"They like to see you, as the dame in Goody Two Shoes, open a night club on the strict understanding that it is only for clergymen's daughters in need of recreation?"
"They laugh," he said again.
"But they don't know what you mean?"
"No. But I'm funny. That's what you don't seem to understand. I'm so funny that everything I say and do makes them laugh. It doesn't, in fact, matter what I say."
"Ah!" I replied, "I have you there! In that case why don't you say a few simpler and sweeter things?"
He seemed perplexed.
"Things," I explained, "that don't want quite so much knowledge of the seamy side of life?"
"Go on!" he said derisively. "I haven't got time to mug that up. I've got my living to get. You don't suppose I invent my jokes, do you? I collect them. I'm on the Halls the rest of the year, and I hear them there. There hasn't been a new joke in a pantomime these twenty years. But what you don't seem to get into your head, mister, is the fact that I make them laugh. Laugh. I'm a scream, I tell you."
"And laughter is all you want?" I asked.
"I must either make people laugh or get 'the bird.'"