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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 4, 2007
More on laughter
Last Sunday, I touched on the serious subject of laughter: not for jokes (beyond the occasional dryness), nor really in the hope of sounding any great depth on a subject that is very large. Rather, it interests me as a political subject. Laughter has been all but banished from our public life, in Canada today, and I think it is worth considering in that aspect.It is increasingly driven underground in Canadian society, or tamed and carefully regulated in such media as the CBC, and even in commercial advertising, to reinforce “politically correct” stereotypes (such as: white males are always stupid, women are longsuffering and oppressed, Canadians are too humble and modest, immigrants are generally misunderstood, religious believers are ignorant and deluded, except for Muslims who are gentle and tolerant, and so on). Moreover, from right as well as left, humour with any edge in it tends away from what I called “the old-fashioned belly laugh” -- that was essentially about the human condition, and did not try to make a deadly point -- and instead towards cutting sarcasm, which is seldom if ever funny in itself. The perfect example being the many letters I received, responding to my lamenting the decline of humour, with some such sarcastic comment as: “Hey, try reading your column, it works for me.” I have this theory that the cheapness of a rejoinder can be quantified as the inverse ratio of the number of times it turns up in my inbox. Is a country that is humourless a wiser or better country than one in which even our public servants acknowledge that some things are intrinsically ridiculous, that much of human fate is, when you look at it plainly, quite hysterically funny? Are the people who believe themselves to be always august and serious, morally superior to those who are capable of self-deprecation? These are leading questions. It would be unfair to blame everything on the charlatanism of the contemporary Left. The inability to make space for laughter is a flaw written more deeply into our national character, which has needed to have something done about it for a long time. Read, for instance, several pages in Hilda Neatby’s book from 1953, So Little For the Mind (which was an analysis of an earlier stage in the destruction of Canadian education by the “progressive” ideology), and later from the disputes over it. She touched on the atmosphere in teacher’s common rooms, and among fastidious administrators, way back then. A brilliant pedagogue herself, Miss Neatby knew that the best teachers often made the most outrageous jokes about the limitations of their pupils, about their own limitations, about the recalcitrant nature of the whole human race. They might even relieve stress by fantasizing about what they’d like to do with their most difficult charges. Among anecdotes, she gives one of a student in a “normal school” (the old name for a teacher’s college), who would later become a very successful teacher. She greeted a friend who had just returned from supply teaching by cheerfully asking, “How were the brats today?” Overheard by the principal, she was ordered to his office, reprimanded to tears, suspended for two weeks, and threatened with permanent expulsion. Verily, in that principal you see the direct ancestor of the various self-important legislators of politically-correct behaviour today. Themselves scarcely educated, in intensely bureaucratic environments founded on the totalitarian premises of the “psychological expert”, they tend to suffer from an extreme inability to tolerate normal behaviour in the people who must live and work around them. Worse, their rigid habit of attitudinizing has validated their own mediocrity, becoming a means to cut more intelligent people around them down to size. For people who cannot laugh at anything, let alone at themselves, “That isn’t funny!” becomes the catch-all defence. The idea that a serious mind would be capable of humour, even of flippancy and silliness, is beyond their comprehension. Let alone the further idea that without such light relief, the human mind tends to become like an egg left too long in the fryer. It congeals in an unpleasant way. I was recently dining with a young Ottawa lady, who laughed uproariously at one of my off-colour remarks. We then spontaneously looked around us in the restaurant, to see that no one had been following our conversation. Think of this for a moment: the very fact of her laughter alerted us to the possibility that trouble could be near. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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