Some people who have been of my audience meet me afterward and proceed to “take the gilt off of the gingerbread” in an amusing fashion—if I am sensible enough to take it that way. Once I encountered one of the blundering old chaps who mean well, yet invariably make a break and he said:
“Mr. Wilder, there was one very good thing among those stories you told.”
I was disconcerted for a moment, but recovering myself I said:
“Well, that’s better than missing the point of all of them.”
At one of my private entertainments I was “making good” and was keeping my audience in continuous merriment, but my hostess begged me to cease making them laugh and say something sad and pathetic, so that they might catch their breath and rest their aching sides.
“My dear madam,” I replied, “I am never sad or pathetic—I mean, not intentionally.”
With a properly developed sense of humor one can sometimes bring a laugh out of disconcerting surroundings. While I was talking to an audience at Flint, Mich., one night, the lights suddenly went out but I succeeded in saying:
“That’s too bad. Now I’m afraid you won’t be able to see through my jokes.”
One evening in the course of an engagement I was playing at the Orpheum in Brooklyn; one of the boxes was occupied by a quartette who had evidently been drinking “not wisely, but too well.” They were giving the audience the benefit of their conversation and even sharing the honors of the entertainment with the ladies and gentlemen on the bill, much to the annoyance of these, for the disturbance was interfering seriously with good work. I had been watching from the wings and determined I would not submit to such distraction, so when I went on I said:
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is an oft-repeated remark that it takes all kinds of people to make a world. Some people in an audience are so sensitive that they are affected by any unusual conditions or surroundings. For instance, if they find themselves among ladies and gentlemen they are so elated by the fact that their conduct has every appearance of intoxication—but it really is not intoxication, though it may look that way.” My performance, which followed immediately, was not disturbed, nor was that of any one who followed me.