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Jokes should be the pepper of conversation, not masquerade as the main dish. Furthermore I can force myself to laugh at an occasional dull joke, but in a whole evening of storytelling there are likely to be so many inept ones that my risibility cannot keep up to its duty. A half hour of joke telling is about the maximum. While one danger is that jokes become a conversational nuisance by their irrelevancy, the greater danger is that as soon as storytelling becomes the main business, a lively tug of war seems to begin between the parlor joke and the water-front joke, and the whole party is in suspense whether at the end the parlor joke will still be out in front. There is the fearful expectation that at any moment a dirty joke will explode among them, with everybody's civilized nature pulling for the parlor, but their animal nature ogling at the bowery. |
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