and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the producers of comic "movies" know what "One crowded hour of glorious life" can be made to hold.
Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining causes—why should we?—until the contradictory definitions of philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our pleas-
