A Quote From ...

Eels in a Tub

'We are not amused' said Queen Victoria, repressively. As we publish the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, it is an appropriate moment to look at varying views of humour across the ages - including the awareness that it is not always easy to make people laugh. 'Among all kinds of writing, there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in works of humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel' said the essayist Joseph Addison, and the comic W. C. Fields, two centuries later, spoke for his own medium: 'The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.' Laughter is regarded as important - 'A joke's a very serious thing', said Charles Churchill in 1763, although Lord Chesterfield thought that 'there is nothing so illiberal and so! ill-bred, as audible laughter.' Ken Dodd however had a trenchant view of trying to achieve it as a stand-up comic: 'Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.' This rather surreal vision is a long way from W. S. Gilbert's view that 'An accepted wit has but to say "Pass the mustard", and they roar their ribs out.'

Jokes can have their drawbacks: as a character in one of Thomas Love Peacock's novels protested, 'Laughter is pleasant, but the exertion is too much for me.' George Eliot, too, had a warning: 'A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.' Laurence Sterne saw another danger: 'For every ten jokes, thou hast got an hundred enemies.' But in the end we cannot do without them: as John Buchan might have said to Queen Victoria: 'Without humour you cannot run a sweetie shop, let alone a nation.'

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