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Chapter II (a) The school of those who treat the matter superficially and think, as most ordinary people do, that there is no mystery and nothing sinister about laughter, and, (b) The school of those who go into the problem more deeply and think that, on the contrary, there is a mystery in the phenomenon of laughter and that it has its sinister side. Of the authors and thinkers who see no mystery in laughter or who, in any case, regard it either as wholly delightful and innocent, or at least as compatible with Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Bacon, Pascal, Voltaire, Sydney Smith, Smollett, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Hazlitt, Schopenhauer, Dickens, Carlyle, Professor Lipps, Emerson, Spencer, Ribot, Camille Mélinaud, Renouvier, A. Penjon, Dewey, Bergson and Freud. Lord Bacon is singularly jejune. He says: "In laughter there ever precedeth a concept of something ridiculous," 1 which amounts simply to saying that laughter is the expression provoked by the laughable. He adds that "the object of it is deformity, absurdity, shrewd turns and the like," but this is to state merely a fact of common experience without explanation. Pascal and Sir Philip Sidney sought the cause of laughter in a surprising disproportion between what one expects and what one sees. "Laughter almost ever commeth of thinges moste disproportioned to ourselves, and nature," said Sir Philip Sidney. 2 He certainly added that it "hath only a scornful tickling," and that "we laugh at deformed creatures," and "at mischaunces." But here again, although the field is wide, he gives us merely the facts of common experience, and without a particularly good generalisation. He seems, therefore, to belong more to the present than to the next section dealt with in Chapter III. "Nothing makes people laugh so much as a surprising disparity between what they expect and what they see," said Pascal. 3 In his eleventh Provinciale, 4 he also says that laughter can be a weapon for social discipline, and, therefore, that it may inspire fear and shame. But all this is too limited and leaves entirely Voltaire, who is quoted with great satisfaction by all whose chief concern it is rather to defend laughter and humour from any taint of "self-glory," than to discover what it really is, says: "Some men have argued that laughter is born of pride and that people imagine themselves superior to those they laugh at. True, man is a laughable creature; but he is also a proud creature. Pride, however, is not a cause of laughter. A child who roars with laughter does not indulge in this pleasure because he sets himself above those who make him laugh." 5 This, which is probably a thrust at Hobbes, and a most foolish one, because, as we shall see, Hobbes's "self-glory" is very much more profound than Voltaire suspects, is to state the case against the less superficial views of laughter, not merely with a lack of candour, but also with either the conscious or unconscious intention of confusing the issue. Because, although we may be compelled to agree with Voltaire so far, that a feeling of pride is not traceable in all laughter, we know that pride does enter into some laughter, and we also know that a child sometimes laughs out of pride, although not necessarily out of pride towards those "who make him laugh." Besides, we are still without any satisfactory explanation from Voltaire as to why the child, or anybody, laughs at all, or at anything in particular. To say, as he does, that "in laughter there is always an element of joyfulness incompatible with contempt If all laughter is joyfulness, then it seems as if Voltaire has merely given us another name for laughter. For in the three examples just mentioned, if the laughter is merely joyfulness, everybody must see that it is not a sufficient explanation, and that behind the joyfulness, there must be something provoking it. Consequently we are still in search of the ultimate provocation of laughter. Like Sydney Smith, below, Voltaire seems to have been either not quite candid, or else not quite clear about laughter; because he knew and admitted that what Sir Philip Sidney called "mischaunces" could also provoke laughter. He says: "I have noticed that a whole theatre audience never laughs loudly as one man except when a mishap occurs. . . . Harlequin only makes us laugh when he makes a mistake." 7 And he adds: "I have never heard people roar with laughter, either at the theatre or in company, except in cases similar to those I have mentioned." 