Andre Charlot Prefers Smiling to Laughing Audience--Finds Automobile Manufacturers Unappreciative of His Revue

"Revues naturally fall into two classes, one which demands nothing of the audience but open eyes and attentive years, and the other which makes the audience meet it half-way," stated Andre Charlot, well known as the originator and producer of Charlot's Revues, to an interviewer who was still puffing after the arduous climb up the spiral stairway which twists from the floor back stage up toward the mase of curtains and back drops to the dressing rooms of the New Park Theatre.

"I always try to make the people who come to my shows think before they laugh. It's easy enough to get several teams of vaudeville men, a smattering of wise-cracks, and a chorus which isn't particular about the quantity of clothing it sports.

"I have always tried, however, to have my shows more than mere spectacles and collections of jokes. I like to make an audience laugh loudly and heartily, but I try also to make it smile. I smile is more closely related to the brain than a laugh is. I want to appeal to that part of a man which makes him smile. It means that the man must make some effort of his own. He can't remain just passive."

Sense of humor, while it varies in different places, is not dependent upon Nationality, the producer disclosed in reply to a question about the difference between. American and English audiences. A Boston audience, he declared, is much more like a London audience than one in Detroit. "Our show this year," he want on, "has been very well-received everywhere we went, except in Detroit. There, before audiences composed chiefly of bibulous automobile makers, our show was a flop. They just couldn't see it. I like to watch the people who are watching my shows and it is interesting to notice their reactions. Here, in Boston, now, in contrast to Detroit, the audiences seem to understand the show, and though it doesn't call for a brilliant mind to follow out show, we presuppose a certain amount of sophistication, intelligence, and education on the part of the people who come to see and hear our revue."