COMEDIAN Phil Baker may be just as funny as he likes - the funnier the better, in fact - when he is on the job. "But," says young and lovely Peggy Cartwright Baker, "I don't expect my husband to be the life of the party at home!"
Home, says petite Peggy, who married Phil seven years ago while her friends all gasped and demanded, "How in the world will you stand the strain!" is a place where her husband can relax, where he can be himself.
"If he ever feels like being amusing, we're ready for a laugh," she explains. "But we don't expect it all the time. Nor does he expect me to be geared for a laugh at the drop of a hat. And that is why there is no strain!
"It is strange how everyone has the idea that the wife of a comedian expects to find her husband returning home after a day's work brimming over with a new set of jokes ready to be sprung on her. After all, being a comedian is a profession. No one would expect an engineer to bring home new plans for a bridge for his wife to look over!"
THE truth of the matter, says Mrs. Baker, is that being funny quite easily may be a sad job and frequently she wonders how her husband can wake up to face a day of telling jokes and springing gags. Problems arise that are serious enough to make any husband and father of a family feel far from humorous. Sometimes one of the four Baker children is ill. But true to the trouper motto, "the show must go on."
"Many people wonder if a comedian's home life is one big gag after another. I can tell them that it isn't!" says Peggy. "I know that Phil gets a great deal of pleasure out of making thousands of people laugh, and I enjoy his pleasure and am proud of him for it. But he knows that he isn't expected to make his family laugh!"
Nevertheless, the wife of the famous comedian believes that all marriages require a certain amount of managing and accordingly, she polices domesticity in the Baker home with a set of rules of her own devising.
For one thing, Peggy believes that compromise is the surest rule for a happy marriage. A wife gives in to her husband's whim and he retaliates by catering to a desire of hers and so on. But it must be a sixty-forty arrangement, with the wife on the short end, when she makes no financial contribution toward maintaining the home.
"I believe all married women not engaged in work outside the home should tax themselves an extra ten per cent," Peggy declares. "Whether a man is a comedian, an actor or a businessman, he is under a strain every day and likely to be on the brink of irritability when he comes home. I think the least we wives can do is to keep ourselves from getting moody so there won't be two depressed people in the house!
"But one thing I do not do," confesses this smiling young woman, "is to bury myself in my home. There should be an outside life for every woman. I attend lectures, concerts and the theatre and manage to crowd welfare work into my program as well. Activity keeps you alive!"
ANOTHER of her clever rules provides for keeping as fashionable and attractive as finances permit in the belief that a man comes home after the day's work expecting to find the girl he married looking exactly as she did on their bridal day.
"I may add that I always am ready for my husband's kisses," says Peggy. "No doubt we are sentimental, but from the day we were married we have had the traditional goodbye kiss in the morning. And whenever he goes out of town to fill an engagement, I am always at the station to greet him with a big hug and kiss."
But most important of all Mrs. Baker's rules is the one which prohibits her from competing with her husband.
"I never have expected him to 'fall in the aisles' if I happen to say something funny," she reveals. "Living with a comedian never has taken the edge off anything that really was amusing, but I never have insisted that Phil had to listen to my repertoire of jokes. That part of the entertaining belongs to him."
The main thing about marriage, says Peggy, is "Know your man" and then learn to live with him whether he is a funny man or not. She, herself, maintains that being married to a funny man is fun; yet she makes it clear that she wouldn't care to have him funny all the time.
"I don't expect my husband to be the life of the party at home," says Mrs. Phil Baker.