Home |
Texts |
Next Chapter |
---|
Chapter VI Conversely, we ought to expect to discover that Incidentally, and apart from the evolutionary test here to be applied, we ought to be able to arrive at the general conclusion that, excluding states that provoke subjective laughter, all people tend to show teeth only at those displays of inferior adaptation which challenge their own peculiar claims to superior adaptation, or those which they have in common with all their equals or contemporaries, so that while a soldier would probably be the only one of a company to laugh at another soldier who had a strap or a buckle in the wrong place on his uniform, that same soldier would be able to laugh, together with the non-military persons in the company, if a man turned head over heels in the middle of the road. We almost expect the ignoramus to be silent while the scholar roars with laughter, and the scholar to remain dumb while the ignoramus Hence the enormous confusion that has hitherto prevailed in men's minds regarding the nature of laughter and the laughable, and hence, too, the angry protests of all Anglo-Saxon humorists, including that most confused and most confusing of all humorists, Chesterton, when Hobbes's definition is advanced as comprehensive and final. For each man imagines that he knows of some case of laughter, or of many cases, in which no superiority, no comparison, no looking down, can be traced; and, armed with this certain knowledge, he thinks he can undertake to prove the invalidity of Hobbes's view; while the more subtle humorist, aware of the difficulty of including the laughter of obvious self-glory and comparison in the same category with those cases of laughter which I have called subjective, and which Mr. J. C. Gregory calls "private," 1 gives up the enquiry But, just as each man in a given society will tend to show teeth chiefly at those displays of inferior adaptation which challenge his own peculiar claim to superior adaptation, and at releases from those conventions and constraints only which happen to threaten his feeling of superior adaptation, so, in the development of mankind, men at each stage will tend to show teeth at those provocations which challenge or stimulate their own peculiar claims to superior adaptation, or else those claims which are common to all mankind irrespective of time and place. Hence, if we view mankind at a stage where only physical adaptation can be claimed, laughter or showing teeth will occur only over displays of inferior physical adaptation, and we shall expect corresponding modifications as the mind and spirit absorb ever larger spheres of interest. But is this really so? Does the laughter of savages, uncultivated persons and children tend to be provoked chiefly by inferior physical adaptations? My own view is that all of us, however cultivated we may be, retain to the end of our lives a certain capacity for showing teeth over cases of inferior material or physical adaptation. As La Rochefoucauld said and he was speaking as a cultivated man "In the misfortunes of our friends there is always something that pleases us," 1a and one has only to read a comic journal, no matter how cultured, regularly week by week, in We are certainly told by travellers that what chiefly causes savages to laugh is some coarse practical joke, some brutal display of physical inferiority, and the evidence of this is so voluminous and overwhelming that it would be impossible to give more than a little of it. Speaking of the negro of Loando, for instance, Spencer tells us "a fellow-creature or animal writhing in pain, or torture, is to him a sight highly provocative of merriment and enjoyment." 2 Of the Fijians, Basil Thomson says: "Stunned by a blow, the prisoners to be eaten were placed in heated ovens, so that when the heat made them conscious of pain, their frantic struggles might convulse the spectator with laughter." 3 In his account of the Melanesians, W. H. R. Rivers adduces much evidence of the way horse-play creates laughter among the natives, 4 as does also Jerome Dowd in his description of the negro races. 5 "It cannot be doubted," says the latter writer, "that the people of this zone (the Banana Zone) take real delight in human suffering." 6 M. W. Hilton-Simpson says much the same of the people of Kasai, 7 as do also the Rev. Edwin W. Smith and Capt. Andrew Murray Dale of the people of Northern Rhodesia. 8 In fact, there is hardly Another feature of savage humour, which is common to civilised children, is the laughter created by the Brer Rabbit type of story, in which the tables are turned by the weaker party on the stronger, who seemed to have every chance of winning. Civilised children, as dwarfs among a population of giants, thus delight in the story of Jack the Giant Killer. And savages, exposed to enemies of all kinds, delight in the same kind of story, in which physical superiority is suddenly and surprisingly exhibited or enjoyed by the weaker party. Both Henri A. Junod in his careful study of the African native, 9 and A. Werner, in his description of British Central Africa, call attention to this. 10 James Sully, speaking of savages and their resemblance to children, says: "Nothing comes out more plainly in the reports on those uncivilised peoples than their fondness for teasing, including practical jokes." And he continues: "Mrs. Edgworth David, writing of the inhabitants of Funafuti, says, 'It is thought a good practical joke in Funafuti for a girl to saw an unsuspecting youth with a pandanus leaf,' which produces a painful scratch, 'a good deal of laughter on the one side and volubility on the other is the usual result of this joke!'" 11 Sully gives numerous further examples. On the whole, the savage, as we should have expected, seems to be on a plane where laughter is created chiefly by the spectacle of physical inferior adaptation, and it testifies to George Eliot's exceptional "Strange as the genealogy may seem," says the famous authoress, "the original parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy and feeling, which constitutes modern humour, was probably the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhing of a suffering enemy such is the tendency of things towards the better and more beautiful." 