8 Very well, then, Voltaire acknowledges that these "mischaunces" happening to our fellows (not only on the stage be it noted, but also "in company") were the cause of the most hearty laughter he ever heard. How did he reconcile this with his contention Nobody would claim that all laughter is provoked by "mischaunces" happening to our fellows; but since Voltaire himself regards the example he gives as that which provoked the heartiest laughter ever heard by him, it is curious that he should still have been able to reconcile it with his generalisation. Sydney Smith, not unlike Pascal and Sir Philip Sidney, sought the cause of laughter in the opposition of ideas, in "incongruity which excites surprise" and "only surprise"; and, in the example quoted from him above (under e) he says we laugh at the tradesman in "habiliments somewhat ostentatious" who slides down gently into the mud, because the opposition of ideas is great, and we do not laugh at the dustman, "because the opposition of ideas is trifling and the incongruity so slight." 9 He goes on to say, "Incongruities, which excite laughter, generally produce a feeling of contempt for the person at whom we laugh. I do not know that I can state an instance of the humorous in persons, when the person laughing does not feel himself superior to the person laughed at. . . . In all such cases the laugher is, in his own estimation, that superior man; the person laughed at, the inferior." But although this seems to get very near a more profound understanding of laughter, one feels that Smith believed that it is the incongruity still that causes laughter, and not the self-glory. This, if I read Smith correctly, he regards merely as an accompaniment of the laugh caused by incongruity. In fact. Smith, like Voltaire, Both Pascal and Sydney Smith, however, like Voltaire, fail to explain many of the examples I have given above — for instance, the laughter of embarrassment, the smile or laughter over schoolboy howlers, when we know of our own knowledge they are howlers, and many others. Yet another group, to which Hazlitt, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Lipps and Camille Mélinaud belong, see the cause of laughter in incongruity. According to Hazlitt, "the essence of the laughable then is the incongruous, the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another." 10 But among the instances he gives of the laughable, many are very far from being merely innocent contrasts. Moreover, he says: "Someone is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke. What is sport to one is death to another. . . . The injury, the disappointment, shame, and vexation that we feel, put a stop to our mirth; while the disasters that come home to us, and excite our repugnance and dismay, are an amusing spectacle to others. The greater resistance we make, and the greater the perplexity into which we are thrown, the more lively and piquant is the intellectual display of cross-purposes to the bye-standers. Our humiliation is their triumph." 11 To have been able to say and admit all this, and still to have clung to his generalisation, justifies me, I believe, in placing Hazlitt, with Smith and Voltaire, among those who treat laughter superficially. Schopenhauer says: "The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation." 14 Among the many examples he gives to illustrate his theory, is the following: A guard of soldiers once allowed a man who was their prisoner to join them at a game of cards, and because he cheated them, they kicked him out of the guardroom; that is to say, they set free a man whom they were supposed to keep in custody. 15 Hegel, whom Schopenhauer loathed more than any other man, does not deal nearly as thoroughly with laughter as his junior did, and like most of the men in this section, seems to regard the question as not important enough for careful treatment. He says: "On the whole, it is extraordinary what a variety of opposite things excite human laughter. Matters of the dullest and most vulgar description will move men in this way; and often they laugh quite as heartily-at a thing of the greatest moment and profundity, provided only that some important feature of it becomes apparent, which is contrary to what they are used to, Apart from the fact that he acknowledges an element of superiority in laughter — superiority as the result of having recognised a contrast and being above it — Hegel seems to associate himself with those who think an incongruity or contrast is the cause of laughter. But he makes no attempt to connect this laughter with that of mockery, scorn and despair, or to show how the same expression can do duty on so many different occasions. The ten men above mentioned are hardly more helpful than Bacon and we have only to compare their definitions with the thirty-two examples of the laughable we have given to see how seriously inadequate they are. To Immanuel Kant 17 and Herbert Spencer 18 laughter is the result of an expectation, which, of a sudden, ends in nothing. This, too, is not nearly exhaustive enough and fails to include many of the most common and frequent causes of laughter. Emerson inclines both to Schopenhauer and to Kant and Spencer. He says: "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of This, too, is quite inadequate. Carlyle, in his pretentious and shallow little book, Sartor Resartus, makes no attempt to define laughter, but speaks of it generally with such