“Why, Marsh, why didn’t you tell me? If I’d known it, I wouldn’t have gone.”
“Enjoying serious talks by great men.”
Ha, ha, pretty good, wasn’t it?
Where do I get the material for my own sketches? From the originals every time. I pick it up in the streets, in the cars and restaurants, get it from the newsboys, from men of all sorts on the curb-stone, from almost everywhere, but never from books or newspapers, for the world is full of fun if one only has the ear to hear it.
When I get hold of a new thing that seems to be good, I always “try it on the dog”—that is, on my friends. I take it down to the Lambs’ Club and work it off on some of the good fellows there. If I escape alive with it, I inveigle a couple of newsboys into a dark corner and have them sample it. If it “goes” with them, I am pretty sure it is good, so I add it to my repertoire; but if it fails there, I never disagree with my critics; it is damned—absolutely, no matter who may think it might be made to work.
Few Americans are busier than the successful entertainer. His hands are full of the work of brightening up the heavy parts of the social affairs that crowd the long winter afternoon and evenings, so with hurrying between New York, Boston and Chicago, with occasional moves to Philadelphia and Baltimore, he is kept “on the jump.” Yet the public hears little of his work, for it is not advertised. Why, not long ago I went to a large party at a house only three blocks from my apartments, and I am sure thirty or forty of the guests had never heard my name before.
Such is fame.