Laughing Stock

Laughing Stock Synopsis

Excerpt from Laughing Stock: Over Six-Hundred Jokes and Anecdotes of Uncertain Vintage

Many of the newer anecdotes in this book were sent to me by total strangers, and appeared first in my weekly Trade Winds column in the Saturday Review of Literature. These contributors commented in a superior sort of way about the antiquity of sto ries somebody else had submitted the week before, and ended by retailing a few choice samples of their own. This enchanting and labor-saving custom I have encouraged as vigorously as possible.

I have tried to scatter my own favorites throughout the book, rather than follow the time-honored custom of putting all the good apples at the top of the barrel. I have tried also to avoid giving offense to the most sensitive reader. This collection, like all others, has lts full quota of Irish, Scotch, Jewish, Negro, and Cockney yarns, but every one of them, I think, plays up humor ous qualities of the races involved without holding them up to ridicule or derision. Taciturn farmers and their beautiful daugh ters, salesmen, people of the theatre, inebriates, and all the rest of the inevitable and exaggerated characters people the volume' The average, everyday citizen is the backbone of the nation, but slim pickings for a joke book. He is supposed to buy it - not star in it!

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