The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1904-02-14
FOUR PROMINENT
NEW YORK MEN
Tom Mason of Life, Bourke Cochran and His
Triumphs, James Dill. Father of Trusts.
and Recorder Goff

New York, Feb. 13.-Special-Fou
mon. we'll known, but not often of late
nroninent in the news, have been the
epbiect of considerable newspaper talk
within the last few days.
They are Tom Mason, the humor-
;st. John w. Golf, the Recorder;
Rourke Cochran, the orator politician,
and James B. Dill, the corporation at
torney
nence was brought about through the
loss of his favorite dog and it's recov-
cry by his little daughter.
The child, who was heartbroken over
tbe animals disappearance, heard it's
cries from under the ground. Investi-
eating, she found that it had followed
q cat up a drain pipe and stuck there
If took half the town of Glen Ridge,
over in Jersey, where the humorist
lives a good many hours to get the
net out of its enforced hiding place,
and one of the papers thought the in
cident of sufficient Importance to de-
vote a column and quarters to
IT. Of course the temptation to treat
the lQclQenL III d nuIuOIOuS IIldHIleT
was too strong to let pass.
A Systematic Humorist.
Mr. Mason, who is now an associate
editor of Life, the satirical weekly, is
the finest example living of the system
attic humorist. He is in the neighbor-
hood of thirty-five, and although his
original bent was in the direction of
bookkeeping, there are only two or
three other humorous writer's who
make as good an income out of their
jokes to-day as he does.
In a way he. follows in the footsteps
of the late Philip H. WEIGH. WEIGH
was originally reporter Of the petro-
leum market in the days before the
Standard Oil practically monopolized
trading in petroleum.
When the change came about he
found his occupation gone and turned
10 joke writing, not because he was
naturally so very humorous, but be-
cause he could find nothing else to do.
He had learned that the secret of writ
ing jokes lay in the fact that it is the
incongruOus which makes the people
laugh. Therefore, wherever he went
he was looking for homogeneous situa-
tons, and listening to incongruous re-
marks, and he carried in his pocket
some little cards on which he jotted
down memoranda of the things he saw
and heard.
Thus, as matter of fact, he became
a reporter of the humorous in daily
life. He had the rare good sense to
put his reporting in the briefest pos
sible form, and he may be said to have
established the dialogue joke" He
has been called its inventor, but that is
not correct, because dialogue jokes
were written before he came on the
writing stage, but he certainly did fix
that form of the joke as a permanency
in the English language.
In one respect, however, Masson's
Shift from the commercial to the hui
morous field was unlike Welchs Mas
son was employed in the financial de-
partment of big newspaper syndicate.
Someone was wanted to select humor
from the newspapers; the president of
the syndicate, noticing that the young
bookkeeper often said bright things,
turned over the department to him. He
made 1t a success, and after a bit began
TO write little dialogue jokes and hui
morous verses, taking the tip from
WEIGH that incongruity is the soul of
humor.