Laughter | Page 5

that so important a
fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the
attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal
which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal
which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object,
produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to
man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.
Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the
ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It
seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect
unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm
and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has
no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a
person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection,
but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of
court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure
intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps
there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune
and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally
prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.
Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said
and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those
who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as

though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects
assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now
step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama
will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound
of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once
to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar
test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay,
on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To
produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something
like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence,
pure and simple.
This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other
intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be
drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself
isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,
Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it
is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one
to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive
rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot
go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the
circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the
laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when
seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating
to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they
laughed heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have
laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to
do so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon,
when everybody else was shedding tears, replied: "I don't belong to the
parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of
laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a
kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers,
real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre,
the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the other hand,
how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are
incapable of translation from one language to another, because they
refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! It is through

not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has
been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds
amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon,
without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence those
definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract relation
between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a palpable absurdity,"
etc.,--definitions which, even were they really suitable to every form of
the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic makes us laugh.
How, indeed, should it come about