This book was written while on holiday some three thousand miles away from data, documents, and means of verification. It is written from memory and, although I have had time and have tried to check up, I feel sure that the safest thing is to let it go as cautious merchants do when they send out statements—with the caveat: E. and O. E.—errors and omissions excepted. 

For fifteen years there has existed in the United States, and in the United States alone, a form of entertainment which, seemingly without sources in the past, restored to us a kind of laughter almost unheard in modern times. It came into being by accident; it had no pretensions to art. For ten years or more it added an element of cheerful madness to the lives of millions and was despised and rejected by people of culture and intelligence. Suddenly—suddenly as it appeared to them—a great genius arose and the people of culture conceded that in his case, but in his case alone, art existed in slap-stick comedy; they did not remove their non expedit from the form itself.

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