In offering the toasts, jokes, quotations and stories in this second volume, the editor has endeavored to bring further aid to the distracted toastmaster, to the professional after-dinner speaker who must change his stories often, and to individuals inexperienced in public speaking and so unfortunate as to have public addresses forced upon them. He views the product with much the same feeling as did Alexander Pope, who said, "O'er his books his eyes began to roll, in pleasing memory of all he stole."
Paolo Bellezze expressed the same feelings in the introduction to his work "Humor" when he said "Of this work of mine, I must confess it is a great lot of stuff gathered from everywhere except from my brain. … It is a necklace of pearls strung upon a slender cord; that, I have put there; the pearls have been furnished me by the most famous jewelers, native and foreign. This said, I can—without being accused of pride—recommend it to my respectable customers as an article of great value and of absolute novelty."
In making this collection, files of such magazines as Life, Judge, Puck and Punch were drawn on extensively; also magazines having humorous pages or columns, such as the Literary Digest, Ladies' Home Journal, Everybody's, Harper's; also Bindery Talk and various other house organs. According to Samuel Johnson "A man will turn over half a library to make one book," and the compiler of this one makes humble acknowledgment to a whole library of books and periodicals where most of these jokes have already appeared. It has been impossible to give credit unless the place of first publication was definitely known.
The compiling of "More Toasts" was in large measure cooperative. The test of the humor of a story or joke is in its efficacy when applied to normal people under ordinary circumstances. With this philosophy in mind the editor made it a rule to include nothing until it had first been "tried on the dog." The original material was first graded into three classes and, before being accepted, each joke had to stand the test of appealing to the sense of humor of several persons. The result is a collection of very carefully selected jokes and stories, only about fifty per cent of the material originally chosen being used. If any over-critical reader fails to find them humorous, may not the fault possibly be due to his own imperfect sense of humor?
There is also much truth in the statement that the point of a jest lies in the telling of it and often much of the subtle humor is lost in the reading. The personality of the speaker is a necessary factor and is frequently more important in the effect produced by the story than the story itself. Elbert Hubbard once said "Next in importance to the man who first voices a great thought is the man who quotes it."
The clever compiler, like a good chef, must not only know what to select but in what order to present it. Knowledge consists in being able to find a thing when you want it and accordingly an attempt has been made to pigeonhole each joke where it would be most useful. Such a classification is at best a difficult and debatable question, and numerous cross references have been placed wherever it was thought they might direct the reader to the subject wanted.
With these few explanatory words, the editor presents this little volume, sincerely hoping that it may prove a friend in need to all who seek the relaxation of humor, and a lifesaver to that legion of humble men whose knees tremble when the chairman speaks those fateful words—"The next speaker of the evening. … "
M.D.M.
November, 1922.
INTRODUCTION
What can be more fitting than that a compiled book should have a compiled introduction? Why should one with great pains and poor prospects of success attempt to do what has already been well done? Knowing that all readers of this book have a sense of humor and that they will approve our decision we begin with a quotation from an article1 by Mr. E. Lyttelton.
The Divine Gift of Humor
The subject of humor has an attraction peculiarly its own, because it deals with a mystery which yet is pleasantly interwoven with the daily life of each one of us. We often say of one of our neighbors that he has no sense of humour. But he often laughs; he never spends a day without at least trying to laugh, tho it remains but an attempt, an effort, an aspiration after something which he seems to have lost but wishes to recover. Either, that is, he remains grave when others laugh, or he laughs, as Horace says, "with alien jaws," by constraint rather than because he cannot help it. He has a confused idea that it is expected of him. Such laughter is apparently the outcome of an uneasy sense of duty, a dismal travesty of the real thing. …
Certainly humour is a singularly elusive thing, and I doubt if anyone alive can explain it; but its elusiveness gives it something of its charm; and, moreover, the illustrations which are necessary to an inquiry into its nature, its scope and meaning, are apt to be amusing without being irrelevant.
Humour has often been roughly described as a sense of the incongruous. More satisfying, however, is the following, which has been ascribed to Dean Inge: It is a sense of incongruous emotions. As soon as we think of the emotions being stirred we see that the strange difference between humourous and unhumourous people is not an intellectual matter, but follows the general law of emotional susceptibility, viz., that it is independent of the reason and varies within wide limits with each individual, and obviously with each nationality. Moreover, it appears that, as it is compounded of two emotions, one man may feel one of the emotions but be dull to the other, according to his temperament. It is a matter of sensitiveness, and in sensitiveness no two of us are alike.
Crudely judged, then, humour may be described as a blessing of nature bestowed on all, but in widely varying measure, so that in the case of some of our acquaintance we deplore its non-existence, but never in ourselves. Nobody really believes that he is wholly without it, partly because, in proportion as the sense is really defective, the defect must be in its own nature unperceived, but also because the gift is so precious, so winsome, that no one could bear to believe that it has been denied him. By a merciful law of nature, the delusion is unsuspected, for assuredly, if any wholly unhumorous person once realised the full extent of his privation, nothing could save him from "wretchlessness" and despair.
I prefer to believe that, like the sense of beauty, the love of music, the thrill of admiration for uncalculating heroism, we have here a wondrous aid to us in our life's pilgrimage, but that if we trace it to a sense of our self-interest, we not only vulgarize it, but we turn it into a caricature. For there is in humour this singular property; its aroma is so subtle, delicate and undefinable that the effort to buttress it upon coarse, common utility is doomed to fail, and in the mere attempt humour vanishes. There is something deliciously contagious about laughter that is quite sincere and unthinking; whereas the only people who contrive to be always absurd, but never amusing, are those who laugh from a sense of duty.
Humour, then, in the young is restricted in scope, their experience of life being small; in women it is quicker than in men, but shallower; in the Scotch it is reticent, in the Irish voluble and refined, but cold. But wherever it is found free from counterfeit, wholesome and contagious, it is the offspring of man's heaven-bestowed power of seeing in the meannesses of earth the true presence of the Divine.
Darwin says the causes of humor are legion and exceedingly complex and various disquisitions upon humor and laughter would seem to support him. Its social nature is emphasized by Edwin Paxton Hood:
The sources of all laughter and merriment are in the cordial sympathies of our nature. Laughter is very nearly related to the highest and most instinctive wisdom; it stands at no distant remove from Judgment on the one hand, and Imagination on the other; and it is a proof of a healthy nature, for both thinking and acting.
C.S. Evans in his article "On Humor in Literature" gives a hint of the evolutionary process of its mechanism and its higher refinement:
On