Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohmwas an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth24 August 1872
Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.
Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.
There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.
I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
Nobody ever died of laughter.
O the disgrace of it! - / The scandal, the incredible come-down!
It is doubtful whether the people of southern England have even yet realized how much introspection there is going on all the time in the Five Towns.
Vulgarity has its uses. Vulgarity often cuts ice which refinement scrapes at vainly.
You will find my last words in the blue folder.
Have you ever noticed there is never any third act to a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there.
. . . but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.