pictures.

Therefore, in selecting material the monologue writer should choose
those gags and points that can be told in pictures, and every word
he uses should be a picture-word.

5. Smoothness and Blending

A monologue--like the thin-model watch mentioned--is made up of
many parts. Each part fits into, the other--one gag or point
blends perfectly into the following one--so that the entire monologue
seems not a combination of many different parts, but a smoothly
working, unified whole.

Count the number of different points there are in "The German
Senator" and note how each seemingly depends on the one before it
and runs into the one following; you will then see what is meant
by blending. Then read the monologue again, this time without the
Panama Canal point--plainly marked for this exposition--and you
will see how one part can be taken away and still leave a smoothly
reading and working whole.

It is to careful blending that the monologue owes its smoothness.
The ideal for which the writer should strive is so to blend his
gags and points that, by the use of not more than one short sentence,
he relates one gag or point to the next with a naturalness and
inevitableness that make the whole perfectly smooth.

We are now, I think, in a position to sum up the theory of the
monologue. The pure vaudeville monologue, which was defined as a