And the next corpse that comes to the village he'll get mixed up with—sure to—and have it laid to his door, and there'll be all the old business over again.
No, our advice to the stage heroine is to get rid of the hero as soon as possible, marry the villain, and go and live abroad somewhere where the comic man won't come fooling around.
She will be much happier.
THE COMIC MAN.
He follows the hero all over the world. This is rough on the hero.
What makes him so gone on the hero is that when they were boys together the hero used to knock him down and kick him. The comic man remembers this with a glow of pride when he is grown up, and it makes him love the hero and determine to devote his life to him.
He is a man of humble station—the comic man. The village blacksmith or a peddler. You never see a rich or aristocratic comic man on the stage. You can have your choice on the stage; you can be funny and of lowly origin, or you can be well-to-do and without any sense of humor. Peers and policemen are the people most utterly devoid of humor on the stage.
The chief duty of the comic man's life is to make love to servant-girls, and they slap his face; but it does not discourage him; he seems to be more smitten by them than ever.
The comic man is happy under any fate, and he says funny things at funerals and when the bailiffs are in the house or the hero is waiting to be hanged.