Excerpt from Comedy The curse of Babel only fell among men when they learned to laugh. Laughter is the real frontier between races and kinds of people. We are agreed, the world over, as to what precisely is grievous. Babel has made little difference between the weeping of an Englishman (he weeps more commonly than is reputed) and the weeping of a Patagonian. Laughter is another matter. A joke sets all nations by the ears. We laugh in different languages. The Frenchman violently explodes into laughter at something which leaves the Prussian cold as a stone. An Englishman sees very little fun in Alceste. A Frenchman sees in Falstaff no more than a needlessly fat man. Try to be funny in a foreign land, and you will probably only succeed in insulting or disgusting or annoying or shocking somebody. A joke cannot be translated or interpreted. A man is born to see a particular sort of joke; or he is not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.