"So you're the funny man of a pantomime, are you?"

"Yes," he said.

"Which one?"

"All of them," he said.

"Good," I replied. "I have long wanted a talk with you. There are
things I want to ask you. Why, for instance, do you always pretend to
be a grimy slum woman?"

"It seems to be expected," he said.

"Who expects it? The children?"

"What children?"

"The children who go to pantomimes," I said.

"Oh, those! Well, they laugh," he replied evasively.

"They like to see you quarrelling with your husband and getting
drunk?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to hear you, as an Ugly Sister in _Cinderella_, singing
'Father's on the booze again; mother's off her chump'?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to see you as the wife of Ali Baba, finding pawntickets
in your husband's pockets and charging him with spending his money on
flappers?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to see you, as The Widow Twankay, visit a race meeting and
get welshed and have your clothes torn off?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to see you, as Dick Whittington's mother, telling the cat
that, if he must eat onions, at any rate he can refrain from kissing
her?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to see you, as the dame in _Goody Two Shoes_, open a night
club on the strict understanding that it is only for clergymen's
daughters in need of recreation?"

"They laugh," he said again.

"But they don't know what you mean?"

"No. But I'm funny. That's what you don't seem to understand. I'm so
funny that everything I say and do makes them laugh. It doesn't, in
fact, matter _what_ I say."

"Ah!" I replied, "I have you there! In that case why don't you say a
few simpler and sweeter things?"

He seemed perplexed.

"Things," I explained, "that don't want quite so much knowledge of the
seamy side of life?"

"Go on!" he said derisively. "I haven't got time to mug _that_ up.
I've got my living to get. You don't suppose I invent my jokes, do
you? I collect them. I'm on the Halls the rest of the year, and I hear
them there. There hasn't been a new joke in a pantomime these twenty
years. But what you don't seem to get into your head, mister, is the
fact that I make them laugh. Laugh. I'm a scream, I tell you."

"And laughter is all you want?" I asked.

"I must either make people laugh or get 'the bird.'"

"But hasn't it ever occurred to you," I said, "that children in a
theatre at Christmas time are entitled to h