SENSE OF HUMOR

Evening Star, Issue 19456, 14 January 1927, Page 7

SENSE OF HUMOR

DEGREES OF THE COMIC THE BASIS OF LAUGHTER HUMANISED BY CIVILISATION.

To ask “What is the comic?” or “ Why do we laugh in certain circumstances?” is to ask questions that are, , funnily enough, profound and serious } (writes Professor J. Alexander Gunn, jin the Melbourne ‘Argus’). For centuries philosophers, psychologists, and I literary critics have endeavored to find i an adequate explanation, and few be who find it. Is laughter nothing j more than the idle crackling of thorns ! under a pot? Is it merely the physical | expression of the grim triumph of primitive man over his adversary? There is, indeed, ‘the laughter of the fool and the laughter of triumph, examples of which we find in the Book of Chronicles. But is this all? Among modern writers <Bergson suggests that laughter is ali ways a social corrective, a sneer, or a ! disapproval. Ido not think this is so: ; Even primitive man, while he might ■ laugh with .sheer relief at the victory over his enemy, or at escaping the tension caused by some danger, could laugh in a totally different spirit at his child or his dog in their, playful or their timid moods. In ‘ Homer ’ Hector laughs at his little son’s fear of the big Elume waving on the top of his father’s elmet. _ As for laughing at animals, God Himself must have a sense of humor, or He would never have created kittens.

Man is the animal who laughs, and however laughter originated it has become humanised with the civilising of men. Only the young barbarians we call children laugh at cruelty. As we grow older laughter becomes more genial, and pity oft replaces comedy. We do not laugh at the drunken man who falls down an open cellar or the dear old lady who trips over a guy rope at the show, because we are afraid they have hurt themselves. Small boys, however, shriek with delight. Socially, too, we have altered our criterion of fun. No longer do we gain amusement from things which in the eighteenth century were regarded as humorous. At that time numerous clubs flourished in which the main source of fun was blasphemy in the form of parodies of sapred ritual akin to the notorious medieval Feasts of tho Ass. We no longer laugh at the infirmity of a hunchback or a dwarf. We do not today think it funny to give .a large dinner party to selected guests specially chosen because they are all squint-eyea or are too big to get through tho door or are all stammerers. ’ WIT AND HUMOR,