whole-hearted approval and such spiteful condemnation of those who do not laugh with great resolution and noise, that the unwary reader is tricked into believing that here is something more than bogus profundity or superior claptrap. "Readers who have any tincture of psychology know . . . that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad . . . the man who cannot laugh is only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem." 19a So superficial and yet so plausible! In any case, it lent the authority of a grossly-overrated writer to the popular view of laughter, which we also find reflected in the works of Dickens, Smollett and Byron. A most exceptional woman, George Eliot, succeeded, as we shall see, in making a much better and closer shot at the truth; but owing to the fact that a certain shallowness is essential for wide popularity, George Eliot's view of laughter is not nearly so well known as Carlyle's, nor has it a hundredth part of the latter's influence. The next group, consisting of C. Renouvier, 20 A. Penjon, and John Dewey, see in laughter a sort of release from constraint, an attainment of liberty. Penjon thinks laughter is the expression of liberty, a release from the constraints of rationality. But apart It is difficult to agree with Penjon in all this. His first example is badly chosen. I myself have suggested (under (t) in Chapter I supra) as an example of laughter, the laugh or smile with which we greet a friend. But how this is to be connected with an increase of liberty, I fail to see. It is easier to see liberty in Penjon's second example. Speaking of the regularity of daily, civilised life, with its science and conventions, he says: "On the other hand, everything that interrupts this regular process, this uniformity, provided that it does not frighten or injure us, or cause suffering to anybody, makes us laugh, or feel inclined to do so." 22 There is something in this; but it does not cover all laughter by any means, and when he adds: "Laughter seems to be the result of a sort of shock caused by the sudden disturbance of a uniform sequence, already observed and expected to continue," 23 he seems to be closing his eyes to a good three-quarters of the common causes of laughter. He certainly admits an uncharitable element of superiority in some laughter 24 but even this does not make him relinquish his inadequate generalisation. Professor John Dewey regards laughter as the Dewey is, however, helpful, because at least he sees that humour is not the only or even the chief cause of laughter. "A very moderate degree of observation of adults," he says, "will convince us that a large amount of laughter is wholly irrelevant to any joke or witticism whatever." But apart from that, his view that laughter is the sign of a "termination of effort," i.e., that it is like a sigh of relief, and is the expression of doffed gyves, is palpably inadequate. "The laugh," he says, "is thus a phenomenon of the same general kind as a sigh of relief," and he adds: "Both crying and laughing fall under the same principle of action — the termination of a period of effort." 25 Ribot, like Cicero, gives up the definition of laughter as impracticable. He says: "Laughter is the outcome of such a variety of different causes — physical sensations, joy, contrasts, surprise, eccentricities, unfamiliarity, low behaviour, etc. — that it is doubtful whether a common basis can be found for them all." 26 We now come to Bergson, probably the most respected of the modern contributors to the subject of laughter, and in any case the man who has made the most painstaking and most earnest attempt to solve the problem. Bergson's treatment of the subject has two aspects: (a) Stated briefly, Bergson sees the laughable in any manifestation of the living human being — whether on the physical or the spiritual side — that betrays a tendency to be inelastic, rigid, or mechanical, that is to say, in which matter seems not wholly animated or successfully controlled by the spirit, and where adaptive ease gives place to mechanical stiffness and awkwardness. As an example on the physical side, Bergson says: "A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary. Consequently it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change — his clumsiness. He should have altered his pace, or avoided the obstacle that threw him. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, as a result, in fact, of rigidity, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the reason of the man's fall and also of the people's laughter." 