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Chapter IV Why do all of us, including the animals, dislike laughter directed at us, and instinctively know, without ever being told, that it is offensive? Why, in fact, do we contort our faces as we do, when we laugh, and why is this expression universally understood as one that may humiliate? Except for Hobbes, nobody gives any solution of these problems, although the new wording of Hobbes's self-glory covers the right explanation. But, first of all, let us thoroughly clear up the fact that laughter can be, and often is, felt as an offence. This is one of the stumbling-blocks to those writers like Max Eastman, whose one anxiety is to purge laughter of every trace of unpleasantness. No one, indeed, has made a more valiant effort than Max Eastman to champion laughter as an innocent, charming and delightful pastime. In fact, so anxious is he about this one object, that he does not mind in the least how confused and incoherent his arguments become, provided that, at the end of it all, he is able to rise above his mist of verbiage and claim that he has done his best by laughter. Having removed the sting from one end of laughter that is to say, from the motivation and causation of the laugh and having refused to recognise in it anything but Voltaire's "joyfulness," he is naturally puzzled to discover and explain why the other end the person laughed at still feels a sting. I may say, forthwith, that nothing could be more hopelessly muddled and incoherent than the reasoning of those who thus try to refute Hobbes. Those readers who know Max Eastman's book and also J. C. Gregory's 1 will understand what I mean. Take, for instance, this passage in Eastman which sums up at this point his arguments against Hobbes's superiority theory: "I suspect that the reason why so many philosophers have deemed all laughter to be of the derisive flavour (Hobbes never deemed all laughter to be of the derisive flavour) is that they dreaded the prick of it . . . the reason why we hate to be laughed at is that we experience a feeling of inferiority, on such occasions, that is indeed logical and involved in the essence of the case. For no matter how truly the laughers may hasten to assure us that they are not hostile, but only happy they feel no scorn but rather a delightful love of our blunder still there remains the fact that we are inferior." 2 Yes, but, Mr. Eastman, why inferior, if there is no superiority expressed in laughter? The complete muddle revealed in this passage from Eastman is sufficient to show the hopeless dilemma of those who would rule all superiority out of laughter. When, therefore, Mr. Eastman continues in the same strain to speak of Hobbes's "erroneous theory," 3 after having made it perfectly plain that he has not even been able to learn from it what he obviously does not know, one is apt to close his book on his none too ingenious or ingenuous special pleading, and to turn all the more reverently to the great father of modern English philosophy. It should be sufficient for our purpose that a writer as anxious as Mr. Eastman is to prove the innocence of laughter, is nevertheless bound in honesty to admit that he who is laughed at fee/s inferior. But let us hear what a much greater authority says on this subject. James Sully, who was aware of the unreasoning fury provoked in many people by a superficial reading of Hobbes's explanation of laughter, wrote as follows: "There are one or two facts which seem to me to point to the conclusion that superiority is implied in, if not tacitly claimed by, the forms of laughter which have a distinctly personal aim. One of these is the familiar fact that anything in the shape of a feeling of inferiority to, or even of respect for, the laughable person, inhibits the laughter of the contemplator. . . . If no superiority is implied in our common laughter This seems to me to be final. Nothing could be more fair and judicial than Sully's examination of the problem of laughter, even if it be admitted that it is on the whole unenlightening. When, therefore, we bring the results of our own experience, as we cannot help doing, to Sully's support, it seems undeniable that, at least in that laughter which is directed at us, we are all conscious of a sting a sting that is explained by the feeling of inferiority that such laughter makes us feel. And although it yet remains to be shown in what way superior adaptation is felt and expressed in all other examples of laughter even in those forms in which no obvious act of comparison is implied or demonstrable we may confidently admit at once that in that form of laughter (and it covers a wide field) in which the expression is directed at a human object, a claim of superiority is as a rule involved and certainly felt by the person who laughs. Returning now to our original question why laughter has this effect, we find ourselves confronted by a much more difficult problem. To say that because laughter is the expression of superior adaptation, therefore it offends, would be to argue in a circle and to assume too much. It would amount to assuming, for instance, that every creature, including some of our more intelligent domestic animals, is