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unearths some literary gems.
From "Mrs. Fisher, or the Future of Humour," by Robert Graves:
***This is bucolic humour, meaning not-funny-to-the-power-of-not-funny.***I heard a story about Sir Owen [Seaman, the editor of Punch]....Two old Scottish ladies were sitting in the gallery of a Glasgow theatre watching Pavlova dance the Mort du Cygne, and one said to the other: "She’s awfu’ like oor Mrs. Wishart." When this comment was reported to Sir Owen by my Aunt Jeannie, he asked briskly: "And, pray, who is Mrs. Fisher?"Well, who is Mrs. Fisher? Sir Owen didn’t know. My Aunt Jeannie didn’t know. I don’t know. But she sounds so plausible that I suspect her of being the future of humour itself and intend to give her the benefit of the doubt.***The difficulty about writing a Future of Humour is, of course, that true examples of the humour of the future must necessarily be not-yet-funny and therefore dull and unplausible; so the writer will forfeit his claim to a sense of humour in the present. If, on the other hand, he remains a humorist of the present, his readers will justly complain that he has not conscientiously revealed the future.***
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