To slip in as the first guest that arrives.
In wine and man this difference appears:
The old man bores you, but the old wine cheers.
Men do not, like your wine, improve by age;
The more their years, the less their ways engage.
Aristotle, though the first to put into words the definition of the ridiculous, can furnish no extracts which come within our present scope.
Indeed the great teacher considered comedy from its dramatic side rather than as mere humor.
One of his pupils, Theophrastus, left us some fragments, especially a short collection of character sketches which show both wit and humor.
OF SLOVENLINESS
This vice is a lazy and beastly negligence of a man’s person, whereby he becomes so filthy as to be offensive to those who are about him. You’ll see him come into a company when he is covered all over with a leprosy or scurf, or with very long nails, and he says those distempers are hereditary, that his father and grandfather had them before him. He will speak with his mouth full, and gurgle at his cup in drinking. He will intrude into the best company in ragged clothes. If he goes with his mother to the soothsayers, he cannot even then refrain from coarse and profane expressions. When he is making his oblations at the temple, he will let the dish fall out of his hand, and laugh as at some jocular exploit. At the finest concert of music he cannot forbear clapping his hands and making a rude noise. He will pretend to sing along with the singers, and rail at them when they leave off.