|
Few people are witty or humorous enough to do much extempore inventing of wit. Most people who want to contribute their share of humor to a conversation have to rely on jokes and anecdotes they learned from a joke book or the "Laugh" page of the magazine. I think one can say that a person with pretensions to superior conversation ought to be able to tell a joke well. He ought to have a repertoire of old ones and a weather eye out for new ones. Jonathan Swift wrote: "There are some men excellent at telling a story, and provided with a plentiful stock of them . . . considering how low conversation runs now among us, it is not altogether a contemptible talent." Dr. Henry C. Link has found that knowing and telling jokes and stories are marks of a relatively high personality quotient. |
|||
|
