A Book of Burlesques Part 25

LOVE-AT-FIRST-SIGHT. A labor-saving device.

LOVER. An apprentice second husband; victim No. 2 in the larval stage.

MISOGYNIST. A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

MARTYR. The husband of a woman with the martyr complex.

MORALITY. The theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

MUSIC-LOVER. One who can tell you offhand how many sharps are in the key of C major.

OPTIMIST. The sort of man who marries his sister's best friend.

OSTEOPATH. One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory is to be found in the heads of those who believe it.

PASTOR. One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.

PATRIOTISM. A variety of hallucination which, if it seized a bacteriologist in his laboratory, would cause him to report the streptococcus pyogenes to be as large as a Newfoundland dog, as intelligent as Socrates, as beautiful as Mont Blanc and as respectable as a Yale professor.

PENSIONER. A kept patriot.

PLAt.i.tUDE. An idea (_a_) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (_b_) that is not true.

POLITICIAN. Any citizen with influence enough to get his old mother a job as charwoman in the City Hall.

POPULARITY. The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

POSTERITY. The penalty of a faulty technique.

PROGRESS. The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and G.o.d.

PROHIBITIONIST. The sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

PSYCHOLOGIST. One who sticks pins into babies, and then makes a chart showing the ebb and flow of their yells.

PSYCHOTHERAPY. The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a d.a.m.ned fool.

QUACK. A physician who has decided to admit it.

REFORMER. A hangman signing a pet.i.tion against vivisection.

REMORSE. Regret that one waited so long to do it.

SELF-RESPECT. The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

SOB. A sound made by women, babies, tenors, fas.h.i.+onable clergymen, actors and drunken men.

SOCIALISM. The theory that John Smith is better than his superiors.

SUICIDE. A belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.

SUNDAY. A day given over by Americans to wis.h.i.+ng that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in h.e.l.l.

SUNDAY SCHOOL. A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

SURGEON. One bribed heavily by the patient to take the blame for the family doctor's error in diagnosis.

TEMPTATION. An irresistible force at work on a movable body.

THANKSGIVING DAY. A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

THEOLOGY. An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.

TOMBSTONE. An ugly reminder of one who has been forgotten.

TRUTH. Something somehow discreditable to someone.

UNIVERSITY. A place for elevating sons above the social rank of their fathers. In the great American universities men are ranked as follows: 1. Seducers; 2. Fullbacks; 3. Booze-fighters; 4. Pitchers and Catchers; 5. Poker players; 6. Scholars; 7. Christians.

VERDICT. The _a priori_ opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.

VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read.

WART. Something that outlasts ten thousand kisses.

WEALTH. Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

WEDDING. A device for exciting envy in women and terror in men.

WIFE. One who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

WIDOWER. One released on parole.

WOMAN. Before marriage, an _agente provocateuse_; after marriage, a _gendarme_.

WOMEN'S CLUB. A place in which the validity of a philosophy is judged by the hat of its prophetess.

YACHT CLUB. An asylum for landsmen who would rather die of drink than be seasick.

_XII.--THE OLD SUBJECT_

_XII.--The Old Subject_

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