"
One night Newgag drank two glasses of beer in rapid succession and looked
at me with a touching countenance.
"Old boy," he said, in his homely drawl, "I'm discouraged! I begin to think
I'm not in it!"
"Why, what's wrong?"
"Well, I've dropped to the fact that, after all these years in the
business, I can't make them laugh."
I was just about to say, "So you've just awakened to that?" but pity and
politeness deterred me. Every one else had known it, all these years.
Newgag, to be sure, should naturally have been, as he was, the last to
discover it.
Newgag thus went one step further than any comedian I have ever known.
Having detected his inability to amuse audiences, he confessed it.
People who know actors and read this will already have said that it is a
fiction, and that Newgag's admission is false to life. Not so; I am writing
not about comedians in general, but about Newgag.
That he had come to so exceptional a concession marked the depth of his
despair. I tried to cheer him.
"Nonsense, my boy! They give you bad parts. Go out of comic opera. Try
tragedy."
I had spoken innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting.
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