How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

watchmaker, that he would like to get him out of the asylum. “ Could you earn your living outside, my good man ? ” he asks. “ Of course I could ” answers the insane man. “You see I am a very-good watchmaker, and I could always earn my living in a watch-repairing shop. In addition, I am an excellent mechanic and could work in a garage. And if the worst came to the worst,” adds the paranoiac by way of emphasis, holding one hand on his hip and stretching his other arm out in a graceful curve, “ I could always be a teapot ! ” The obvious incongruity of this man’s statement with his belief in his sanity, immediately puts the listener in a superior situation. The transition from a common-sense system of thought to the private autistic logic of the lunatic is imperceptible, but his conclusions are so far-fetched that the listener immediately senses the incongruity, and laughs, because he feels safe in his security and sanity. The joke would not appeal to a paranoid patient in an asylum who was normal in everything but his idee fixe. There are some people who bolster their ego with an extensive repertoire of stories told at the expense and humiliation of someone else. Others-—especially in some forms of manic-depressive insanity or in dementia praecox —support their private autistic logic by the belief that the whole world is a joke. This “ senseless laughter ” of the isolated schizophrenic patient is one of the earmarks of that form of insanity. Others again cannot laugh at any joke because they take their own lives so tragically. These men and women “ have no sense of humour ” because they refuse to build the bridge of encouragement to their fellow-men by participating in the wholesome laughter which, without humiliating anyone, lightens the burden of life by letting it appear as a comic paradox. The telling of smutty stories exemplifies the attempt of the discouraged to inflate their ego by the defamation of a member of the opposite sex. Whether it is a man or a woman who tells a dirty story makes no difference. They betray their inferiority complex by demonstrating their tendency to achieve an easy triumph at the expense