(13) A man proclaims his defiance of his wife while the latter is presumably out of hearing.  As the man is speaking, his wife’s voice is heard calling him.  Meekly he turns and goes to her.  This device has many changes, such as employer and employee.  All are equally effective.

  (14) A pair of lovers who try several times to kiss, and each
  time are interrupted by the entrance of some one or by the ringing
  of the doorbell or telephone-bell or something of the sort.

  (15) A bashful man and a not-bashful woman are seated on a bench
  or divan.  As the woman gradually edges up to the man, the man
  just as gradually edges away from her.

All these “laugh-getters” are known to the experienced as “high class”; that is, they may all be used upon the legitimate stage.  On the burlesque and vaudeville stages devices of a somewhat lower intellectual plane have established a permanent standing An authority on this phase of the subject is Mr. Frederick Wyckoff, who catalogues the following as a few of the tricks that make a vaudeville audience laugh: 

Open your coat and show a green vest, or pull out your shirt front and expose a red undershirt.  Another excellent thing to do is to wear a shirt without sleeves and pull off your coat repeatedly. [1]

[1] Such ancient methods of winning laughs, however, belong to vaudeville yesterdays.  It should be remembered that Mr. Nathan, who bore the labor of writing this excellent article, is blessed with a satirical soul—­which, undoubtedly, is the reason why he is so excellent and so famous a dramatic critic.

  Ask the orchestra leader if he is married.

  Have the drummer put in an extra beat with the cymbals, then
  glare at him.

  Always use an expression which ends with the query, “Did he not?”
  Then say, “He did not.”

The men who elaborated this kind of thing into a classic are Messrs. Weber and Fields.  They are the great presiding deities of “slap-stick” humor.  They have capitalized it to enormous financial profit.  They claim that Mr. Fields’ favorite trick of poking his forefinger periodically in Mr. Weber’s eye is worth a large fortune in itself.  A peculiarity of this kind of humor is that it finds its basis in the inflicting of pain.  A painful situation apparently contains elements of the ridiculous so long as the pain is not actually of a serious nature.  Here, too, the stage merely mirrors life itself.  We laugh at the person who falls on the ice, at the man who bumps against a chair or table in the dark, at the headache of the “morning after,” at the boy who eats green apples and pays the abdominal penalty, at the woman whose shoes are so tight they hurt her, at the person who is thrown to the floor by a sudden lurch of a street-car, and at the unfortunate who sits on a pin.  A man chasing his rolling hat