Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 28 to 34. What drives moderately intelligent persons to put themselves up for acceptance or disparagement? In short, what sort of individual wants to be a comedian? When we hear the very word, what does the label suggest? Other professions, callings and occupations attract separate and distinct types of practitioner. Some stereotypes are so familiar as ...

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 28 to 34.

What drives moderately intelligent persons to put themselves up for acceptance or disparagement? In short, what sort of individual wants to be a comedian? When we hear the very word, what does the label suggest? Other professions, callings and occupations attract separate and distinct types of practitioner. Some stereotypes are so familiar as to be cheaply laughable examples from the world of travesty, among them absent-minded professors, venal lawyers, gloomy detectives and cynical reporters. But what corny characteristics do we attribute to comedians? To a man or woman, are they generally parsimonious, vulgar, shallow, arrogant, introspective, hysterically insecure, smug, autocratic, amoral, and selfish? Read their superficial stories in the tabloids and so they would appear.

Rather than look at the complete image, perhaps we need to explore the initial motives behind a choice of career. Consider first those who prefer a sort of anonymity in life, the ones who’d rather wear a uniform. The psychological make-up of individuals who actively seek to resign their individuality is apparent among those who surrender to the discipline of a military life. The emotional and intellectual course taken by those who are drawn to anonymity is easily observed but not easily deflected. They want to be told what to do and then be required to do it over and over again in the safety of a routine, often behind the disguises of a number of livery. If their egos ache with the need for recognition and praise, it’s a pain that must be contained, frustrated or satisfied within the rut they occupy. The mere idea of standing up in front of an audience and demanding attention is abhorrent.

Nor will we find our comics among the doormats and dormice, the meek. There's precious little comedy in the lives of quiet hobbyists, bashful scholars, hermits, anchorites and recluses, the discreet and the modest, ones who deliberately select a position of obscurity and seclusion. Abiding quietly in this stratum of society, somewhere well below public attention level, there is humour, yes, since humour can endure in the least favourable circumstances, persisting like lichen in Antarctica. And jokes. Many lesser-known comedy writers compose their material in the secret comers of an unassuming existence. I know of two, both content to be minor figures in the civil service, who send in topical jokes to radio and TV shows on condition that their real names are not revealed.

In both cases I’ve noticed that their comic invention, though clever, is based upon wordplay, puns and similar equivoques, never an aggressive comic observation of life. Just as there may be a certain sterility in the self-effacement of a humble life, so it seems feasible that the selection process of what’s funny is emasculated before it even commences. If you have no ginger and snap in your daily round, with little familiarity with strong emotions, it seems likely that your sense of fun will be limited by timidity to a simple juggling with language.

If the comedian’s genesis is unlikely to be founded in social submission, it’s also improbable among the top echelons of our civilisation. Once again, humour can be found among the majestic. Nobles and royals, statesmen and lawmakers, have their wits. Jokes and jokers circulate at the loftiest level of every advanced nation, but being high-born seems to carry no compulsion to make the hoi polloi laugh.

Some of our rulers do make us laugh but that’s not what they’re paid to do. And, so with the constricted comedy of those who live a constricted life, that which amuses them may lack the common touch.

Having eliminated the parts of society unlikely to breed funnymen, it’s to the middle ranks of humanity, beneath the exalted and above the invisible, that we must look to see where comics come from and why. And are they, like nurses and nuns, called to their vocation? As the mountain calls to the mountaineer and the pentameter to the poet, does the need of the mirthless masses summon forth funsters, ready to administer relief as their sole raison d’etre? We've often heard it said that someone’s a ’bom comedian’ but will it do for all of them or even most of them? Perhaps we like to think of our greatest jesters as we do our greatest painters and composers, preferring to believe that their gifts are inescapably driven to expression. But in our exploration of the comedy mind, hopefully finding some such, we are sure to find some quite otherwise.

[Source: PROFICIENCY TESTBUILDER 4 Edition, Macmillan, 2013]

Which word/phrase can be a substitution for “the hoi polloi”?