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More Toasts by Marion Dix Mosher

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MORE TOASTS

Jokes, Stories and Quotations

Compiled by

MARION DIX MOSHER
Librarian, Genesee Branch, Rochester (N.Y.) Public Library

New York
The H. W. Wilson Company
London: Grafton & Co.

1922







* * * * *

BOOKS OF JOKES, STORIES
AND QUOTATIONS

TOASTER'S HANDBOOK. Peggy Edmond and
Harold Workman Williams. 501p. $1.80

MORE TOASTS. Marion D. Mosher. 552p. $1.80

* * * * *




CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION
The Divine Gift of Humor
The Function of Humor
Importance of Humor

MORE TOASTS

INDEX




PREFACE


The success of the Toaster's Handbook has encouraged its publishers to
compile another that will supplement it and bring it up-to-date. New
subjects keep coming to the front, and the up-to-date toaster needs
up-to-date stories to fit the up-to-date subjects. No public occasion
of today is complete without its joke on the nineteenth amendment, the
allied debts, the income tax, etc.

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
article[1] by Mr. E. Lyttelton.

[Footnote 1: The Nineteenth Century. July, 1922.]


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 the lower plane of humor you get a laugh by the most
unimaginative means--merely conceive a recognized humorous
situation, or bring several things together according to a
recipe, and the thing is done. Every practised comedian,
in literature or on the stage, is an adept at it. But the
creation of character, the expression--in terms of the words
and actions of men and women--of that "social gesture" which
is laughter's source, is a much greater thing, for there we
touch the symbolism which is the soul of art.


The Function of Humor

In an article entitled "Why Do We Laugh?" William McDougall discusses
scientifically the value of laughter:

Laughter of man presents a problem with which philosophers
have wrestled in all ages with little success. Man is the only
animal that laughs. And, if laughter may properly be called an
instinctive reaction, the instinct of laughter is the only one
peculiar to the human species....

We are saved from this multitude of small sympathetic pains
and depressions by laughter, which, as we have seen, breaks
up our train of mental activity and prevents our dwelling upon
the distressing situation, and which also provides an antidote
to the depressing influence in the form of physiological
stimulation that raises the blood-pressure and promotes
the circulation of the blood. This, then, is the biological
function of laughter, one of the most delicate and beautiful
of all nature's adjustments. In order that man should reap the
full benefits of life in the social group, it was necessary
that his primitive sympathetic tendencies should be strong and
delicately adjusted. For without this, there could be little
mutual understanding, and only imperfect cooperation and
mutual aid in the more serious difficulties and embarrassments
of life. But, in endowing man with delicately responsive
sympathetic tendencies, nature rendered him liable to suffer
a thousand pains and depressions upon a thousand occasions of
mishap to his fellows, occasions so trivial as to call for no
effort of support or assistance. Here was a dilemma--whether
to leave man so little sympathetic that he would be incapable
of effective social life; or to render him effectively
sympathetic and leave him subject to the perpetually renewed
pains of sympathy, which, if not counteracted, would seriously
depress his vitality and perhaps destroy the species. Nature,
confronted with this problem, solved it by the invention
of laughter. She endowed man with the instinct to laugh on
contemplation of these minor mishaps of his fellow men; and
so made them occasions of actual benefit to the beholder;
all those things which, apart from laughter, would have
been mildly displeasing and depressing, became objects and
occasions of stimulating beneficial laughter....

For laughter is no exception to the law of primitive sympathy;
but rather illustrates it most clearly and familiarly; the
infectiousness of laughter is notorious and as irresistible
as the infection of fear itself.... The great laugher is the
person of delicately responsive sympathetic reactions; and his
laughter quickly gives place to pity and comforting support,
if our misfortune waxes more severe. Such persons are in
little danger of giving offense by their laughter; for we
detect their ready sympathy and easily laugh with them; they
teach us to be humorous.

H. Merian Allen in his essay "Little Laughs in History" says "The
relaxation of a full laugh clears the brain, restores fit contact
with one's fellows, and so smoothes the way for the solving of knotty
problems."

Linus W. Kline, Ph.D., further elucidates the psychical office of
humor as follows:

The psychical function of humor is to delicately cut the
surface tension of consciousness and disarrange its structure
that it may begin again from a new and strengthened base. It
permits our mental forces to reform under cover, as it were,
while the battle is still on. Then, too, it clarifies the
field and reveals the strategetic points, or, to change the
figure, it pulls off the mask and exposes the real man. No
stimulus, perhaps more mercifully and effectually breaks the
surface tension of consciousness, thereby conditioning the
mind for a stronger forward movement, than that of humor. It
is the one universal dispensary for human kind: a medicine for
the poor, a tonic for the rich, a recreation for the fatigued
and a beneficient check to the strenuous. It acts as a shield
to the reformer, as an entering wedge to the recluse and as a
decoy for barter and trade.

