The sense of humor

Front matter

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Preface

Although I have tried to make this book enjoyable, and keep it alive to the qualities of its subject, my prevailing purpose has been scientific. So far as the present technique of psychology permits of solutions, I have tried to solve the problem of humorous laughter. And if I have taken one valid step toward that solution, it will please my purpose better than any amount of the success that might be called literary.

The relation between science and the literature of generalities seems to me to be one of the great problems of the future. For science is developing so technical and special a body of knowledge upon every subject under the sun, that only an expert can know anything substantial of what is to be known about it. And yet literary men with no real training in science continue to pretend that they know something, if not everything, about all subjects. They write essays upon general problems with the same free joy of selfexpression with which they write stories or poems about particular things or experiences. And these essays, while they may stimulate the reader and give him a fine sense of mental companionship, are very likely to be in flat contradiction to some method or result that scientific men have already humbly and conscientiously verified — in which case they certainly belong to the second and not the first order of human values. The attitude of Carlyle toward Darwin’s dis-

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PREFACE coveries is an example in point, and Nietzsche’s amateur views on heredity at the very basis of his gospel of the Superman, and the light manner in which men like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, and at one time Maxim Gorki, while professing to be scientific socialists, have dismissed or miscomprehended the Marxian theories of history.

This may seem a remote opening for a book about humor, but it happens that the problem of humor has always been a special field of play for the irresponsible essay-writer, and the literature that adorns it is notoriously inconsequential. When I told Bernard Shaw that I was writing this book, he advised me to go to a sanitarium. “There is no more dangerous literary symptom,” he said, “than a temptation to write about wit and humor. It indicates the total loss of both.” And with a proper emphasis upon the word literary, that is entirely true. But if technical science continues to develop as it has in the last half-century, and men of letters continue not to develop, it will soon be true that there is no more dangerous literary symptom than a temptation to write about any problem of general knowledge. People will take our Plays seriously, but not our Prefaces — not our essays, epigrams, and immortal disquisitions. These they will glance through with an indulgent smile, and then go look the thing up in a laboratory report and find out what the truth is.

The problem of scientific as opposed to “literary” knowledge will have to be solved. And in as much as

PREFACE ix scientific knowledge happens upon the whole to be correct, I can see no way to solve it, except for the literary people to go to work. Of this gentle revolution I have tried to give a small example in the present book.

In the First Part I have stated my own theory as to what humor is, and I have shown its application to the various kinds of things we laugh at. In the Second Part I have given an account of the historic attempts of mankind to explain humor and state the causes of laughter. I have classified these attempts and criticised them from the standpoint of my own theory, but I have tried to make my account generous enough so that the reader who wishes to experiment or think further can find here all the leading ideas that others might contribute to his effort. In the concluding chapter I have treated my own theory in somewhat the same way as the rest, showing its relation to them and to the existing psychology of the emotions.

The Second Part is written mainly for purposes of historic reference and technical argument, and will not perhaps interest the general reader. It is folly, at any rate — in this day of the newspaper, the magazine, pamphlet, sign-board, prospectus, and the general onward rush for nowhere — for an author to pretend that people are really going to sit down and read his book. I therefore extend my benediction and gratitude, and the permission to say that he has read my book, to any one who will finish Part I and read the last chapter of Part II. He will know all the affirmative things I have to say about humorous laughter.

Part I Chapter Page

I. Laughter of Pleasure 3

II. Laughter of Playful Pain 11

III. Elementary Humor 20

IV. Jokes with a Point 27

V. Humor and Hostility 32

VI. Humor and Sexuality 38

VII. Humor and Truth 42

VIII. The Humor of Quantity 49

IX. Practical Humor 58

X. Poetic Humor 72

XI. Good and Bad Jokes 86

Part II Theories Of Humor

I. The Greek Philosophers 123

II. The Agnostic Attitude 130

III. The Derision Theory 136 xi

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

IV. The Disappointment Theory 152

V. The Discovery of Benign Humor .... 165

VI. The Mechanical Theory 175

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VII. Laughter as Liberty 184