27 On the spiritual side, unconscious repetition or absence of attention, as revealed in an unintentional play on words, makes us laugh, because the author of them is behaving like an automaton, instead of consciously like a living, thinking animal. Thus the deliberate play on words causes a laugh because of its connection with the involuntary play. This fits in magnificently with Bergson's Evolution Creatrice, in which he expounds his system of the universe; but it is unfortunately wholly inadequate, Truth to tell, Bergson's view of laughter is among the most restricted and inadequate, although he wrote a whole book to explain it. Had he been less anxious to light on a theory fitting his fundamental view of the universe, I cannot help thinking that a man of his ingenuity must have found a more comprehensive theory. The fact that his theory of laughter has met with such widespread approval, at least in England, is easily accounted for if we remember: (1) The high esteem in which humour is now held, and (2) the consequent desire that everyone feels to see laughter explained as innocently and as pleasantly as possible. (b) But it is when he comes to explain the function of laughter that Bergson reveals most superficiality and most thoroughly deceives both himself and his readers. According to Bergson, laughter is a sort of disciplinary chastisement, a form of social ragging, a means of making people conform to the conventions and rules of society, and a weapon against anti-social or eccentric conduct. Thus the function of laughter is that of a lash which makes nonconformists smart. All this is most ingenious, and a rather superficial writer in the magazine Psyche, S. Edwards by name, And yet the whole of Bergson's theory of the function of laughter as a form of social chastisement for unsocial conduct depends upon laughter itself having in it, on occasion only, an element of scorn and contempt. If it is sometimes a lash, how and why and when is it a lash? You may exclaim, "Oh, but we all know it is that!" Yes, but why? Unless we know why, we have not only failed to explain laughter itself, but we have also failed to explain how it can fulfil this supposed social function. The fact that it does not always fulfil it, and that, times out of number, laughing has no such function, ought to have made Bergson pause. But although he speaks of the fear 28 laughter inspires, and admits that it is always humiliating for the person laughed at, 29 nowhere does he begin to explain how or why it inspires fear or is humiliating. Had he done so, he would necessarily have arrived at a much more profound and comprehensive theory of laughter itself. Because this element of scorn in laughter, because the reason why laughter inspires fear and humiliates and may therefore be used in a disciplinary fashion, 30 is not touched upon by Bergson — a fact that does not in the least disturb the writer in Psyche — his whole theory is left, as it were, hanging in mid-air. Not only, therefore, is Bergson's explanation of the laughable inadequate, but his definition of the function Freud is chiefly interesting, not as a guide to the meaning of laughter, or as a discoverer regarding its function, but rather as a psychologist who enriches our knowledge of the possible thought processes preceding certain perceptions of the comic. As might be expected, he makes much of the return to the infantile state in laughter and in the production of adult wit, and tries to show that while wit pleases because it is derived from an economy of expenditure in inhibition, the comic because it is due to an economy of thought, and humour because it arises from an economy of feeling, all these three economies really take us back to the infantile beginnings of mind, when states of unembarrassed and unconstrained pleasure were common without the need of the artificial stimulation of wit, the comic and humour. This is helpful since it takes laughter away from the object and back to the subject in a way that the other theories do not. But it hardly says enough about laughter itself, as a gesture and an expression. In some respects Freud approaches Spencer in the theory of static psychic energy finding a free vent in laughter, and both Spencer and Kant in the theory of the laughable being a descending incongruity; while, in that part of his theory in which he emphasises the element Apart from the valuable hint regarding the state of the subject in laughter, however, we feel after reading Wit in its Relation to the Unconscious no nearer an exhaustive definition of the laughable or to an understanding of the deeper meaning of laughter itself as a gesture, than we did after an examination of all the previously enumerated theories. Those who see in laughter no harm or mystery, therefore, are not very helpful. Each of them lights on some aspect of laughter which all of us know quite well; but none of them gives us a comprehensive theory or even a hint of one. We do not laugh only when we are confronted by an incongruity, a contrast, an expectation that ends in nothing, a human being's resemblance to a machine, a human being's unsocial conduct, or by a mental state recalling childhood's euphoric and irrational condition. But the most inadequate and false of all the views of laughter quoted above is surely that of Carlyle, who, with his usual blend of bombast and spite, is definitely misleading. |
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