For several years now we have had an Academy of Humorists that recruits from gay writers. If we are to believe Pélisson, who was a man of character, since he preferred to stay five years in the Bastille rather than betray Fouquet who had protected his beginnings, if we are to believe Pélisson, there was in Rome, in the sixteenth century, an Academy of Humorists constituted on the model of ours and which we owe to the initiative of the poet Georges Docquois.

But, in that of yesterday as in that of today, we have always had the greatest difficulty in defining humor, which the English, who invented the word, pronounce "ioumeur". The forty French humorists are successively called upon to give their definition. Yesterday, it was the turn of Mr. Miguel Zamacoïs, who is not only the author of the Fleur merveilleuse, so warmly applauded at the Théâtre-Français, but who is also one of our most witty fanciful storytellers.

- Humor, it seems to me, is a gigantic cerebral and verbal keyboard, which serves Truth to play four-handed with Fantasy to express its painful lessons and its boring sermons, which serves it to adorn with an attractive accompaniment "graziose con spirito" the abstraction of its morality and its philosophy; to embellish with smiling arabesques "allegro affectuoso" "scherzando furioso" the banality of simple daily observation and the dreaded suggestions of logic and common sense. It is Truth which, in this concert, plays the necessary, inexorable and penetrating bass; it is Fantasy which embroiders the seductive melody, and it seems to me that this close association of the useful and the pleasant is Humor.

It is perhaps a little long and it is not decisive. It is generally agreed that humor is not the same as cheerfulness or irony. A comedian is not obliged to make people laugh, but he must at least make them smile, and you see the difference. The clown in the circus must provoke laughter loudly, but the comedian in literature is the one who brings a discreet smile. The English define it as comic cheerfulness. We give it another meaning.

Humor requires good-natured, mischievous and not mean verve. Alphonse Allais was the model of the genre; Willy has never been equaled in humorous criticism. Courteline is generally considered a great humorist and Tristan Bernard too. Pierre Weber, a humorist in his spare time, wrote: "Humor is the art of pinching without laughing, while cheerfulness is the art of laughing without pinching."

In politics, the one who had found. this formula that vaudeville can claim "Increase spending by asking less from the taxpayer and more from the tax", was a humorist. Mr. Louis Marsolleau brought this definition a few years ago "Humor is misfortune that amuses itself instead of being sorry for it. If there had been a humorist on the raft of the Medusa, he would have made words of hunger.

At the beginning of the war, Lucien Descaves told this story, true, it seems, but of superb humor:

It is in a trench; the order has been given to climb the parapet and run to the assault. A Parisian soldier, leading his neighbors, says to them: well! do you think we will have war? ....

JEAN-BERNARD.