Humor is as necessary to our mental and spiritual life as are vitamins
to our physical well-being. Ruskin has called our attention to the
tendency of rivers to lean a little to one side, to have "One shingly
shore upon which they can be shallow and foolish and childlike, and
another steep shore under which they can pause and purify themselves
and get their strength of waves fully together for due occasions," and
has likened them to great men who must have one side of their life
for work and another for play. Action and reaction must be balanced:
seriousness and lightness. "Men who work prodigously must play with
equal energy," says one commentator. "Humor is the gift of the deeply
serious man," remarks another. "There have been very few solemn men,
but their solemnity was evidence, not of their gifts, but of their
defects; as a rule greatness is accompanied by the overflow of the
fountain of life in play." "The richly furnished mind overflows
with vitality and deals with ideas and life freely, daringly, often
audaciously."

The function of the catalyst in chemical reactions is to help other
bodies to get on together, but in doing this it only lends its
presence.

CATALYST. A chemical body which by its presence, is capable
of inducing chemical changes in other bodies while itself
remaining unchanged.

In quite the same way humor, by its mere presence, serves to smooth
the way in all human relations. It contributes a socializing touch.
"Humor makes the whole world akin."


Importance of Humor

Not only the toastmaster needs to have a sense of humor and a
collection of funny stories, and not only the preacher, the public
speaker and entertainer, but everyone, as well, who must influence
others. The "voice with a smile" wins because behind the voice is a
sense of humor. We have more confidence in those who have a sense
of humor. The following is quoted from a persuasive advertisement
entitled "The Gentle Art of Telling a Humorous Story Well":

The most successful men and women are those who know how to
get along with their fellow-beings, who know how to win and
hold good will. In fact, the biggest problem in business and
society today is the human problem, the problem of making
people like you and making people feel kindly towards each
other.

And nothing oils the wheels of human relationship so nicely
as humor. Abraham Lincoln understood this when he saved many
a critical situation by the introduction of one of his famous
anecdotes. Humor has its place in serious business life, and
in social life it is the universal passport to popularity.

The importance of humor in our daily life, often emphasized by
scientists and philosophers, has been well summarized by Justin
McCarthy in an article "Humor as an Element of Success":

I am strongly of the opinion that the quick and abiding sense
of humour is a great element of success in every department
of life. I do not speak merely of success in the more strictly
artistic fields of human work, but am willing to maintain that
even in the prosaic and practical concerns of human existence,
the sense of humour is an exciting and sustaining influence to
carry a man successfully thru to the full development of his
capacity and the attainment of his purpose....

In the stories of great events and great enterprises we are
constantly told of some heaven-born leader who kept alive,
thru the most trying hours of what otherwise might have been
utter and enfeebling depression, the energies, the courage and
the hope of his comrades and his followers.

During thousands of years nature has developed in the human body many
"safety first" signal systems. For example, when the body becomes
chilled this signal system causes us to shiver and tickles the throat
making us cough and in this way thru exercise stimulates the blood
circulation.

Perhaps in ages to come nature will find a way to tickle our sense
of humor when we are angry, discouraged, or otherwise mentally
discomfitted and will thus help us thru laughter to throw off the soul
chill and to regain spiritual poise.






MORE TOASTS




ABSENT-MINDEDNESS


This story is told of an absent-minded professor at Drew Theological
Seminary. One evening while studying he had need of a book-mark.
Seeing nothing else handy, he used his wife's scissors, which lay on
the sewing-table. A few minutes later the wife wanted the scissors,
but a diligent search failed to reveal them.

The next day the professor appeared before his class and opened his
book. There lay the scissors. He picked them up and, holding them
above his head, shouted:

"Here they are, dear!"

Yes, the class got it.


Deep in a ponderous calculation, the professor leaned over his desk.
One hand held his massive brow; the other guided the pencil.

Suddenly the library door was flung open, and a nurse entered, smiling
broadly.

"There's a little stranger upstairs, professor," she announced, of
course referring to the very latest arrival.

"Eh?" grunted the man of learning, poring deeply over his problem.

"It's a little boy," remarked the nurse, still smiling.

"Little boy," mused the professor. "Little boy-eh? Well ask him what
he wants."


A story is current concerning a professor who is reputed to be
slightly absent-minded. The learned man had arranged to escort his
wife one evening to the theater. "I don't like the tie you have on. I
wish you would go up and put on another," said his wife.

