Objections to laughter

Title

Creator

Lynd, Robert

Language

English

Year

1968

Subject

Laughter.

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Condensed from The Atlantic Monthly, March 1930.

Fulltext

OBJECTIONS TO LAUGHTER “Laughter” is a word, we are told by the philologists, that is a distant cousin of Greek words meaning “to cluck like a hen,” and also “to croak.” But we need go no further than our every day speech to haVe it brought home to us that when we laugh we do some thing that puts us on a level with, the lower animals. We say of a laughing human be ing that he “bellows” or “roars” or “cackles” or “crows” or “whinnies.” We say of one man that he "laughs like a hyena” and of another that he has a “horse laugh.” Perhaps it was their real ization of the essential ani mal nature of laughter that led so many philosophers, saints, and authorities on be havior to condemn it. Plato, for instance, declares that the guardians of the state ought not to be given to laughter, and that persons of worth must never be represented as being overcome by laugh ter. As for the saints, though many of them have been cheerful men, few of them have been conspicuous for their hilarity. Some of them have even thought it was a sin to laugh, believing, with Saint Basil, that laughter was the one bodily affection that the Founder of the Christian religion “does not seem to have known.” Among more wordly au thorities on behavior we find the same thing. Lord Ches terfield, the greatest English gentlemen who ever left de tailed instructions as to be havior, declares emphatically in one of his passages that a man who wishes to be re garded as a gentleman must avoid laughter above all things. Everyone knows the passage in which he warns his son: “Lord laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh, since the creation of the August 1968 35 world. A man of fashion and parts is, therefore, only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.” In a fur ther letter, Lord Chesterfield writes: I am neither a melan choly nor a cynical dispo sition; and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as any body; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh. But it is not only the phi losophers, the saints, and the authorities on manners who have belittled laughter. That the ordinary man cares lit tle for laughter can, I think, be easily proved. Consider, for one thing, literature. Today three out of four of our best-sellers are writers who depend for their effect scarcely at all upon humor. I do not for get that Dickens, the perma nent best-seller of English literature, was a humorist as well as a. tragic sentimen talist. But, taking a general view of popular literature, we shall be safe in affirm ing that it is easier to be come a best-seller with a book that does not contain a single laugh than with a book that, in the language of the reviewers, contains a “laugh on every page.” No novelist ever suceeded in be coming immortal through alone. And even master pieces of comedy are most ardently appreciated, not for comic, but for serious rea sons. Laughter cannot play more than a small part in a man’s life. The very essence of laughter is surprise and a break in the monotonous continuity of our thoughts or our experience. It is a physical appreciation of the suprising things of life, such as the spectacle of a man falling suddenly on ice, or sitting down on the floor in stead of a chair. Such things makes us laugh, of course, only if the results are not too serious. If a man died as a result of any of these accidents, nobody but a sa vage would think it funny, however, suprised he might be. What makes us laugh is a mixture of the shock at an accident that looks as it might be serious and the realization that it is after all only a hundreth part as serious as it might have been. Panorama We can see, then, why saints and Utopian philoso phers are on the whole hos tile or indifferent to laugh ter. The saint and the Uto pian philosopher have a vi sion of a perfect world in which accidents do not hap pen. Laughter is a confes sion of the sins and silliness of the world, but it is also a kind of genial acquiescence in these sins and sillinesses. To the saint, the stumblings of man are tragic, proving that he is not yet an angel. To men and women with a sense of humor, the stum blings of man — even on his way to perfection — are largely comic, proving that he is only a human being after all. We may deplore, if we like, the saint’s lack of humor, but in this I think we may be wrong. He has a vision that we have not. Our sense of humor is only a compensation for our lack of vision. We should never have possessed it if we had remained in Eden. It is the grace of our disgrace — a consolation prize given to a race excluded from Paradise. Laughter, even when salt ed with derision or bitter ness, is a form of play. As with play of all sorts, one of its chief function is to saints and Utopian philosoing formulae of our daily lives. Comedy gives us, in deed, a new and surprising pattern of life — a pattern that is a lampoon on the pattern to which we are ac customed. Mrs. Malaprop breaks the pattern of the or dinary use of words, and as a result her “allegory on the banks of the Nile” still sets the theater in a roar. Lear in his nonsense verses breaks the pattern of intelligible speech, and we love his non sense because he enables us to escape for the moment from the iron rule of sense. People do not laugh when a cock crows, but I have heard the gallery laughing uproariously when a man in the audience imitated a cock crowing — he was breaking the pattern of human beha vior. The amusement many people get from talking and performing animals may be explained in the same way. The parrot that swears is not behaving according to the monotonous rules of bird life. Lord George Sanger amused thousands of people some years ago by introduc ing into his circus an oyster that smoked a pipe. This August 1968 37 would not have been amus ing but for the fact that oysters do not, as a rule, smoke. All the comic writers from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, from Swift to Lewis Carroll, have broken the pattern for us in a comparable way. They have taken us when we were tired of looking at life as though it were a series of demonstrable theories in Euclid, and have torn all those impressive triangles and circles into small pieces, and have dipped them in color and put them into a kaleido scope. Laughter, then, springs largely from the lawless part of our nature. Hilarity is a kind of heresy — a cheerful defiance of all the laws. At the same time a reasonable defense of laughter may be founded on the fact that men who are lawless in this way are not the greatest lawbreakers. Murderers and thieves are, for the most part, serious men who might have remained law-abiding citizens if only they had had a great er capacity for laughing. It would be going too far to claim that all laughers are virtuous men and all non laughers criminals. But it is probably true that the laughing man, if he is vir tuous, will as a result of his laughter be less offensively virtuous, and if he is vicious he will be less offensively vicious. Laughter gives a holiday both to the virtues and to the vices. The worst thing that can be said against laughter is that, by putting us in a good humor, it enables us to tole rate ourselves. The best thing that can be said for it is that for the same reason it enables us to tolerate each other. — By Robert Lynd, condensed from The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1930 KISS When women kiss it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands. — H. L. Mencken 38 Panorama

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