VIII. Freud’s Contribution 190

IX. The Discovery of Merry Laughter . . . 206

X. Conflict-Mixture Theories 211

XI. Humor as Instinct 224

PART I

Chapter I Laughter Of Pleasure

With almost every new system of philosophy there comes a magical explanation of laughter as a kind of side-show. A portion of the apparatus is removed from the main tent, a slight relaxation of intelligence is permitted, and a number of tamed witticisms are ushered in, and go through their paces in a mechanical way, or simply slink around and refuse to be humorous upon exhibition. The result is a mood of strained mercy and embarrassment very little akin to the sympathy of true understanding. I think the error in this procedure is to regard the explanation of laughter as a side-show, and not a main part of the explanation of man. Perhaps there is no room for fun and friendly merriment in that small cerebral habitation which philosophers call the universe, and so naturally to them the problem of laughter appears trivial and external, a “pert challenge” to their great powers of speculation. But to the more humble observer who simply looks out of his window at the daily stream of behavior, inquiring of its course, it seems as though men and women were always seeking for something or anything at which they might smile. And those explanations which make laughter a mere by-product, of other enterprises — a mechanical accident, a condition of release or overflow — seem to give small justice to this continual and very dexterous accomplishment that distinguishes man and raises him a little above the less amiable animals.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together. It seems to be an intrinsic part of the gregarious instinct in men, signifying that they are something more than merely restive in solitude, and desirous to stand alongside of their kind and chew, signifying that to be with others is for them action and vivid employment of their nature. A smile is the universal welcome, and laughter is a greeting that we may give to any arriving friend. It is a definite affirmation of hospitality and delight. To laugh is to say “Yes.” It is to say “Good !” “I agree to your emotion!” “I am happy to see you!” A smile is the path along which two selves approach, and not to smile is to declare off the meeting explicitly.

Perhaps some mechanical accident might explain why this instinct flows out in just these good wrinkles and gusts of amiability, and not in some other mode of action. We can imagine that we might have accomplished the same thing more quietly with our ears, as we see that dogs accomplish it with their tails. But if we consider the handicap they suffer in conversation, and observe how they fold themselves half-double in a vain effort to bring forward that rear-end cordiality into the main scene of action, we shall be inclined to acknowledge a social utility even in the forms of human

LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE laughter. The need for an expression which should be luminous, and should mingle readily with speech and vision, may well have been the determining factor in its evolution. A smile is a moving summary of the chief points of personality. It is so complete and so delicate an employment of the features that medical doctors rely upon it to reveal the least trace of a facial paralysis when all the other expressions appear normal. And laughter is but an addition of breath and voice and gesture to this already complicated act. The two can not be distinguished either physically or in the fundamental qualities of feeling involved. Those who have attempted this have neglected to observe that every one who laughs is still smiling. The celebration is single and continuous as it is complex and delicate. It is a celebration of social pleasure, a blessing without which our lives would be but the spare outline of what they are.

In Charles Fourier this pleasure was so dominant that he believed a law of “social attraction” could play the same role in political science as the law of gravitation in physics. And as a natural symptom of that excessive state of feeling, we learn that Charles Fourier never smiled. It is usually through such an inhibition of our actions that our passions are intensified. And that, I suppose, is why we feel so warm a trust in the friendliness of those who smile gently, and mostly through their eyes, while those who “laugh with the lips ” we think are of more use in luck than trouble. All the famous moralists of Greece and Rome, and the

Hindu sages too, were of the opinion that unrestrained laughter is not characteristic of the wise and strong. But for my part I think the surest sign of a healthy spirit is to see friendly joyfulness pour all over his features, and down into his throat and the muscles of his body without bound or hindrance. The smile that fills my imagination is one that begins with a flash, because the motion of the upper lip comes first and so strongly, and yet that lip broadens a little as it rises so that while all the teeth shine the mouth is only redder than it was — the cheeks curve, and the eyes gather light and attract the brows and lashes toward them just infinitesimally, warming their vivid glitter with those radiant soft lines of good nature and good-will. Such living motions are more beautiful than any wine or flower or colors in the clouds of heaven, and they are almost the source of the light in which men struggle through so much pain and blind anxious endeavor to the goal of darkness.