The professor tranquilly obeyed. Moment after moment elapsed, until
finally the impatient wife went upstairs to learn the cause of the
delay. In his room she found her husband undressed and getting into
bed.


"How will you have your roast beef?" asked the waiter.

"Well done, good and faithful servant," murmured the clerical-looking
diner absent-mindedly.

_See also_ Habit; Memory.




ACCIDENTS


Hearing a crash of glassware one morning, Mrs. Blank called to her
maid in the adjoining room, "Norah, what on earth are you doing?"

"I ain't doin' nothin', mum," replied Norah; "it's done."


A big Irishman, while carrying a ladder through a crowded street
had the misfortune to break a plate-glass window in a store. He
immediately dropped his ladder and broke into a run, but he had been
seen by the shopkeeper, who dashed after him in company with several
salesmen, and was soon caught.

"Here you big loafer!" shouted the angry shopkeeper, when he had
regained his breath. "You have broken my window!"

"I sure have," admitted the Celt, "and didn't you see me running home
to get the money to pay for it?"


There was a man who fancied that by driving good and fast
He'd get his car across the track before the train came past;
He'd miss the engine by an inch, and make the train-hands sore.
There was a man who fancied this; there isn't any more.




ACCURACY


In one of the industrial towns in South Wales a workman met with a
serious accident. The doctor was sent for, and came and examined
him, had him bandaged and carried home on a stretcher, seemingly
unconscious.

After he was put to bed the doctor told his wife to give him
sixpennyworth of brandy when he came to himself. After the doctor had
left the wife told the daughter to run and fetch threepennyworth of
brandy for her father.

The old chap opened his eyes and said, in a loud voice: "Sixpenn'orth,
the doctor said."


An editor had a notice stuck up above his desk on which was printed:
"Accuracy! Accuracy! Accuracy!" and this notice he always pointed out
to the new reporters.

One day the youngest member of the staff came in with his report of a
public meeting. The editor read it through and came to the sentence:
"Three thousand nine hundred ninety-nine eyes were fixed upon the
speaker."

"What do you mean by making a silly blunder like that?" he demanded,
wrathfully.

"But it's not a blunder," protested the youngster. "There was a
one-eyed man in the audience!"





ACTORS AND ACTRESSES


FIRST ACTRESS (behind the scenes)--"Did you hear the way the public
wept during my death scene?"

SECOND ACTRESS--"Yes, it must have been because they realized that it
was only acted!"


"These love scenes are rotten. Can't the leading man act as if he were
in love with the star?"

"Can't act at all," said the director. "Trouble is, he is in love with
her."


The teacher was giving the class a natural history lecture on
Australia. "There is one animal," she said, "none of you have
mentioned. It does not stand up on its legs all the time. It does not
walk like other animals, but takes funny little skips. What is it?"
And the class yelled with one voice, "Charlie Chaplin!"


Eight-year-old Robert had been ill for nearly a month with tonsilitis,
and nothing kept him contented but pictures of his favorite, Charlie
Chaplin, clipped from the pages of the motion-picture pictorials.

One morning, as his mother sat beside his bed, he studied earnestly a
full-page drawing of the million-dollar comedian.

"Mother," he asked, "will Charlie Chaplin go to heaven?"

"Why, yes--I hope so," answered the somewhat astonished parent.

"Gee! won't the Lord have some fun then!" was Robert's comment.


Sweeping his long hair back with an impressive gesture the visitor
faced the proprietor of the film studio. "I would like to secure a
place in your moving-picture company," he said.

"You are an actor?" asked the film man.

"Yes."

"Had any experience acting without audiences?"

A flicker of sadness shone in the visitor's eyes as he replied:

"Acting without audiences is what brought me here!"


It was a death-bed scene, but the director was not satisfied with the
hero's acting.

"Come on!" he cried. "Put more life in your dying!"


"Pa, what's an actor?"

"An actor, my boy, is a person who can walk to the side of a stage,
peer into the wings at a group of other actors waiting for their cues,
a number of bored stage hands and a lot of theatrical odds and ends
and exclaim, 'What a lovely view there is from this window!'"


"There were two actresses in an early play of mine," said an author,
"both very beautiful; but the leading actress was thin. She quarreled
one day at rehearsal with the other lady, and she ended the quarrel by
saying, haughtily: 'Remember, please, that I am the star.'

"'Yes, I know you're the star,' the other retorted, eyeing with an
amused smile the leading actress's long, slim figure, 'but you'd look
better, my dear, if you were a little meteor!'"


INTERVIEWER--"What is your wife's favorite dish?"

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