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The contrast between your private cir cumstances and your political professions will serve to draw attention to you . . . 5) To be invited to tea with Mr. Vishinsky is a triumph, as is a smile won from Mr. Nehru or from Marshal Tito; but political exiles must ever be anathema to you. Nor should any opportunity ever be missed of taking a sly dig at Americans and their policies. Indeed, potential allies everywhere should be treated as somewhat ludicrous, if not downright despicable." Laughs, Not Sniggers. Muggeridge is also dead set against the kind of whimsy, long a Punch specialty, with which "the middle classes try to comfort themselves that the world hasn't changed, that all things that happen are only funny vari ants on what happened before. It's a no tion that all immense social events of recent time can be translated into whimsical facetiousness. It's phony . . . It's a nervous snigger rather than a laugh." In producing laughs instead of sniggers, Muggeridge has also stirred up protests from readers that Punch's lampooning is in bad taste. He is not worried. "Good taste and humor," says he, "are a contra diction in terms, like a chaste whore. I think Punch's ban on sex is wrong, be cause I think sex is funny ... I will gently move towards more sex. If it's genuinely funny, in it goes." Thus far Muggeridge's new Punch is paying off. In the last six months, circulation has risen by 6,000 (to 139,677), the first increase in six years, and last week World Press News, the British trade weekly, noticed a "wonderfully fresh vitality [in] Punch."