“Old boy,” he said, in his homely drawl, “I'm discouraged! I begin to think I'm not in it!”
“Why, what's wrong?”
“Well, I've dropped to the fact that, after all these years in the business, I can't make them laugh.”
I was just about to say, “So you've just awakened to that?” but pity and politeness deterred me. Every one else had known it, all these years. Newgag, to be sure, should naturally have been, as he was, the last to discover it.
Newgag thus went one step further than any comedian I have ever known. Having detected his inability to amuse audiences, he confessed it.
People who know actors and read this will already have said that it is a fiction, and that Newgag's admission is false to life. Not so; I am writing not about comedians in general, but about Newgag.
That he had come to so exceptional a concession marked the depth of his despair. I tried to cheer him.
“Nonsense, my boy! They give you bad parts. Go out of comic opera. Try tragedy.”
I had spoken innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting. Instead of his usual attempt at lofty callousness, however, he smiled that dismal, marionette-like smile of his. That gave me an idea, of which I said nothing at the time.
Several months afterward, a manager, who is a friend of mine, was suddenly plunged in distress because of the serious illness of an actor who was to fill a part in a new American comedy that the manager was to produce on the next night.