Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.  A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.  You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.  You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,—­the human caprice whose mould it has assumed.  It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers.  Several have defined man as “an animal which laughs.”  They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter.  It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled.  Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.  I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity.  In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.  Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion:  as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything.  Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator:  many a drama will turn into a comedy.  It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous.  How many human actions would stand a similar test?  Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment?  To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.  Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences.  And here is the third fact to which attention should be drawn.  You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others.  Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully:  it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.  Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever.  It can travel within as wide a circle as you please:  the circle remains, none the less, a closed one.  Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.  It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d’hote, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily.  Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so.  A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied:  “I don’t belong to the parish!” What that man thought of tears would be still more true of laughter.  However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.  How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!  On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group!  It is through not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity.  Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract relation between ideas:  “an intellectual contrast,” “a palpable absurdity,” etc.,—­definitions which, even were they really suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic makes us laugh.  How, indeed, should it come about that this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected?  It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem.  To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.  Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations.  Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common.  It must have a social signification.

Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary observations are converging.  The comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence.  What, now, is the particular point on which their attention will have to be concentrated, and what will here be the function of intelligence?  To reply to these questions will be at once to come to closer grips with the problem.  But here a few examples have become indispensable.