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Chapter I

I am going to suggest that there is something sinister in laughter. But by this I do not mean that it is necessarily bad. Many very desirable things have either had sinister beginnings, or else have their sinister side. Nevertheless, when we know the sinister side of laughter, although we may not, like Henry I., dismiss it for ever from our gamut of expressions, at least we shall be in a position to understand its function and the meaning of the present high esteem in which humour is held.
        Before I concentrate on the main theme, however, I should like to illustrate my use of two terms — "superior adaptation" and "unconscious" by a few examples.
        In the Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, which some have ascribed to Homer, a mouse, stopping on the bank of a pond to drink, is invited by a frog to pay him a visit. The mouse consents and mounts the frog's back to go to the latter's castle. In the middle of the pond, however, an otter frightens the frog, who dives, and the mouse is left to drown. Now, from the moment the mouse mounts the frog's back, it is the frog, in spite of his inferior position, who enjoys, as compared with the mouse, superior adaptation in

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the sense in which I am going to use the term in this book.
        In La Fontaine's fable of The Fox and the Stork, you will remember that a fox invites a stork to dinner and offers the food in two flat platters, from which he alone is in a position to eat the food. By way of retaliation the stork then returns the invitation and offers the food in two narrow-necked vases into which he alone can introduce his long, slender beak. At the first meal it is the fox, and at the second the stork, who enjoys superior adaptation in the sense in which I propose to use the term.
        A man who has only one glove in a company of people all of whom have their complement of gloves, a man who is left on the pavement in the rain to wait for the next omnibus while those in front of him fill the one that has just driven up, and a man who loses his hat in the wind while those about him do not — each of these men is in a position of inferior adaptation, while those about him, or in front of him in the case of the omnibus, enjoy superior adaptation in the sense given to the term in this book.
        The term "unconscious" I shall use in the sense usually meant when people speak of blinking by an "unconscious" reaction when an arm or stick is suddenly raised in front of them. The sense in which I propose to use it is also well illustrated by an incident in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. There, one of the male characters is tracked down by spies to a certain inn. But they find that the only guest at the inn is a woman. One of them, suspecting that the woman is really a man in disguise, tries the ruse

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of flinging a coin into her lap, and from the spontaneous closing of her knees (a reaction that would not be spontaneous in a woman accustomed to skirts and the obstruction they would offer to a falling coin) he concludes that the woman, as he suspected, is really a man in disguise. The spontaneous closing of the knees was the man's "unconscious" response, in my present sense.
        Now one of the main difficulties in investigating the meaning of laughter consists in the great variety of circumstances in which a laugh seems a suitable expression. For instance:
        (a) A small child, hard pressed by a pursuer, laughs when it reaches safety in the folds of its mother's dress. There is nothing obviously funny or humorous, however, in running to safety.
        (b) A young woman, knowing herself to be well dressed, smiles constantly, and laughs at the slightest provocation. There is nothing obviously funny or humorous about being well dressed. On the contrary, it is often more funny and humorous not to be well dressed.
        (c) We are told that the gods on Olympus burst into loud laughter when they saw Hephæstos hobbling lamely from one to another offering them nectar. Hephæstos was the crippled ugly god.
        (d) We are told that David Garrick once broke down in a tragic scene because he was laughing so much at a man in the front who, owing to the heat, had placed his wig on his dog's head.
        (e) Children and some adults laugh to see Harlequin belabouring the clown.

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        (f) Some people laugh to hear other people speaking a foreign language, or speaking their own language in an odd way. Much of the success of Harry Lauder in London was due to this human peculiarity.
        (g) Many people have difficulty in not laughing at someone who loses his hat in the wind and proceeds to grope about for it, at great personal risk, under the bonnets of cars and the heads of horses.
        (h) On the other hand, that same person will laugh while he is trying to recover his hat, and will look anxiously and laugh at those near him when he first loses it.
        (i) Once on a damp, greasy day, in Old Bond Street, where the pavement has two different levels, a smartly-dressed woman, evidently unfamiliar with the two levels, fell in front of me. Her handbag dropped on the flags and sprang open, money rolled in all directions, and I noticed that her white gloves, her silk stockings and the skirt of her dress were badly soiled. And yet, the whole time that I and a few others assisted her to her feet and helped her to recover her property, she never once stopped laughing. Now it cannot be funny or humorous to fall and soil one's clothes in the street.
        (j) We laugh when we inhale nitrous oxide.
        (k) We also laugh at a mere absurdity, as, for instance, when we are told that two lions, kept in adjoining cages, broke through the partition separating them, and in their fury mauled each other until only the tips of their tails were left.
        (l) Again, the more dignified the person is who has a fall, the more we laugh. A ragged, bedraggled

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tramp falling in the dust or mud is not nearly as funny as one of His Majesty's judges, or a bishop performing the same antic.
        Sydney Smith, writing over a hundred years ago, gives a curious instance of this. He says:
        "If a tradesman of a corpulent and respectable appearance, with habiliments somewhat ostentatious, were to slide gently into the mud and decorate a pea-green coat, I am afraid we should have the barbarity to laugh. If his hat and wig, like treacherous servants, were to desert their fallen master, it certainly would not diminish our propensity to laugh. . . . But if instead of this we were to observe a dustman falling into the mud, it would hardly attract any attention." 1
        (m) We never laugh at a horse, a child or an old woman who falls. 2
        (n) We laugh when we are embarrassed. In fact, the typical mannerism of all timid and ill-adapted young people on the stage is a perpetual simper or laugh.
        (o) We laugh at any mishap that may occur to a performer on the stage. Voltaire actually said: "I have noticed that a whole theatre audience never laughs loudly as one man except when a mishap occurs to one of the performers." 3
        Once, I believe it was at the Coliseum, I saw Sir Frank Benson walk on to recite a speech from one of Shakespeare's historical plays. He was in the garb of some ancient knight or noble, and as he approached the footlights he tripped over his long sword. The whole audience rocked with laughter, and although he bravely shouted the speech he had to deliver,

