The Richfield Recorder

THE HUMOROUS VEIN

Every serious minded editor is at times disgusted to find that when he especially wants to inflate a glittering bubble of humor, the wit and humor verse seems to have run dryer than the Russian vodka-drinker of Petrograd. He cannot turn a faucet like the proprietor of a soda fountain and hand over a fizz pop or lemon phosphate or "pick me up" restoration to order. He must just wait until the tired brain revives for a moment its cheerier tone. Sometimes he tries to utilize the funny stories told him to lighten the grim shadows of an editorial page, but when he tries to call up their ghosts the delicious and care-dispelling point of the joke has, alas, wholly escaped his memory. A jovial humor doesn't ensure the brilliant word-play of the jest.

The world loves fun, but real fun is like foam, it glitters with the hues of Paradise, but it is as evanescent as clouds on a hot summer day. The things written while on the brink of tears, or inspired by deep sincerity and earnestness seem to endure the longest. Even carrying a joke book, with every good story and pungent saying carefully tabulated and indexed, doesn't help, for often jokes, when grown cold, lack gleam and glitter, and sometimes the point is as hard to find as a yesterday's newspaper.

So this sad fact is a perennial joke in the editorial sanctum, and even this confession might be considered a joke on the reader, for it is not easy even to dictate one's failure to fittingly evolve a joke, and yet one feels that he has often closely approached that frame of mind which Mr. Mark Twain insisted always possessed him when he wanted to write or say something humorous. "Your head must always be empty—absolutely empty of all else," wrote the author of "Huckleberry Finn." "If you want humor to enter, all else must go, for nature in her piquant moods doth abhor a vacuum." Query, "Would a mental vacuum cleaner help any?"

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Berkehire Bill has promised to give us a valuable article on the hog, for the Xmas issue. If he fails you have our permission to call him a musical LYRE.