The _mot de caractère_, the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unconsciously, “giving himself away,” as the American phrase is, this is not to be confounded with that ancient stage-trick, the catch-word, repeated again and again with the hope and expectation that it will become more laughable the more often it is heard. The catch-word may be effective when it is used with artful discretion; but it is a dangerous device likely at last to annoy a large part of the audience. Since Corporal Nym companions Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives’ as well as in ‘Henry IV’ we may infer that he had found favor in the eyes of the spectators at the Globe, or else Shakspere would not have carried him over from play to play; and yet modern audiences soon weary of Nym’s inability to open his mouth without letting fall the word _humor_. “That’s the humor of it” is not at all humorous to-day. But even the catch-word, said once and said again, and then said yet once more, may be made to serve as a _mot de caractère_, as a revelation of character. In Molière’s ‘Fourberies de Scapin,’ when the befooled father is told that his beloved son has rashly adventured himself on board a Turkish galley and has been seized and held for ransom, his reiterated query,—“But what the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is increasingly mirth-provoking because it is exactly the futile protest which that foolish parent would put forth again and again in that particular predicament. In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter. When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”