aware that laughter is the expression of superior adaptation, and therefore, by implication, that it makes the object laughed at appear inferiorly adapted. But how could human beings and domestic Can it be possible, however, that, in the facial contortions themselves, there is some signal, some instinctively recognisable message, the precise burden of which has been forgotten by man, but which he unconsciously, and animals instinctively, read as a sign of superior adaptation and therefore a menace to their own adaptation. In the first chapter I said that, since laughter is provoked by a diversity of causes, among which I mentioned some purely subjective states, there must be something that is common to every laugh and every cause of laughter, that is to say, we must be able to show an intimate connection between the laugh of the embarrassed lady in Bond Street (example (i), Chapter I) and that of the child seeking safety in the folds of its mother's skirt (example (a)), as well as the laugh of the same child when it sees the clown belaboured by Harlequin (example (e)), and that of the man who inhales nitrous oxide (example (j)). As, however, there often appears to be nothing in common between the circumstances occasioning these four kinds of laughter (not to mention the rest of my thirty-two examples) it seems as if we must change our ground, and turn from the circumstances to the expression itself. Now Darwin observed that, in laughter, "the upper teeth are commonly exposed" 5 that is to say, that in laughing, we show teeth. But, while we may be the only animals that laugh, 6 we are by no means the only animals that have occasion to show teeth. And, if we The teeth gleam. They are visible to the attacking or merely threatening foe. They are the animals' arsenal of weapons, its equipment for war, for survival in the struggle for existence. But weapons and equipment for war and for survival are, in the jungle at least, the chief concrete factor in the claim of superior adaptation. To display teeth, therefore, is to make a claim of superior adaptation. It may be only bluff, as Now, if we have really descended from the animals, is it not difficult to suppose that this habit of millions of years, so useful, so deeply ingrained, so intimately associated with success and survival, should have passed entirely out of our gamut of expressions, should have been utterly lost, seeing that it reaches back as far as the reptilian period, before any mammal existed? Is it not much more likely that, with the increasing use of external weapons, accessory arms spears, arrows, bludgeons, tomahawks, etc. the showing of teeth (like the using of them in fighting) while retaining its instinctive association, the expression of superior adaptation, should have become volatilised, spiritualised, and been transferred to all those manifold and complex situations in society in which gregarious animals either find or feel themselves superiorly adapted, or merely lay a false claim to such a position by means of bluff? And is it not exceedingly probable, if the expression was retained as a mere claim to In short, is it not likely that, with the vast majority of men, even the precise though general notion of superior adaptation must now have become unconscious, only to have left consciously associated with the expression a feeling of pleasure, of triumph, or success, either genuine or feigned? This certainly explains the immediate and instinctive recognition of laughter as an expression that may intimidate and humiliate; it is the only explanation of laughter that can possibly account for the animal's dislike of it; for obviously, to the animal, a show of teeth has not ceased to mean a show of weapons, and if we accept this theory we have accounted for a very important quality of laughter, which men like Bergson, Eastman and Gregory carelessly take for granted. It is strange that this showing of teeth in expressing the emotions that accompany laughter, should never hitherto have been regarded as one of the principal mysteries connected with laughter and should never have been investigated as a possible key to the solution of the problem. But it seems probable that the reluctance which most modern Anglo-Saxon thinkers have shown to accept Hobbes's definition, which hitherto has never had its possibilities fully explored, has been the cause of this oversight. At all events, if now, instead of the term "laugh" we proceed to use, in regard to all the examples of laughter I have given, the term "show teeth" (meaning a display signalling superior adaptation), we shall find, Even the sounds accompanying laughter, that cachinnation which is always distinctly guttural Darwin noticed that it came "from deep down in the throat" 8 may be merely a specific variation of the hiss of the cat and of its remote ancestor the reptile, at the time of the display of fangs; while anyone whose attention has been called to monkeys fiercely fighting, by the cackling sound they make, must have seen, on beholding their exposed teeth, the connection between their expression and human laughter, although the circumstances of each seem on the surface so different. |
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