Suppose any reader of THE STRAND MAGAZINE with a normal sense of humour were asked, "What is the funniest picture you remember ever to have seen?" Would he not ransack his memory--would he not turn to the files of _Punch_, to the comic almanacs, to such examples of foreign pictorial humour as had chanced to come in his way--and end by declaring that it was impossible to make any selection at all in such a wilderness of mirth-provoking designs, or, having hit upon one, to find it, upon re-inspection, to be no longer as funny as he thought it at the time--years ago? But in quite a different case is another small class in the community. These are the authors and manufacturers of humorous pictures themselves. They, not only from having a special gift of comedy, but from having presumably studied, or been interested in, the work of other draughtsmen, might confidently be expected to know their own minds. And so to them the writer addressed the question, What was the funniest picture they had ever seen? What had a right to be considered a masterpiece of pictorial comedy? At the outset the writer must not forget to mention that a few years ago, in a confidential chat he had with the late Mr. Phil May, he was pleasurably surprised to learn the high esteem in which that gifted humorist held one of the earliest and greatest masters of pictorial comedy, James Gillray. [Illustration: "COMPANY SHOCKED AT A LADY GETTING UP TO RING THE BELL."--BY GILLRAY. SELECTED BY THE LATE MR. PHIL MAY AS THE BEST COMIC PICTURE]. "There is nobody to-day to touch him," were May's words. "Look at his sweep of line and his astonishing mastery over the grotesque and ridiculous. There are pictures so extraordinarily funny that you can't laugh--'too funny for words,' if you catch what I mean." As he spoke he turned to a folio containing several specimens of Gillray's drawings. One in particular was, if too funny for words, not too funny to be laughed at, for May's smile broadened enormously as he held it up for inspection--"Company Shocked at a Lady Getting Up to Ring the Bell." "Now, I call that funny," he said, "and it was, perhaps, a hundred times funnier a hundred years ago, when the characters were well-known people. There's nothing 'dates' so much as the average comic picture, especially a social caricature, but the fun of this is pretty fresh still." On the whole, most of Gillray's and Rowlandson's best work is a little too highly flavoured--too broad--for the taste of to-day.