12 Taking the Chinese as an example of a civilised people still below Europeans in culture, we find them also unusually prone to laugh uproariously at merely physical maladaptations, particularly those resulting from practical jokes. On this point European travellers in China seem to be agreed, while numerous reports go even farther, and claim that in the Chinese there is a sense of the humorous hardly more elevated than that of the savage. We hear, for instance, that the Chinese "are prodigiously amused when a dog is run over in the street." 13 Mr. Dingle tells us "that in all ages, the Chinese find a peculiar and awful satisfaction in watching the agonies of the dying," 14 and in speaking of the Chinese mob, he also says: "There is nothing more glorious to a brutal populace than the physical agony of a helpless fellow-creature, nothing which produces more mirth than the despair, the pain, the writhing of a miserable, condemned wretch." 15 But according to Mr. J. H. Gray, the joyful mirth at the spectacle of human suffering would not seem to be confined merely Such stories could be multiplied indefinitely. There is hardly a frank monograph on China that does not contain at least one example of the sort. Stating the case with the utmost moderation, therefore, it would seem fair to say that humour in China is still on the level of the practical joke physical maladaptation as we should have expected it to be in any civilisation still at a comparatively low level of culture. Now if entogeny, or the development of the individual, is really a repetition of phytogeny, or the evolution of the race, we should expect to find among European children, or the children of Western civilisation generally, just that stage of humour which we look for and find among savages and among civilised peoples below the more cultivated adults of Europe. But although most people would be ready to agree that children, and boys particularly, are specially prone to laugh at the practical joke, at the April fool sort of humour, and at chiefly physical maladaptations, systematised records of these facts are singularly difficult to obtain. Two such records, however, do happen to have been made, one by Katherine A. There were 700 test papers written for Miss Chandler's enquiry, and they were the work of children ranging from eight to fifteen years of age, whose homes may be described as those of the comfortable middle class The conclusion to which personal observation had led her was that the mortification, or discomfort, or hoaxing of others, very readily caused laughter, while a witty or funny remark often passed unnoticed. The results of the tests, however, revealed, as might have been foreseen, that this tendency to see fun and the ludicrous only in other people's misfortunes was limited to the lower ages only, and became ever less noticeable as the children advanced in years. The children of eight, without exception, described some action in which they had personally taken part, involving the idea of discomfort to somebody. The other pupils, as they rose in years, described such jokes with less regularity, although the boys, up to the highest age, namely fifteen, continued with frequency to find their good jokes in some situation in which their sisters and other girls had looked ridiculous. 17 This is exactly what our theory would have led us to expect. With regard to Mr. Kimmins's investigation, it is impossible, in this brief reference, to do justice to the excellence and great interest of his work. Although I do not, by any means, see eye to eye with him regarding the general problem of laughter, I find it difficult He carried out his enquiries in England and in America, and each of them yielded results very similar to those obtained by Miss Chandler. Speaking of English children, Mr. Kimmins says: "The misfortunes of others as a cause of laughter are frequently referred to by young children and form the basis of many funny stories." 18 And he adds: "The misfortune-of-others story practically ceases after the age of ten with boys and girls. Not so funny sights of the misfortune-to-others type . . . they retain their popularity long after the age at which this kind of funny story has disappeared, and descriptions of them are in special favour during the period of rapid growth from twelve to fourteen years of age." 19 Mr. Kimmins points out, however, that" in accounts of laughter in the home at domestic incidents, the girls' records are much more numerous than the boys'," and gives a typical story by a girl in which the whole point of the laughter turns upon her mother and father having fallen on the floor over some spilt porridge. 20 In older children, from twelve to eighteen years of age, Mr. Kimmins tells us that "the misfortunes of others, as the humorous basis, unless concerned with the behaviour of adults, have practically lost their appeal." 21 In American children there appears to be a greater tendency than in the English to laugh at stupidity in others, 22 and at stories of gross stupidity. Apart from As for coloured children, Mr. Kimmins's general conclusion is as follows: "It is found that the stories which are selected by coloured children of twelve years of age are of similar nature to those selected by the white children at the age of nine. This difference of three years is maintained up to the age of fifteen years . . . the sense of humour of the coloured child is three years behind that of the white child." 23 These conclusions of Miss Chandler and Mr. Kimmins on the whole, therefore, support the view that physical maladaptations tend to constitute the primitive forms of the laughable, and if we follow the development of humour and wit in Europe from the earliest times, we can, I think, see the gradual emergence of spiritual from merely physical laughter. The process is naturally not always continuous or progressive. There are set-backs and fluctuations here and there, and we find gross humour still surviving in Western Europe long after the finest Greeks and Romans had expressed disapproval of it. On the whole, however, the truth seems to be that in all that laughter which is not purely subjective in character, in all that laughter which is the outcome of a comparison, conscious or unconscious (and this is by far the greater part of laughter), the provocations which consist in mere physical inferiority always precede those which consist in some spiritual superiority, and