Sources of Laughter
In a clever paper in the Saturday Review (Oct. 7th, 1865), we find these amusing anecdotical instances of the sources means movere jocum:—
“A sustained, deliberate pride would have rather prevented than encouraged that fit of laughter which has preserved to posterity the name of a certain Marquis of Blandford. He, being noted for laughing upon small provocation, was once convulsed for half-an-hour together on seeing somebody fillip a crumb into a blind fiddler’s face, the fits returning whenever the “ludicrous idea” recurred to him. An habitual sense of superiority would have prevented this sudden glory at sight of a beggar’s helplessness under insult.
“There are personalities which lie so hid under a disguise that they are not readily known for such. The humorist and the cynic have each a knack of investing with human weaknesses things, animate and inanimate, in which plainer minds can see no analogy to human nature. We have known a man of quaint fancies laugh till the tears ran down at seeing a rat peep out of a hole. He caught a touch of humanity in the brute’s perplexed air; he guessed at something behind the scenes impervious to our grosser vision. A bird, frumpish and disquieted on a rainy day, suggests to such a man some social image of discontent that makes capital fun for him. He can improve these lower creatures into caricatures of his friends, or of mankind at large. Mr. Formby owned himself unable to help “laughing out loud” in the presence of Egyptian antiquities, with the Memnon at their head; he laughed at an ancient civilization, at the men of the past personified by their works. Saturnine tempers can only laugh at imminent danger or positive calamity; mortal terror is the most ludicrous of all ideas to them. Mr. Trollope represents Lord de Courcy, who had not laughed for many a day, exploding at the notion of his neighbour earl having been all but tossed by a bull: and the joke would have been better still if the bull had had his will. This tendency is frequently to be seen with a defective sympathy, and we believe the things that make men laugh are an excellent clue at once to intellect and temper. Many a man does not betray the tiger that lurks within him till he laughs. There are times when the body craves for laughter as it does for food. This is the laughter which, on some occasion or other, has betrayed us all into a scandalous, unseasonable, remorseful gaiety. After long abstinence from cheerful thought, there are few occasions so sad and solemn as to render this inopportune revolt impossible, unless where grief absorbs the whole soul, and lowers the system to a uniformity of sadness. In fact, as no solemnity can be safe from incongruities, such occasions are not seldom the especial scene of these exposures—of explosions of a wild, perverse hilarity taking the culprit at unawares; and this even while he is aghast at his flagrant insensibility to the demand of the hour.
“This is the laughter often ascribed to Satanic influence. The nerves cannot forego the wonted stimulus, and are malignantly on the watch, as it were, to betray the higher faculties into this unseemly indulgence. Thus John and Charles Wesley, in the early days of their public career, set forth one particular day to sing hymns together in the fields; but, on uplifting the first stave, one of them was suddenly struck with a sense of something ludicrous in their errand, the other caught the infection, and both fell into convulsions of laughter, renewed on every attempt to carry out their first design, till they were fain to give up and own themselves for that time conquered by the Devil. There is a story of Dr. Johnson much to the same purpose. Naturally melancholy, he was yet a great laugher, and thus was an especial victim to the possession we speak of, for no one laughs in depression who has not learnt to laugh in mirth. He was dining with his friend Chambers in the Temple, and at first betrayed so much physical suffering and mental dejection that his companion could not help boring him with remedies. By degrees he rallied, and with the rally came the need of a general reaction. At this point Chambers happened to say that a common friend had been with him that morning making his will. Johnson—or rather his nervous system—seized upon this as the required subject. He raised a ludicrous picture of the “testator” going about boasting of the fact of his will-making to anybody that would listen, down to the innkeeper on the road. Roaring with laughter, he trusted that Chambers had had the conscience not to describe the testator as of sound mind, hoped there was a legacy to himself, and concluded with saying that he would have the will set to verse and a ballad made out of it. Mr. Chambers, not at all relishing this pleasantry, got rid of his guest as soon as he could. But not so did Johnson get rid of his merriment; he rolled in convulsions till he got out of Temple Gate, and then, supporting himself against a post, sent forth peals so loud as, in the silence of the night, to be heard from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch. We hear of stomach coughs; this was a stomach, or ganglionic, laugh.
“The mistimed laughter of children has often some such source as this, though the sprite that possesses them has rarely the gnomelike essence. A healthy boy, after a certain length of constraint, is sometimes as little responsible for his laughter as the hypochondriac. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, in describing, and even defending, a Puritanical strictness of Sabbath observance, recalls the long family expositions and sermons which alternated in her youth with prolix Meeting services, at all of which the younger members of the household were required to assist in profound stillness of attention. On one of these occasions, on a hot summer afternoon, a heedless grasshopper of enormous dimensions leapt on the sleeve of one of the boys. The tempting diversion was not to be resisted; he slyly secured the animal, and imprisoned a hind leg between his firmly compressed lips. One by one, the youthful congregation became alive to the awkward contortions and futile struggles of the long-legged captive; they knew that to laugh was to be flogged, but after so many sermons the need was imperative, and they laughed, and were flogged accordingly. Different from all these types is the grand frank laugh that finds its place in history and biography, and belongs to master minds. Political and party feeling may raise, in stirring times, any amount of animosity, even in good-natured men; but once bring about a laugh between them, and an answering chord is struck, a tie is established not easily broken. Something of the old rancour is gone for ever. There is a story of Canning and Brougham, after hating and spiting one another through a session, finding themselves suddenly face to face in some remote district in Cumberland, with only a turn-pike gate between them. The situation roused their magnanimity; simultaneously they broke into laughter, and passed each on his separate way, better friends from that time forth.
“No honest laugher knows anything about his own laugh, which is fortunate, as it is apt to be the most grotesque part of a man, especially if he is anything of an original. Character, humour, oddity, all expatiate in it, and the features and voice have to accommodate themselves to the occasion as they can. There is Prince Hal’s laugh, “till his face is like a wet cloak ill laid up;” there is the laugh we see in Dutch pictures, where every wrinkle of the old face seems to be in motion; there is the convulsive laugh, in which arms and legs join; there is the whinny, the ventral laugh, Dr. Johnson’s laugh like a rhinoceros, Dominie Sampson’s laugh lapsing without any immediate stage into dead gravity, and the ideal social laugh—the delighted and delighting chuckle which ushers in a joke, and the cordial triumphant laugh which sounds its praises. We say nothing of all the laughs—and how many there are!—which have no mirth in them; nor of the “ha ha!” of melodrama, and the ringing laugh of the novel, as being each unfamiliar to our waking ears. Whatever the laugh, if it be genuine and comes from decent people, it is as attractive as the Piper of Hamelin. It is impossible not to want to know what a hearty laugh is about. Some of the sparkle of life is near, and we long to share it. The gift of laughter is one of the compensating powers of the world. A nation that laughs is so far prosperous. It may not have material wealth, but it has the poetry of prosperity. When Lady Duff Gordon laments that she never hears a hearty laugh in Egypt, and when Mr. Palgrave, on the contrary, makes the Arabs proper a laughing people, we place Arabia, for this reason, higher among the countries than its old neighbour. And it is the same with homes. Wherever there is pleasant laughter, there inestimable memories are being stored up, and such free play given to nerve and brain, that whatever thought and power the family circle is capable of will have a fair chance of due expansion.”