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IMPASSE . . . One of Kansas City's larger downtown stores employs as op' erators rather elderly gentlemen who seem particularly adapted to the large slow cages which lift the customer from floor to floor if the customer has patience enough. During a recent rush hour, we squeezed into the elevator just as it was ready to ascend. "Up!" warned the elderly gentleman. A frenzied lady dashed up to the door. "Down?" she queried. Another couple arriving at that moment asked, "Down?" The operator hesitated the fraction of a second. Someone on the elevator got the wrong idea. "Down?" she asked. Another lady stepped inside. "Up?" she said. "Up?" said another late arrival. Inside and outside the adverbs began to fly — "Down?" "Up?" "Down?" The gentleman at the helm, bewildered by the power of suggestion, suddenly asked in earnest exasperation, "Well, which way ara I going!"
ANY OLD PORT . . . Thru the mail just the other day we received a report from Arkansas on one of the various clubs tenanted by soldiers stationed at a particular camp: "Ports of Call, Camp Robinson, Arkansas; USA: Large gloomily lit room, where you are not likely to get lit. Newly decorated with artificial walnut. The beer flows like whine. When we dropped in, two gifted young ladies were doing an adagio in the middle of the floor without partners. Prices are moderate. Pin ball machine for two — 10c. Peanuts, smgle order, 5c."
MUCH OF A MUCHNESS (DRUM SOLO FOR CECIL) . . .There's a familiar old circus routine which seems to us the perfect illustration for a certain technical aspect of comedy. A coupe (before the war, always the latest model from some display floor) will come bouncing into
the arena and one clown will get out. Well, there's nothing so remarkable about that. But then another clown gets out. Still nothing funny. Then another emerges, and another, and another — until something like twenty-eight clowns have crawled, one at a time, out of that threepassenger car. And by that time, we're in the aisles! There's a story by Erskine Caldwell that works on the same principle, which we call "so much of a muchness." His story is "A Country Full of Swedes" — a classic of its kind. It has that sort of accumulative funnyness where the humor lies not in any individual line or character so much as in the totality of effect . . . And it's that principal that made so funny to us a one-sided conversation which a friend of ours heard on a street car not long ago. As nearly as she can reproduce it, it went something like this — and she jotted most of it down in her excellent shorthand:
"Listen, Cecil, why don't you get off this car? I don't wanna see you — I don't