The comic has various manifestations, of which wit and humor are two. Wo have extolled wit and eliminated the grosser humor of past days at least from the British stage; and the British comic papers are free from the crudities of “ Simplicisimus ” or of the jokes published by Freud. We do not to-day look, as Goldsmith did, upon humor as gross and wit as refined. Humor may be as refined as wit, but it is more general and more genial. Wit is the flash which shows us the incongruous in what Hobbes _ called “ a sudden glory.” Brevity is the soul of wit. Humor is a more sympathetic representation of the comic than wit, which is often sharp, critical, biting, and even ferocious, as in satire. Yet even our satire is more genial, and Anatole France is a kindlier spirit than either Swift or Voltaire. The most brilliant wit is_ the display of striking similarity and incongruity at once, a blend or diversity m unity. Hazlitt brought out this distinction in his ‘ Lectures on the English Comio Writers.’ Humor brings out the absurdities of mankind and emphasises the ludicrous in accident, situation, and character. Wit, however, is the illus- [ trating and heightening sense of that absurdity by come sudden _ and unexI pected likeness or opposition. The comic, embracing as it does both wit and humor, is the inverse of the sublime, for the comic involves comparison downward, not upward. Tho comic spirit, as proclaimed by Bergson and by Meredith, shows itself as intellectual and as a form of the social censure of idiosyncracies. For Bergson, particularly, laughter is society’s defence against excess or extravagance in the individual. He believes that in laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and to correct our neighbor. The comic, ho affirms, appeals to the intelligence only, for laughter is incompatible with emotion. It fear, sympathy, or pity enter in it is impossible to laugh. For him, laughter is a social gesture at once intellectual and critical. Any individual is comic, in his view, who j automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with his fellows. It is the part of laughter to reprove his absent-mind-edness. Each member of society must remember his social environment. Laughter is the eternal social reminder. Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is for Bergson a kind of social “ ragging.” This is too harrow a view of laughter and the comio. It reflects the comedies of Moliere, not those of Shakespeare. It is an intellectual type of comedy like that described by Meredith in bis ■ Essay op Comedy and the Uses of tho Comic Spirit,’ and used by Wilde. It is not the laughter provoked by Fnlstaff, _ Dan Leno, George *Bobey, or Charlie Chaplin. FORMS OF THE COMIC. The comic produces laughter by the effect of contrast. A caricature is laughable if it is sufficiently like the original to be recognised; but to be a caricature and not a portrait it must be unlike the original in its exaggeration of certain features. The comedy of the pun, tho “ howler,” the parody, and the Spoonerism rests on the same principle. Not all Spoonerisms were uttered by Dr Spooner, but he is guaranteed _ to have said to a student in correcting his Latin prose : “ Sir, there are far too many prowlers in your hose.” The great naturalist Agassiz once received an insect from his students made up of parts of all the different beetles and bugs they could find. In the United States any insect is a bug, and the students enclosed a letter : “ Dear Professor, what hug is this?” His brief reply was: “Humbug.” Howlers are usually made unconsciously in tho emotional tension of the examination. One student solemnly declared that the form of marriage in modern society where a man has only one wife is “monotony.” The principle of identity and difference is seen in all parodies, whether they be parodies of method and form, like Leacock’s “ Nonsense Novels ” or more precise ones, like that given in the 1 Moxford Book of Verse,’ which recasts some famous lines of Wordsworth:— My heart leaps up when I behold A mince pie on tho table; So was it when my youth began, So is it now I am a. man, So be it when I shall grow old, If I am able. The boy eats faster than the man, And I could wish my meals to bo Bound each to each by rich mince piety. For sheer absurdity as productive of laughter we have to turn to the limerick and the cinema. Thefe was a young gourmet of Credition Took some pate de fol gras and spread it on A chocolate biscuit, And said: “Yes, I’ll risk it,” ; His tomb bears the date that he said it on. Again, when Charlie Chaplin .works, as in * The Gold Rush,’ with a very 1 fat man, the contrast effects of comedy are apparent. But even this com-

edian in recent years has abandoned much of the old business of pushing the piano on the stairs or falling down to amuse small boys, aud has realised how near comedy is to pathos. When ho arranges a party for the girls, who do not appear, he ceases to be merely comic and becomes a pathetic figure, as in many scenes in * The Kid.’ LAUGHTER AND LIFE. Horace Walpole said, “Life it a comedy to the man who thinks, a tragedy to the man who feels.” Most of us both think and feel, and so life' i« never pure comedy or pure tragedy. Elements of pathos blend with laughter. Bergson and Meredith seem to forget that we laugh not merely at people, but with them, and if we are wise.we never lose the art of laughing at ourselves. French comic characters usually lack this sublime grace. Monsieur Jourdain, Tartuffe, Tartarin, and Monsieur Ferrichon thus never rank with old Falstaff. Comedy holds the mirror to all our idiosyncrasies, aud he laughs best who can at times laugh at himself. He has the power of that “giftie” which Burns invoked. Nothing disarms vanity, conceit, bigotry, and _ fanaticism like laughter. The British people know that, and we may think that the humor of the volunteers did more_ to break the general strike than anything else. Laughter saves the people from vanity and from the heathen imagination of a vain thing. Shakespeare, with his mixture of tragedy ana comedy, is nearer to life than Moliere. In Falstaff, Dogberry, and Malvolio, we have very human fellows personifying the human weaknesses and follies of us all. But comedy is a form not merely of theatrical representation; it is a form of life itself. In laughing, not so much at fellow-men, but with them, we find in the eternal spirit of the comic a link which binds us in a catholic fellowship. One touch of humor makes the whole world grin, just because it is that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.