comic cut

— The drunken man is always the comic cut in the terrible book of life, and an old soldier who knew Portsmouth well in those days, described to me how he had constantly seen men, in a hopeless state of muddled intoxication, climb the trees in Elm Grove under the delusion that they were going upstairs to bed , and on flinging their weary limbs on the imaginary couch come crashing down through the branches on the heads of unwary passers-by.