On the other hand, there is ample evidence to show that the rough jocosities of the teasing game are, as a rule, accepted in good part. The youth who bore the biting satire of the pandanus leaf seems to compare favourably in this respect with a London policeman, who recently complained in court of the soft attentions paid him by a lady of the East End in tickling some part of his official visage with her dainty feather. Sometimes we are distinctly told that jokes are taken in good part, so long as they are seen to be intended as such. So of the African Hottentots and Kafirs, according to the authority already quoted.[174] Of the Tahitians it is said that the jests played off at their expense are never taken in ill part.[175] It is evident that the rougher kinds of jocosity here described allow considerable scope for something of the spirit of superiority and contempt. One fears that this was felt to be present, for example, by the women victimised by the men’s coarse teasing. As with boys, so with savages, we may suppose that playful attack does not always respect its limits, but that now and again it allows itself {234} to be infected by the brutish element in man. Nor is this surprising when we remember how much of so-called humour in civilised men owes its piquancy to the same brutish ingredient. This attitude of superiority and contempt seems, as one might have expected, to be more apparent in what may be called the extra-tribal direction of jocosity, more particularly in the common laughter at members of other rival and possibly hostile tribes. In certain cases we are told that this is of the nature of mockery and ridicule. Among savages and early communities, writes one authority, when their chieftain sat in his hall with his warriors, they amused themselves by turning enemies and opponents into mockery, laughing at their weaknesses, joking on their defects, giving them nicknames, and so forth.[176] The savage—again like a boy—is apt to be a vain sort of fellow, and to think that his ways are a lot better than those of the rest of mankind. Hence he will, with something of contempt in his heart, laugh at the bungling efforts of men of another tribe to kill a turtle, and will give a nickname to the white man or take off with admirable mimicry some of his crazes, such as his passion for road-making or for bartering. Yet it would, I think, be an error to treat this laughter at the outsider as a form of serious ridicule, with its feeling of the corrective superior. It is, even when lightly touched with contempt, savage play, and has for its chief ingredient the love of fun, and that delight in the mere contemplation of what is foreign and odd which the savage shares with his ethnic betters.