that, with the rise of culture, the former provocations tend to die out, although they always It is not very useful to advance, as many writers do, the "laughter of babies and young children "against this generalisation, as if in pursuance of Wordsworth's puritanical views, we were bound, owing to the acknowledged sexual impotence of infants and young children, to endow them with every attribute of the divinity and the angels, and to argue that there is something , some lofty and magic quality about their laughter, to which the laughter of adults cannot attain. This is, of course, the most pernicious nonsense. But it is a view very prevalently held by Anglo-Saxon women, and men who think like women. Truth to tell, as we shall see in the next chapter, there is a very simple explanation of the fact that children laugh so much and with such conviction, and so far from there being any superior or transcendental quality about their laughter, its provocation consists, as a rule, of the most obvious and most physical circumstances. A very small infant enjoys, if it is in good health, a great deal of subjective laughter. It is pleased to move its limbs, to break wind, to throw things about, and to feel its strength. All these activities constitute its first acquaintance with "superior adaptation." It does not laugh and smile, as Wordsworth would have us believe, because its great pure mind is recalling its recent sight of God and the angels. Later on it laughs because it is able to recognise things. It looks at a book, sees a cow jumping over the moon, and recognises the animal and laughs. It is delighted at A young child laughs chiefly at physical maladaptations in another, or in an adult. It has to be forbidden by its parents or nurse to laugh at cripples, at lame people and at hunchbacks, just as the early Greeks needed to be forbidden by their philosophers to laugh at the deformed. It is only later on, at school and in adult society, that it develops the power to laugh at spiritual maladaptations. Then, too, it acquires its power of appreciating the fun and humour of sheer nonsense, of absurdities, incongruities and expectations that come to nothing all on the spiritual plane. Expectations that come to nothing on the physical plane it has already laughed at in the nursery hundreds of times. I suggest that the development of mankind has followed this same path, and that the development of the child repeats that of mankind phylogenically. We find the early Greeks gradually learning from their spiritual leaders the superiority of refined and spiritual over merely physical provocations of laughter. We find the same course followed in Rome; and, in the civilisations of France and England, the familiar stages are repeated. As early as the sixth century B.C. Chilon was conjuring his fellows in Sparta not to laugh at one another's misfortunes. 24 A century later Democritus was praying the Athenians to refrain in the same manner, 25 and Aristotle who came on the eve of the decline of Athenian civilisation, enters with surprising He also refers to "the old and the new comedy," and reveals the interesting fact that the progress registered in the latter consisted in the substitution of innuendo for obscenity for the raising of a laugh. 27 But "the buffoon," says Aristotle, "is one who cannot resist a joke; he will not keep his tongue off himself or anyone else, if he can raise a laugh." 28 Thus, in ancient Greece, as culture advanced, the tendency was ever towards the cleansing of humour and laughter of the provocation of merely physical or even mental inferiority in another, and also of obscenity and the like. And this tendency was very largely directed by the philosophers. The fact that there was need of this direction by the philosophers is shown to give only one instance by an opinion given by Reich, to the effect that in the Mimes and Atellan farces which, from the first, were the most popular of the dramatic genres in the fifth century B.C., the ridicule of bodily defects was one of the richest sources of laughter. 29 We find much the same tendency in ancient Rome. But probably, owing to the greater cruelty of the Romans, the rebukes of their philosophers seem to have had less effect in raising the provocation of laughter to a more spiritual plane. Nor is this surprising if we remember that one of the favourite Although Cicero recognised the ridicule of personal defects as a fruitful source of laughter, he partially condemned it, because it savoured too much of the low humour of the mimes. 30 He disapproved, for instance, of the jest of Appius, at the expense of a one-eyed man, objected to wit turned against the unfortunate because such conduct is inhuman, and censured obscenity as a means of raising a laugh. 31 In his Questiones Conviviales, Plutarch condemns laughter at certain defects foul breath, a filthy nose, or blindness, for instance 32 and tries to soften the asperity of the coarse humour of the period by reminding his fellows that jesting is always more kindly if the joker laughs at himself as well as at others. 33 But it is significant that almost all the provocations of laughter mentioned by Plutarch refer to physical or moral defects. 34 In England, certainly, the development has been similar. The fact that Bacon mentions "deformity" among the first of the objects of laughter, and that we may trace so steady a refinement of Anglo-Saxon humour that, at the present day, a writer on the laughable would hardly be prepared even to include deformity among the conceivable provocations of laughter, is surely proof of this. And the fact, quite natural and comprehensible, that these situations of superior adaptation should in the earliest and remotest period of human development have been associated chiefly with physical superiority, has left its indelible stamp upon us all. This explains why, at times, it pierces the veneer even of the most cultured, and why in adult life it is not uncommon for men and women to feel ashamed of their sudden impulse to laugh. Whenever this happens we may feel sure that a cause we now consider unworthy a physical mishap to a fellow-creature, or else a defect in him has provoked the impulse, and that we are ashamed, because instinctively we feel it to be connected with the most primitive side of our nature. |
Home |
Texts |
Next Chapter |
---|