A reason why this so obvious thing has escaped the philosophers is that they have not clearly distinguished laughter from the curling of the lip in scorn. And yet the temper of these two acts is opposite and their neural machinery distinct, as may be seen in the fact that we laugh with both sides of our face, but most of us can sneer only with one. To unflesh an eye-tooth and emit short breaths or ha-ha’s against a man’s presence, is as far from laughter as the fangs of a canine animal are from his tail. It is therefore upon good biological and bodily grounds, as well as upon

LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE grounds of feeling, that we dismiss from the topic of laughter at the outset the topic of scorn. Not only the sneer itself, but all of its disagreeable children, dwelling in the words gibe, leer, jeer, scoff, flout, hoot, gird, niggle, taunt, the sardonic or cynic probe, and the lash of sarcasm, are to be got out of our way at the beginning. The word sarcasm means in its origin a tearing of the flesh like dogs, and may well be considered a function of the teeth rather than of the lips. The cynic attitude of wit derives its name ultimately also from the dog. And even the word sardonic is plausibly derived from the Greek, aatpco, used originally of animals, and corresponding to our phrase “show your teeth.” Deride also, although in origin a word of laughter, has gone over to the wolf’s breed, and does not describe any of the true family of the smile. It is possible, of course, that the feelings indicated in these words may mingle with laughter, as may a great variety of the moods of men, and give rise to new flavors of emotion, but they are none of them involved in the essence and generation of laughter itself, which is not an act of rejection but of acceptance. It is not pain, but pleasure. It is not derision, but delight, as any one may convince himself by observing it in the cradle at about the fortieth day. For that is the day of its birth — and on that day a companion is born. And the smile of dawning welcome, there so eventful, and so clearly demonstrated to be essential to the very warmth and existence of social communion, is the native original of all smiles and all laughter.

The variety of uses to which this expression is subsequently put, may be understood, if we realize how profoundly the social instinct and emotion enter into and pervade our whole conscious existence. We may almost say they are the receptacle in which human nature is compounded. It is only in relation to others that our own miraculous selves ever could have been created. And therefore it is not surprising if these selves continue a social bearing even in complete solitude, and grin into their beer, or chuckle upon the arrival of an idea in their minds, or make merry with the winds and wild roses blowing over the hill. Indeed anything that drops pleasantly and well ripened into the lap, having been expected long enough, or being sufficiently unexpected to possess an eventful character, wffil usually be greeted laughingly by people not sitting under the incubus of some dull ideal of decorum. And in times of true positive happiness almost any stimulus whatever that is not painful will awaken a smile. People who are happy laugh oftener, indeed, and upon a less special provocation, than do people who are sorrowful cry. x\nd therefore it is possible to say that laughter, from being a means for the communication of social pleasure , has, by a natural economy in evolution, become a means for the social communication of pleasure, and has acquired almost a kind of identity in our nervous systems with the state of joy or satisfaction in general. It is a manifestation of success and plenitude of life, and has been so understood, not only in the songs of poets — “The fields did

LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE laugh, the flowers did freshly spring” — but also in the rituals of religion. For it is only in our own too Christian times that laughter was banished out of the church, and tears alone established as an appropriate approach to the deity. At the sacrificial altar, during the Roman festival of the Lupercalia, two young men would be touched with a bloody knife, and when the blood had been wiped from their foreheads with a handful of wool dipped in milk, the ritual required that they should laugh. It was a symbol of their deliverance into life, like that of Isaak under the knife of Abraham. And we are told that the name Isaak itself in its origin means “he who laughs.” For thus in all primitive and naive religions, which are not so tinctured as ours is with death and negation, and whose believers actually believe in the reality of their deities, laughter has played its part. Not only have men laughed before God in thanksgiving for the blessing of life, but the gods themselves — the eight hundred myriads of gods — in whom life is immortal, have laughed immortally together.

For these reasons it seems strange that tears and moanings and the piteous short wrinkles of grief in the forehead should be accepted by philosophers as justified through their expressive value, while laughter, as though it were some kind of slip or misdemeanor on the part of nature, should always have to be explained away. I will not try to explain laughter away, but assuming it to be one of the most necessary gifts we have, and wholly to be taken for granted even if there were no funny thing in the world, I will explain why it was carried beyond its original domain, and employed in the appreciation of humor and jokes.

