.
Another very good opening for women sufficiently self-possessed is to say, "Well, I hear you are to be congratulated again!"
You see there is always something; either the office staff gave him a stick last month, or the Rotary Club elected him an Elder Brother.
He'll find something.
If he doesn't, then say to him that if he hasn't heard of it yet, you are certainly not going to tell.
Then don't see him for a month, till the Fireman's Benevolent Union has elected him an Honorary Ash Can. He'll get something if you wait.
So you see there are ever so many ways for women to make a hit without trying to be witty.
Nor have women, themselves, any particular use for witty men.
Instinctively they admire courage, though unhappily courage often goes with brutality and savagery. In the next degree they admire the courage of character of strong people on whom one can rely. But intellect comes last.
Unhappily, women also have their superficial admirations, things they “fall for” — it's too bad, but they do. Women are apt to fall for a poet, for anything with long hair and a reputation. Round him they cluster, searching his thoughts. He probably hasn't got any. But wit, in all the procession, comes last, with only a cap and bells behind it.
Another thing is this.
By this very restriction of their province of humour, women are saved from some of the silly stuff that affects the conversation of men. Take puns. They have pretty well died out now. The last of the punsters is probably dead, or in hiding.
But many of us can still remember the social nuisance of the inveterate punster. This man followed conversation as a shark follows a ship, or, to shift the simile, he was like Jack Horner and stuck in his thumb to pull out a pun.
Nor have women that unhappy passion for repeating funny stories in order to make a hit, which becomes a sort of mental obsession with many men.
The "funny story" is a queer thing in our American life. I think it must have begun on the porch of the Kentucky store where they whittled sticks all day. At any rate, it has become a kind of institution. It is now a convention that all speakers at banquets must begin with a funny story.
I am quite sure that if the Archbishop of Canterbury were invited to address the Episcopal Church of America, the senior bishop would introduce him with a story about an old darky, and the Archbishop would rise to reply with a story about a commercial traveller.
These stories run riot in our social life and often turn what might be a pleasant dinner into an agonized competition, punctuated with ruminating silence.
Women keep away from this. They like talk about people, preferably about themselves, or else about their children, with their husband as a poor third, and Winston Churchill competing with Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek for fourth place.
It may not be funny but it's better than darkies and commercial travellers....
There is also the most obvious qualification to be made in regard to women's sense of humour in general and women's wit in particular, that of course individual exceptions, however conspicuous, do not set aside the general rule.
There is no doubt that at least one of the most brilliant humourists of the hour in America is a woman. Many would say, the most brilliant. Such a faculty for reproducing by simple transcription the humour of social dialogue has, it seems to me, never been surpassed. But one swallow doesn't make a summer, though one drop of ink may make all humour kin.
The truth is that the ideal of ordinary men is not a witty woman, but “a sweet woman”. I know how dangerous the term is, how easily derided.
And yet, I don't know. A saint can kick in sideways anywhere.
It might easily be objected that all such opinions about sweetness in women are just left-over Victorianism, half a century out of date. Witty women, it will be said, may have seemed out of date in the stodgy days of women's servitude, but not now.
The men and women of today — or call them the boys and girls — mix on an entirely different plane. All the old hoodoos and taboos are gone. All the girls smoke. They use language just as bad as any the men care to use. They drink cocktails and give the weaker men the cherry.
In point of physique, they may not be equal to the men but after all they can drive a car and fly a plane and telemark all over hell on skis — what more do you want?
So why shouldn't a girl of that type, the new girl who has conquered the world, be witty if she wants to?
What more charming than a witty girl, half-stewed, as compared with a girl half-stewed and silent as a toad full of gravel?
To all of which I answer, "No, no, it's just an illusion!"
There are no new girls, no new women. Your grandmother was a devil of a clip half a century before you were born. You telemark on skis; she cut ice in a cutter. You only knew her when she was wrinkled and hobbling, reading the Epistle to the Thessalonians in a lace cap and saying she didn't know what the world was coming to.
The young have always been young, and the old always old ... men and women don't change. It took thousands, uncounted thousands, of years to make them what they are. The changes that you think you see lie just on the surface. You could wash them away with soap and hot water.
But now I'll tell you another thing. All this new era of ours of emancipated women, and women in offices and women the same as men, is just a passing phase, and the end of it is already in sight.
A great social disaster fell on the world.
The industrial age built up great cities where people lived, crowded into little boxes, where there was no room for children, where women's work vanished because they were dispossessed, where national population was kept going by additions from God knows where, and national safety was jeopardized by the increasing scarcity of our own people.... We had a close shave of it.
Then came the war in the air....
It has bombed the industrial city out of future existence. They know that already in England. The bomb is decentralizing industry, spreading the population out.
They will never go back.
This will mean different kinds of homes, homes half-town, half-country, with every man his acre....
Every one's dream for a little place in the country, a place to call one's own, will come true. Socialized up to the neck, the individual will have its own again under his feet.
And the children?
There must be four or five for every marriage. It is the only path of national safety, safety by the strength and power of our kin and kind, bred in our common thought and speech and ideal.
Without our own children, the wave of outside brutes from an unredeemed world will kill us all. Later, we can redeem the world but we must save ourselves first....
Everybody will know that. In reorganized society the nation's children will be the first need, the main expense of government. Women who see to that need see to nothing else....
That will be done in the home, for there will be no paid domestic service except contract labour by the hour from the outside, labour as good as ladyship, wearing a gold wrist watch and a domestic college degree....
But the main thing will be the home and behind it the long garden and trim grass and flower and vegetable beds, and father trying to plant a cherry tree from a book.
When England has been bombed into the country, America will follow. Our cities will go, too....
No one will live in New York any more than miners live in a coal mine.
So the world will be all different. One little century will do it. Even half a century will show the full outline of it.
Surviving on ... surviving on into this altered world will be the queerest old set of left-over creatures, as queer as our left-over Victorians, only queerer.
These old women will be happy and alert and self-assertive, but they will still not know how to fry an egg or repeat a nursery rhyme, for they only had three-quarters of a child each....
The boys and girls of twenty will think them very funny.... But my! Won't they be witty when they get together and cackle.
So that, you see, is why I don't think witty women are attractive to men.
You don't see the connection?
Well, perhaps you remember Molière's play called “The Doctor by Accident” (”Le Médecin Malgré Lui”) where the supposed doctor, called in to diagnose a case, gets off a vast rigmarole about nothing in particular and adds at the end,"...and that is why your daughter has lost her speech."
You see, he didn't know anything about it.
Possibly it was like that.
So, there you have it, one of Stephen Leacock’s humour pieces. This was originally included in his “Last Leaves” collection which was published in 1945.
Did you notice as you read it, the more things change, the more they stay the same? A lot of the themes he touches on are still be discussed today.
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