Many investigators have speculated as to the character of the first
joke; and as speculation must our efforts remain. But I personally have
no doubt whatever as to the subject-matter of that distant pleasantry:
it was the face of the other person involved. I don't say that Adam was
caustic about Eve's face or Eve about Adam's: that is improbable. Nor
does matrimonial invective even now ordinarily take this form. But after
a while, after cousins had come into the world, the facial jest began;
and by the time of Noah and his sons the riot was in full swing. In
every rough and tumble among the children of Ham, Shem, and Japhet, I
feel certain that crude and candid personalities fell to the lot, at any
rate, of the little Shems.
So was it then; so is it still to-day. No jests are so rich as those
that bear upon the unloveliness of features not our own. The tiniest
street urchins in dispute always--sooner or later--devote their retorts
to the distressing physiognomy of the foe. Not only are they conforming
to the ancient convention, but they show sagacity too, for to sum up an
opponent as "Face," "Facey," or "Funny Face," is to spike his gun. There
is no reply but the cowardly _tu quoque_. He cannot say, "My face is not
comic, it is handsome"; because that does not touch the root of the
matter. The root of the matter is your opinion of his face as
deplorable.
Not only is the recognition of what is odd in an opponent's countenance
of this priceless value in ordinary quarrels among the young and the
ill-mannered (just as abuse of the opposing counsel is the best way of
covering the poverty of one's own case at law), but the music-hall
humorist has no easier or surer road to the risibilities of most of his
audience. Jokes about faces never fail and are never threadbare.
Sometimes I find myself listening to one who has been called--possibly
the label was self-imposed--the Prime Minister of Mirth, and he
invariably enlarges upon the quaintness of somebody's features, often,
for he is the soul of impartiality, his own; and the first time, now
thirty years ago, that I ever entered a music-hall (the tiny stuffy old
Oxford at Brighton, where the chairman with the dyed hair--it was more
purple than black--used to sit amid a little company of bloods whose
proud privilege it was to pay for his refreshment), another George,
whose surname was Beauchamp, was singing about a siren into whose
clutches he had or had not fallen, who had
an indiarubber lip
Like the rudder of a ship.
--So you see there is complete continuity.
But the best example of this branch of humour is beyond all question
that of the Two Macs, whose influence, long though it is since they
eclipsed the gaiety of the nation by vanishing, is still potent. Though
gone they still jest; or, at any rate, their jests did not all vanish
with them. The incorrigible veneration for what is antique displayed by
low comedians takes care of that. "I saw your wife at the masked ball
last night," the first Mac would say, in his rich brogue. "My wife was
at the ball last night," the other would reply in a brogue of deeper
richness, "but it wasn't a masked ball." The first Mac would then
express an overwhelming surprise, as he countered with the devastating
question, "Was _that_ her face?"
"You're not two-faced, anyway. I'll say that for you," was the
apparently magnanimous concession made by one comedian to another in a
recent farcical play. The other was beginning to express his
gratification when the speaker continued: "If you were, you wouldn't
have come out with that one." Again, you observe, there is no answer to
this kind of attack. Hence, I suppose, its popularity. And yet perhaps
to take refuge in a smug sententiousness, and remark crisply, "Handsome
is as handsome does," should now and then be useful. But it requires
some self-esteem.
There is no absolute need, however, for the face joke to be applied to
others to be successful. Since, in spite of the complexion creams,
"plumpers," and nose-machines advertised in the papers, faces will
continue to be here and there somewhat Gothic, the wise thing for their
owners is to accept them and think of other things, or console
themselves before the unflattering mirror with the memory of those
mortals who have been both quaint-looking and gifted. Wiser still
perhaps to make a little capital out of the affliction. Public men who
are able to make a jest of the homeliness of their features never lose
by it. President Wilson's public recital of the famous lines on his
countenance (which I personally find by no means unprepossessing) did
much to increase his popularity.
As a beauty I am not a star,
There are others more handsome by far.
But my face, I don't mind it,
For I keep behind it;
It's the people in front get the jar.
And an English bishop, or possibly dean, came, at last, very near earth
when in a secular address he repeated his retort to the lady who had
commented upon his extraordinary plainness: "Ah, but you should see my
brother." There is also the excellent story of the ugly man before the
camera, who was promised by the photographer that he should have justice
done to him. "Justice!" he exclaimed. "I don't want justice; I want
mercy."
The great face joke, as I say, obviously came first. Because there were
in the early days none of the materials for the other staple quips--such
as alcohol, and sausages, and wives' mothers. Faces, however, were
always there. And not even yet have the later substitutes ousted it.
Just as Shakespeare's orator, "when he is out," spits, so does the funny
man, in similar difficulties, if he is wise, say, "Do you call that a
face?" and thus collect his thoughts for fresh sallies. If all "dials"
were identical, Mr. George Graves, for example, would be a stage
bankrupt; for, resourceful as he is in the humour of quizzical
disapproval, the vagaries of facial oddity are his foundation stone.
Remarkable as are the heights of grotesque simile to which all the
Georges have risen in this direction, it is, oddly enough, to the other
and gentler sex that the classic examples (in my experience) belong. At
a dinner-party given by a certain hospitable lady who remained something
of an _enfante terrible_ to the end of her long life, she drew the
attention of one of her guests, by no means too cautiously, to the
features of another guest, a bishop of great renown. "Isn't his face,"
she asked, in a deathless sentence, "like the inside of an elephant's
foot?" I have not personally the honour of this divine's acquaintance,
but all my friends who have met or seen him assure me that the
similitude is exact. Another lady, happily still living, said of the
face of an acquaintance, that it was "not so much a face, as a part of
her person which she happened to leave uncovered, by which her friends
were able to recognize her." A third, famous for her swift analyses,
said that a certain would-be beauty might have a title to good looks but
for "a rush of teeth to the head." I do not quote these admirable
remarks merely as a proof of woman's natural kindliness, but to show how
even among the elect--for all three speakers are of more than common
culture--the face joke holds sway.