Hokum

Recently that publication [Collier's Weekly] has been filling its readers with the good old hokum about red likker and its steady disappearance, and if what has been offered be but half true, beer, light wine and all of the other beverages which have been tabooed by law, are on their way to that place where nothing returns.

Being in a mood of constructive criticism, I suggest that all future student conferences be made strictly social affairs. All addresses, forum discussions, patriotic service, and other hocums, as such, shall be done away with. Outside of a handful of persons, who either had to or did not know any better, everybody shunned the non-social events.

I think we have learned to beware of these political charlatans. We have enough horse sense to neutralize their hokum. But let's start right now to take their hokum apart and show up its component elements for just what they are—the siren songs of demagogy.

It is pure hocum, this language that they want more police officers, and they vetoed it over the lack of funding in this account. It is just a pure political thing.

The majority of the twenty-six stunts described in this volume belong to a species of so-called hokum acts derived from the professional stage and handed down through several generations of actors.

Every experienced playwright, every manager, every stage director, every intelligent actor who has passed his novitiate, knows of things that always have received a certain definite response. Many of these have been formulated. In the sad, glad days of prosperous melodrama they were known as "sure-fire hokum." [...] The "sure-fire hokum" of murderous melodrama encompassed, in a crudely elemental form it is true, nearly all the essentials of success in dramatic situation, most of the values that make popular favor for a play.

Probably nowhere else do the popular playmakers of Broadway reveal their imaginative shortcomings so clearly as in the employment of what is colloquially known as hokum. In particular, comedy hokum. [...] Year in and year out, and (though still largely sure-fire) become drably stereotyped and threadbare, this hokum of tripping over the doormat, throwing an imaginary object into the wings and having the stagehand thereupon strike a gong, and the like, is promulgated in all the glory of its venerable whiskers.

The "classy" stuff is pretty to talk about, it furnishes inspiration for the dramatic writer, but it is the hocum, the jazbo, what vaudeville styles "comedy acts," which please an audience.