Chapter II

The condition in which joyful laughter most continually occurs is that of play. And this is because the satisfactions enjoyed in play are strong and frequent, without being passionate enough to produce a more specific expression. Play is an attitude in which we exercise our instincts and experience our emotions superficially, as though tasting or smelling of them, but not drinking them down. We arrive at the point of satisfaction sooner and with less organic disturbance. We do not have to hack and slay an enemy in order to appease our fighting thirst; we are contented to win on points. We do not have to produce and cherish the flesh of a baby; we satisfy our parental instinct upon a puppy or a bundle of rags. And so it is with all our instincts — we fight, we hunt, we conduct courtships, we construct houses and cities, acquire property, incur dangers, we lord it over our fellows, we demean ourselves before them, all in a miniature or mimic way, and yet with a pleasure that is altogether real. It is as though nature, realizing how strenuous and difficult a thing it is to live, had provided for us this faery-shadow life, in which we might prepare and exercise ourselves without suffering too much or perishing in strong passion, for the more genuine achievement of satisfactions — and in which again we might refresh and restore ourselves, when the strain of achievement is great, and genuine satisfactions are too long withheld. Play is the school of nature, and also it is her device of recreation. And we can easily believe that without such a device she could never have created anything so complex, agile, intelligent, and resolute as some of the animals are, which play much and have a long period of youth.

Philosophers have been accustomed to define play as any activity that is undertaken for the pleasure involved in it, and not for the sake of an end to be achieved. And we do, of course, naturally call such deliberate pursuits of pleasure in action playful. But, although it is natural to call them playful, it is not good science to define play as consisting of this pursuit. For play in its elementary form is not deliberate but instinctive. It is not a conscious undertaking but a spontaneous attitude. It is not distinguished by the idea of getting pleasure, but by the fact that pleasure is so easily got. When we put our hand between the teeth of a young puppy of the fighting breed in a rough mimic of battle, we do not rely upon his understanding that the object of the engagement is amusement and not bloodshed; we rely upon his instincts. We know that he will perceive and adopt the play-attitude without previous instruction, and with hardly the possibility of error. He can play at fighting just as early and just as mysteriously well as he can fight. He does not have to keep up any mental reservation, or have it explained to him that it is “all in fun,” that we are “only fooling.” It is not an idea, but a fact, that he is fooling; and he can be relied upon never to sink his teeth home, for the reason that in that state of fact he gets a full satisfaction without it. In our own mature and intellectual life a conscious purpose seizes and develops this hereditary gift, a serious thought devises games and sports and dances to increase the harvest of its pleasure. But at the root and centre of the whole perennial circus of our fun, there remains the same fact — the same definite condition of the instincts. And however it may be ultimately explained, this condition is characterized by the accessibility and predominance of pleasure, rather than by the pursuit of it.

We do not know much in a scientific way about pleasure and displeasure, or what it is within us that makes us satisfied or unsatisfied. But we know at least that a deep and general activity of our instincts entails them both. The instinct of fear and that called “disgust” seem to be painful in their very beginning, and all the instincts hurt us when they are aroused and then baffled so that we feel the lack of their fulfilment. For this reason the predominance of pleasure in their playful exercise is more remarkable, and implies a more complex adjustment of our organs, than we who are so accustomed to the fact have ever thought. For if real and solid satisfaction comes in the play-attitude from mimic or superficial achievement, we should expect dissatisfaction to be real and solid whenever this slight achievement fails. If we shout so joyfully in play’s victories why should we not sob desperately in its pains ? It seems to me just here that nature, in her necessity to make us happy when we play — by what interior means we can hardly guess — has triumphed over the very terms of life. For she has ordained it in the inmost structure of our minds that playful failures have a peculiar interest for us, and playful dreadfulness instead of hurting makes us laugh. Indeed it is the first sure sign of play in babies when they giggle instead of looking troubled at our gargoyle faces, and when they find amusement in our snatching away a thing they have reached out to grasp. That feeling of amusement is a new, unique one, and that giggle is a different act from the smile of gratification which greets a friendly look. It is an act of welcoming a playful shock or disappointment — an act for which our nervous systems are arranged at birth as perfectly, and with as specific an accompaniment of interest and emotion, as they are arranged to greet with anger and pugnacious effort a more serious blockage of our wills. It is an instinct. And this instinct is the germ and simple rudiment of what we call the sense of humor.

We can make credible to our minds the development of such an instinct, if we consider what a delicate balance is kept up in many circumstances between pleasure and pain. Even when we are seriously shocked and horrified, a spasm of mad laughter not infrequently occurs; and in great moments of delight, on the other hand, and often at the very tip-top of laughter, we fall to weeping. It is almost a custom for one or two to dissolve in tears around the Christmas-tree and on birthdays; and the sobs of happy love and of sudden rescue, the strong weeping at the prodigal’s return, are among the most natural manifestations of healthy human nature. In unhealthy states the interchange of these expressions is even more pronounced. A chronic habit of violent laughing at sad news has been observed; and the acute confusion of hot tears with hilarious laughter is almost the commonest form of hysteric seizure. In young children such confusions are not called hysterical, but are assumed to be normal to the undeveloped. They make it evident that in our fine mechanism of nerves some rather slight interior accident can divert a potential state of feeling from one of these channels of act and reality into the other. And although the ability to sob and thus droop down with joy, could hardly have been cherished as an advantage in the development of our species, we need not be surprised if the opposite accident — the ability to smile and even outrageously to laugh when we are shocked or disappointed— has been crystallized and, for the purposes of play at least, made fast in our endowment as a mode of regular response.