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nothing would compose the house to seriousness, and at last he had to retire discomfited.
        (p) We laugh at schoolboy howlers. But — and this is most important — we only laugh if the howler is one which our own unaided knowledge enables us to recognise as such. When we hear a schoolboy refer to the bridge spanning the Menai Straits as a "tubercular bridge," we may laugh. We may also laugh when we hear him describe an oculist as a fish with long legs. When, however, the howler concerns some science or language with which we are not familiar, we cannot laugh, except out of courtesy to the interpreter, even when the howler is carefully explained to us. Why is a mistake we know of our own knowledge to be a mistake, funny, and a mistake we know through someone else's knowledge to be a mistake, not funny?
        (q) We laugh at a pun.
        (r) We laugh more heartily and loudly at a joke or a pun in a foreign language, which we happen to understand, than at a joke of equal merit in our own language. De Quincey 4 thought that many scholars had, as the result of a like infirmity, grossly exaggerated the value of certain classical writers.
        (s) We laugh when tickled.
        (t) We smile or laugh when we meet a friend. But even when an enemy passes and we are in company, we also take care to smile or laugh, to indicate to the enemy that we are no worse off for his absence from our circle.
        (u) Although a joke may be really funny, we rarely if ever think it so if it is against ourselves.

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        An instance of this occurred at the Law Courts a few years ago, in the case of Captain Wright versus Lord Gladstone.
        Mr. Norman Birkett, counsel for Lord Gladstone, cross-examining Captain Wright, said: "Did you see the daily papers on July 28th?" Captain Wright said: "No."
        Mr. Birkett suggested that the reading-room of the Club would contain all the London daily newspapers — he could have seen them there.
        Captain Wright retorted: "I am a journalist, not a barrister. I don't rush to the papers to see if my name is in them."
        There was some laughter and Mr. Justice Avory remarked: "There is nothing funny in that." 5
        Evidently some people present did think it funny. Mr. Justice Avory could not, however, because, being a member of the legal profession, and having been a barrister, he could not enjoy a joke which exalted journalists at the expense of the dignity of his own calling.
        (v) When we slip in trying to reach a platform, or knock our heads by accident in front of a crowd, we provoke loud laughter; but it offends us to be laughed at. Even animals, according to some people, are annoyed at being laughed at. 6
        (w) We laugh at a surprise, or an expectation that ends in nothing. Many investigators have believed this kind of laugh to be the only kind.
        (x) We laugh at an incongruity (Schopenhauer's example under (k)).
        (y) We laugh at a good nonsense picture by Lear or Bateman.

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        (z) We laugh at mere caricature.
        (A) We laugh at disguises.
        (B) We laugh when others laugh.
        (C) We laugh at a good ruse, a good trick, a good case of diamond cut diamond, and at a witticism.
        (D) We laugh at good mimicry or imitation.
        (E) We laugh in what we conceive to be an intellectual way, when, in a public debate, one disputant cracks a joke against his opponent, and we then regard the disputant who has had the joke cracked against him as defeated in the argument.
        (F) We laugh at mere indecencies, or at scenes, reference and stories actually indecent, bordering on the indecent, or reminiscent of the indecent, on the stage, in books, and in daily life. Men, after dinner, when the ladies have retired, habitually laugh at indecent and salacious stories.
        I have now given thirty-two examples of laughter, in which the expression is associated with different circumstances. There seems, at first glance, to be very little connexion between these various laughs — between, for instance, the laugh of embarrassment, the exaggerated laugh at the joke in a foreign language, and the laugh provoked by nitrous oxide; but seeing that all the examples I have given provoke the same expression — laughter — it would seem that some common factor must connect them, and that if we find this common factor, we shall know the nature of laughter and what causes it.
        I have deliberately omitted the laughter of hysteria and the laughter of insanity resulting from the methodical feet-tickling which is alleged to be a form

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of torture among the Chinese. This I did because both are morbid, and not enough is known about them to enable a description of the mental processes involved to be made. The abuse of a normal reaction in the case of methodical and persistent feet-tickling may or may not lead to insanity; but if it does it would have no more to do with normal laughter than the production of tears by the stimulus of a freshly-cut onion has to do with normal weeping. It would come under the head of mechanical stimulus and purely mechanical reaction, it would not interest us as enquirers into the nature and function of laughter as a social expression, and would be explained along the lines of Herbert Spencer's Physiology of Laughter. As to hysterical laughter, we know that it is commonly associated with sex-repression or sex-starvation — hence the implied sex-connexion in the name. But whether the hysterical fit of laughter is provoked by an exalted state of mind, by a consciousness of increased power, or not, we do not know. I suspect that it is.
        It is obvious that unless we can discover an explanation or definition of laughter that will account for all the kinds of laughter I have enumerated, it will not be an explanation or definition at all. Even to leave one example of normal laughter out would suffice to ruin the definition.
        What has been done by thinkers and philosophers in the past about the matter?

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