Humorous Hits and How to Hold an Audience A Collection of Short Selections, Stories and Sketches for All Occasions — A Closer Reading

Dialect as a Performance Tool

The excerpts lean heavily on dialect for comic effect. “Finnigin to Flannigan” by S. W. Gillinan uses phonetic spelling to render an Irish superintendent’s exasperation with a verbose subordinate: “Superintindent wuz Flannigan; Boss av the siction wuz Finnigin.” The humor depends on the reader’s ability to voice the brogue consistently. Similarly, “Dennis O’Shaughnessy’s Double” builds its climax around Dennis’s Irish-accented outburst: “Any wan o’ ye blatherin’ rascals that wants to fight, can come down an’ I’ll take any five o’ yez.” These pieces assume a performer who can sustain a dialect without lapsing into caricature. Kleiser’s compilation treats dialect not as mere novelty but as a technical challenge—one that rewards the speaker who masters rhythm and pronunciation.

The Performer’s Nightmare Made Flesh

Several selections directly dramatize the anxieties of public performance. In “Dennis O’Shaughnessy’s Double,” a speaker’s carefully memorized responses—numbered 1 through 4—are deployed in the wrong order, turning a toast into a fiasco. The audience’s reaction escalates from confusion to “a whirl of excitement,” and a gallery boy’s jeers (“How’s your mother?”) shatter the speaker’s composure. This piece functions as a cautionary tale embedded within a book meant to prevent such disasters. Kleiser’s own advice on “committing selections to memory” and “standing before an audience” directly addresses the same pitfalls the story illustrates. The collection thus mirrors its own purpose: it offers material while warning of the risks in using it poorly.

Compression and Comic Structure

“Romance of a Hammock” demonstrates a different structural approach: a courtship-to-regret narrative compressed into couplets of two or three words per line. The poem moves from “Shady tree—babbling brook, / Girl in hammock—reading book” to “Hour of midnight—baby squawking; / Man in bare feet—bravely walking.” The extreme brevity forces each line to carry a punch, and the final stanza—where a second man rides past but “keeps on riding—nary ‘mash’”—subverts the expected repetition. This piece, like the dialect poems, rewards a performer who can pace the delivery to land each short line as a discrete beat. Kleiser’s anthology favors such tight forms, suggesting a preference for material that builds quickly to a payoff.

Readers approaching this collection should treat it as a repertoire to be practiced aloud, not skimmed silently. The dialect pieces demand vocal commitment; the comic monologues require precise timing. Kleiser’s own introductory advice—on voice modulation, pausing, and gesture—provides a framework for testing each selection’s effectiveness. The book’s value lies less in its literary merit than in its practical utility for anyone who must stand before an audience and make them laugh.

That old collection of recitations stayed with me like a half-remembered train whistle—especially the quiet ache underneath all the comic bravado. It reminded me of Kleiser's performers, who grasp at connection through borrowed words. Then I found Mr. Petre — Context and Discussion, and that same loneliness surfaced again, softer, as if it had been waiting.