▲ child asks his mother if Christmas always comes in August.

"No, dear," she answers, "but remember you havo leukemia."

Or this dialogue:

"Ma, can I watch television?"

"Shut up and study your Braille."

Others enlarge even more cruelly on the themes of cancer, polio, leprosy and loss of limbs. New York's newest form of this party play consists of solemnly reading official reports of a disabling accident case from a city's safety bulletin, with the merrymakers then making appropriate or "inappropriate" comments.

That morbid "jokes" are told does not surprise the psychiatrists, since death and bloodshed have always had an unhealthy popular appeal. What really worries them is that the new humor is so calculated in its nastiness. Also, the experts ponder the big why why the listeners laugh.

·

Dr. Eugene J. Braun, a New York psychiatrist, feels that the jokes are a reflection of the times.

-

"The emphasis in psychiatry today has shifted from sex to a new area sadism The most common neurotic problems now have to do with power and dominance. The sadistic person enjoys inflicting power by hating or hurting some one. These jokes, which can hurt people, are simply one manifestation of this tendency."

SEX JOKES ARE PASSE

"There's no more fun in sexual jokes," Dr. Braun said. "People don't mind them so much any more.

Dr. Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist who is also an authority on juvenile problems, agrees that ours is an age of violence and that outcropping of this type of joke at this particular time is further evidence of the fact. He points ut t the amount of violence seen in movies and on televisi and in our literaturo.