The most crude and elementary form of play, the only one which has a physiological basis of its own, is tickling. And since much of the laughter that occurs in tickling is accompanied with a humorous emotion.

we must look to this game for the authentic and first picture of what humor is. It appears that our skin has an exaggerated sensitivity at certain points which in real battle it is of vital importance that we should defend. We dread to be touched at these points, and impetuously protect ourselves against the playful assaults of a companion. We thus learn and exercise the art of self-defense. But although we have so violent an impulse to protect these points from contact, we are not violently aggrieved when they are touched, but on the contrary we are uproariously amused. We find this thing which we had fought off with horror to be not horrible at all but comic. And for that reason, although we continue to fight it off, we still continue to invite it. We experience thus a confused sense of pain combined with pleasure, or at least the dread of pain with humorous delight, which since the day of Plato the psychologists have vainly taxed their science to explain.

Whether the pleasure is on the surface and the pain, as Plato seemed to think it, “underneath,” or whether the sensation is painful and the pleasure lies in some conceptual or perceptive contribution of the brain, or whether there are two kinds of sensation deserving each a long new serious Greek name, as a modern scientist proposes, the question never has been put to rest. Only that something which is or ought to be painful, is also or sometimes manages to be pleasant, they are all agreed. And we can, by means of the concept of a humorous instinct, give at least a simple and not illogical description of the point of their agreement.

Tickling is unpleasant when we “take it seriously.” And for that reason to some sober adults it is always unpleasant, and even merry children cannot enjoy tickling or respond with laughter unless they are distinctly in a mood of play. For that reason also, even where the skin is sensitive enough, we cannot very well enjoy tickling ourselves. We cannot regard our own attacks as playful. And they are not playful — for the essence of this fighting game, if not perhaps in some degree the essence of all play, is social. But when we are attacked by a playmate, toward whom we are “ in fun,” we find at just those points where we should experience a disagreeable sensation if we were serious, the experience of a peculiar and pleasant emotion. It is a true description of this fact to say that those otherwise unpleasant contacts, and those otherwise intolerable dismays and disappointments, awaken through our central nervous systems in the state of play, an instinctive laughter whose interior feeling we enjoy. And it is an explanation at least of the biological development of such laughter, to say that without it this most useful form of play could never have acquired its peculiar character — the character of mortal combat without suffering.

In common English speech we recognize this critical position of the humorous instinct in the mind’s mechanics, for we are agreed now upon the word funny as a generic name for all the situations which arouse it.

And funny stands in a mid-position between play and perplexity. It appears that some northern cousin of the Gaelic word for pleasure, fonn, was so full of pure and fair delight that in the seventeenth century it was simply ravished and carried away home by these literary English — who have always been word-robbers of the most delicate and voluptuous taste — and there it absorbed into its meaning, as fun, all that there is of affirmative enjoyment in the mood of play. But this enjoyment is so evidently related by proximity and dependence to a sense of humor, that wdthin another century the word funny was found to be a name for the situations in which that instinct is appealed to. And these situations, again, are so clearly of a baffling or a lightly troubling nature, that this same word funny is now in another century employed to describe things in sober life that perplex us, and give pause, not too distressing, to our serious wills.

The development of language has thus been wiser in our time than any philosopher. But once long ago the great unharnessed eye of Rabelais perceived and named this same connection of qualities. It was in his celebration of Pantagruelism, “wdiich you know,” he said, “is a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune.” That was a description of humor in its first as well as its last essence. And Rabelais is the sovereign of the world’s humor, exactly because all his jests and vagaries are conceived, born, and bred to flourish in their native home and atmosphere, the attitude of play. With that gigantic mental and poetic equipment which we attribute besides only to Plato and Shakespeare, this genius of exuberance simply romped and gambolled all over the universe. It is well that he should speak the last word here.