I called the other afternoon on my old friend, Graves Moreland, the Anglo-American literary critic -- his mother was born in Ohio -- who lives alone in a fairy-tale cottage on the Upson Downs, raising hell and peacocks, the former only when the venerable gentleman becomes an angry old man about the state of literature or something else that is dwindling and diminishing, such as human stature, hope, and humor.

My unscientific friend does not believe that human stature is measurable in terms of speed, momentum, weightlessness, or distance from earth, but is a matter of the development of the human mind. After Gagarin became the Greatest Man in the World, for a nation that does not believe in the cult of personality or in careerism, Moreland wrote me a letter in which he said: ``I am not interested in how long a bee can live in a vacuum, or how far it can fly. A bee's place is in the hive.''

``I have come to talk with you about the future of humor and comedy,'' I told him, at which he started slightly, and then made us each a stiff drink, with a trembling hand.

``I seem to remember,'' he said, ``that in an interview ten years ago you gave humor and comedy five years to live. Did you go to their funeral?''

``I was wrong,'' I admitted. ``Comedy didn't die, it just went crazy. It has identified itself with the very tension and terror it once did so much to alleviate. We now have not only what has been called over here the comedy of menace but we also have horror jokes, magazines known as Horror Comics, and sick comedians. There are even publications called Sick and Mad. The Zeitgeist is not crazy as a loon or mad as a March hare; it is manic as a man.''