t. Your soul says loudly to its Creator: "Oh, this is
something new!"

One might suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd
provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not
Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the
burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use
of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite
common and human. The philosophical rules of laughter do not explain it:
but it is funny.

Something of the same attraction rests in a quite absurd essay, wherein
Mr. Belloc describes how he was waylaid by an inventor and, having
suffered the explanations of the man, retaliated with advice as to the
means to pursue to get the new machine adopted. The technical terms
invented for both parties to the dialogue are deliciously idiotic, a
sort of exalted abstract play with the dictionary of technology.

In descriptions of persons we are on safer ground, and the reader, if he
still care, after all we have said, for such-like foolishness, may
explain these jokes by the incongruity of teleological beings acting in
an ateleological manner. We are determined to be content in picking out
passages that amuse us and in commenting on them but by no means
explaining them.

Mr. Belloc himself has invented or recorded the distinction between
things that would be funny anyhow, and things that are funny because
they are true. Most of his jokes fall into the second category. The
German baron at Oxford, the gentleman who asked when and for what action
Lord Charles Beresford received his title, the poet who wrote a poem
containing the lines:

Neither the nations of the East, nor the nations of the West,
Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to their interest,

all these people are admirably funny because they do, or very well
might, exist. In fact, most of Mr. Belloc's humour is observation, a
slow delicate savouring of human stupidity and pretence.

The sporadic stories in his books are funny because, at least, we can
believe them to be true. Read this from _Esto Perpetua_:

An old man, small, bent, and full of energy opened the door to
me.... "I was expecting you," he said. I remembered that the driver
had promised to warn him, and I was grateful.

"I have prepared you a meal," he went on. Then, after a little
hesitation, "It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold." ... He