He follows the hero all over the world. This is rough on the hero.
What makes him so gone on the hero is that when they were boys together the hero used to knock him down and kick him. The comic man remembers this with a glow of pride when he is grown up, and it makes him love the hero and determine to devote his life to him.
He is a man of humble station--the comic man. The village blacksmith or a peddler. You never see a rich or aristocratic comic man on the stage. You can have your choice on the stage; you can be funny and of lowly origin, or you can be well-to-do and without any sense of humor.
Peers and policemen are the people most utterly devoid of humor on the stage.
The chief duty of the comic man's life is to make love to servant-girls, and they slap his face; but it does not discourage him;he seems to be more smitten by them than ever.
The comic man is happy under any fate, and he says funny things at funerals and when the bailiffs are in the house or the hero is waiting to be hanged.
This sort of man is rather trying in real life. In real life such a man would probably be slaughtered to death and buried at an early period of his career, but on the stage they put up with him.
He is very good, is the comic man. He can't bear villainy. To thwart villainy is his life's ambition, and in this noble object fortune backs him up grandly. Bad people come and commit their murders and thefts right under his nose, so that he can denounce them in the last act.
They never see him there, standing close beside them, while they are performing these fearful crimes.
It is marvelous how short-sighted people on the stage are. We always thought that the young lady in real life was moderately good at not seeing folks she did not want to when they were standing straight in front of her, but her affliction in this direction is as nothing compared with that of her brothers and sisters on the stage.
These unfortunate people come into rooms where there are crowds of people about--people that it is most important that they should see, and owing to not seeing whom they get themselves into fearful trouble, and they never notice any of them. They talk to somebody opposite, and they can't see a third person that is standing bang between the two of them.
You might fancy they wore blinkers.
Then, again, their hearing is so terribly weak. It really ought to be seen to. People talk and chatter at the very top of their voices close behind them, and they never hear a word--don't know anybody's there, even. After it has been going on for half an hour, and the people "up stage" have made themselves hoarse with shouting, and somebody has been boisterously murdered and all the furniture upset, then the people "down stage" "think they hear a noise."The comic man always rows with his wife if he is married or with his sweetheart if he is not married. They quarrel all day long. It must be a trying life, you would think, but they appear to like it.
How the comic man lives and supports his wife (she looks as if it wanted something to support her, too) and family is always a mystery to us. As we have said, he is not a rich man and he never seems to earn any money. Sometimes he keeps a shop, and in the way he manages business it must be an expensive thing to keep, for he never charges anybody for anything, he is so generous. All his customers seem to be people more or less in trouble, and he can't find it in his heart to ask them to pay for their goods under such distressing circumstances.
He stuffs their basket full with twice as much as they came to buy, pushes their money back into their hands, and wipes away a tear.
Why doesn't a comic man come and set up a grocery store in our neighborhood?
When the shop does not prove sufficiently profitable (as under the above-explained method sometimes happens to be the case) the comic man's wife seeks to add to the income by taking in lodgers. This is a bad move on her part, for it always ends in the lodgers taking her in.
The hero and heroine, who seem to have been waiting for something of the sort, immediately come and take possession of the whole house.
Of course the comic man could not think of charging for mere board and lodging the man who knocked him down when they were boys together!
