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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 25, 2007
On laughter
So far as I am aware, no one has ever written a funny essay on laughter. There have been serious, even philosophical essays, that cracked no jokes, and there have been comedy skits that purport to be about laughter itself, but are not. That, I suspect, is the first thing to know about laughter: that it does not, itself, double-up. You cannot laugh about laughter because: it is too simple for that. You can laugh only at something that is intrinsically ludicrous, distended, awkward.Laughter is, I should think, a restorative in itself, and seems directly opposed to fear and madness. So opposite, that a kind of malign laughter is among the symptoms of fear, and of madness, alike. Some of this is cultural, and I noticed when I lived in the Far East that giggling was often the spontaneous response to fear and anxiety, including the extremer forms. The Western visitor often would not understand it. He would think the native was mocking him, or not taking his annoyance seriously. When instead, that foreigner was doing something that scared the poor native out of his wits. That is cultural, as much so as the Hollywood form of kissing is cultural -- and communicable from one culture to another, by emulation. But more fundamentally I mean, that the nervous impulse to laughter can be triggered by things not in themselves funny -- just as the same feeling in the belly can be triggered by the accident of bad tuna, or by the accident of being in love. The human metabolism is finite and quite limited, human mind and feeling comparatively large, so that a seemingly limitless range of impulses play upon a short range of keys. And it is just as well that this is so, because if our bodies had more sensual range, we could feel more pain than we do. But I am not here referring to the metabolism of laughter -- I leave that to the medical trade -- but specifically to our tendency to laugh at what is funny. And to laugh entirely in enjoyment of that. This capacity does not seem to be shared by any of the other animals, though I stand to be corrected by some zoologist. I’m sure some humourless amateur one will tell me that dolphins laugh; and I had a very clever cat once, who struck me as having a mischievous sense of humour. But not even that cat ever laughed. Some monkeys seem to have most of the oral and facial machinery for it, but I’ve never seen one use these in the way we do. Perhaps they can parrot human laughter, but they are extremely unlikely to smoak the jest. Whereas even very young humans laugh at what is plausibly funny. I lived once next door to a German gentleman, who kept a pet gibbon, who could do, unprompted, something much like sarcasm -- or shall we say, a very elaborate sneer. I often think of that animal when watching persons of a certain political persuasion crease their faces and nearly roll their eyes, in response to some assertion that they “have a problem with”. Sometimes, even in response to laughter, to subvert their own temptation to laugh, at something that might be “politically incorrect”. But sarcasm itself is an exceptional thing, in the part of the universe that contains laughter. One seldom if ever laughs at a sarcastic remark; and when it seems funny it is only because it has been combined with some other droll feature -- is wildly understated or overstated, perhaps. Whereas sarcasm, pure, is an expression of cruelty. This strikes me as getting towards “the essence of laughter”. That the man who slips on the primaeval banana peel, cracks his skull and may bleed to death on the sidewalk, gives us no compulsion to laugh. Yet the idea of him slipping was funny. On several levels, as it were. One of them being that we don’t intend the reality. Laughter of that kind may even serve as a release to more aggressive thoughts. I raise this topic today, and may do again, because I find myself living today in a country where there is very little laughter, and expressions of humour are often sternly rebuked -- or ghettoized into special routines, the way pornography used to be. At a time when sarcasm has largely replaced the “good old-fashioned belly laugh”. And I am looking for ways to laugh at this culture. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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