Autograph Letter Signed G. Bernard Shaw, playwright, to [Frank] Rutter, art critic etc., about his unsuitability for a humorous article and humour itself.

Two pages, 4to, corrections and additions in his hand, fold marks, staining, some heavy, but text clear and complete. I am not a good subject for a humorous article, because I am supposed to be a humorist myself. Now you may confidently make it a rule never to touch subjects that are alreadyconsidered funny. You will find it easy to write an amusing imaginary interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury; but I defy you to make anyone laugh at an interview with Mark Twain. Mark made his reputation as a humorist with a description of a visit to the Holy Land. If The Innocents Abroad had been A Night at the Pantomime, nobody would have thought it as funny as the Pantomime. The only book of Dickens's that has not a smile in it is his Life of Grimaldi. In the same way, you will find me impossible as a comic subject. All the possible jokes at my expense have already been made for aL!lthey are worth by myself. If you doubt roe, try a few other interviews open to the same objection. Try one with Dan Leno or George Grossmith. You will find yourself floored at once. Then try one with Cannon Farrar or the chairman of the Necropolis Company. A funny interview with me is no use. You might perhaps screw some fun out of a burlesque of my proposal to build attractive houses for the middle classes outside London if you could invent sufficiently funny attractions for them; but even then you would have to persuade your readers that the proposal was a serious and important one before they would be amused by ridicule of it. If they start with the notion that I am not ~ious, they will think that anyone who makes fun of me is taken in by me. Nobody will thank you for making him laugh in a place where everybody is laughing, or at a person Who has already set everybody lau8hing at him: you must find a perfectly grave place and a perfectly grave subject. Excuse this lecture; but it may prove useful to you; for editors always set you wrong in this matter: they think that a funny article should be about something funny - just the opposite of the truth. A joke must be written on a clean sheet and not over some other joker's writing. Apparently unpublished.