Objections to Laughter

I

‘LAUGHTER’ is a word, we are told by the philologists, that is a distant cousin of the Greek κλωσσϵιυ, ‘to cluck like a hen,’ and also of κρáζϵιυ, ‘to croak.’ But we need not go any further than our everyday speech to have it brought home to us that when we laugh we do something that puts us on a level with the lower animals. Half the words we ordinarily use to describe anybody laughing are words borrowed from a vocabulary descriptive of the various inarticulate sounds that must have made the chief music of life in Noah’s ark. We say of a laughing human being that he ‘bellows’ or ‘roars’ or ‘cackles’ or ‘crows’ or ‘whinnies.’ Some people even speak of ‘barks of laughter’ and of ‘hoots of joy.’ We say of one man that he ‘laughs like a hyena’ and of another that he has a ‘horse laugh.’ And, even if a man is guilty of nothing worse than that noiseless form of laughter known as a smile, we often describe him as ‘grinning like an ape’ or ‘like a Cheshire cat.’ It is true that, in describing weeping, we also occasionally use words that suggest a comparison with the lower animals. A child, like a dog, is said to ‘whine,’ and its sobs as well as its laughter are often spoken of as ‘ bellowing,’ ‘ roaring,’ and ‘ howling.’ Still, the vocabulary of the forest and the farmyard seems to be much more freely applied to our expression of mirth than to our expression of woe.

We have often been told that the ability to laugh is one of the chief things that distinguish man from the other animals. The report that ‘the little dog laughed to see such sport’ when the cow jumped over the moon is generally discredited as a legend. I am confident, however, that the people who say that animals never laugh are wrong. Animals undoubtedly make slightly different sounds from ourselves in their expressions of pleasure, and possibly they are pleased with different things, but when they are pleased they have a way, like ourselves, of making inarticulate sounds, and I see no reason to doubt that pigs, geese, starlings, dogs, parrots, and green woodpeckers at times make these sounds in a mood of what we call hilarity.

Certainly there seems nothing in the ordinary dictionary definition of the word ‘laugh’ to suggest that laughter is something of which other animals than man are incapable. The first dictionary I consulted on the matter defined ‘laugh’ as an intransitive verb meaning ‘to express mirth or joy by an explosive inarticulate sound of the voice and peculiar facial distortion.’ A dog undoubtedly is capable of that. The next dictionary said: ‘Laugh ... to express feeling by a series of inarticulate explosive sounds due to the characteristic vibrations into which the vocal cords are thrown by the jerky, spasmodic character of the expirations.’ That is no better a description of a human laugh than of a donkey’s bray. I doubt, indeed, whether anyone has ever succeeded in defining or describing laughter in terms inapplicable to the facial contortions and explosive sounds made by animals. All the descriptions of the act of laughter that I have met with have seemed to me equally applicable to the snarling of wild beasts and to the merriment of human beings at a dinner party.

Take, for instance, Professor Sully in that excellent book, An Essay on Laughter. Near the beginning of the book, he has a description of a smile — which, as he tells us, viewed as a psychological event, is rightly regarded as a laugh, though as an incomplete laugh. ‘Smiling,’ he declares, ‘involves a complex group of facial movements. It may suffice to remind the reader of such characteristic changes as the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, the raising of the upper lip, which partially uncovers the teeth, and the curving of the furrows betwixt the corners of the mouth and the nostrils (the nasolabial furrows) which these movements involve. To these must be added the formation of wrinkles under the eyes — the most characteristic part of the expression — which is a further result of the first movements. The increased brightness of the eyes is probably the effect of their tenseness, due to the contraction of the adjacent muscles and the pressure of the raised cheek, though an acceleration of the circulation within the eyeball may have something to do with it.’

I confess that I do not find a smile, so dissected, particularly human. To read of it is to conjure up a picture of the expression on the face of Red Riding Hood’s wolf rather than the expression on the face of La Gioconda. And, when we pass from the smile to the laugh proper, Professor Sully’s description is equally humbling to those who have taken pride in the thought that when they laugh they give convincing

evidence of their difference from, and their superiority to, the other animals. Laughing, says Professor Sully, ‘is an interruption of the natural rhythm of the respiratory process, in which inspiration and expiration follow one another at regular intervals. The obvious feature of its interruption . . . is the series of short, spasmodic, expiratory movements by which the sounds are produced. These are, however, preceded by a less noticed inspiration of exceptional energy and depth. These interruptions of the ordinary respiratory movements involve also an unusually energetic action of the large muscles by which the chest is expanded, viz., those which secure the contraction and so the descent of the dome-shaped diaphragm and those by the action of which the ribs are elevated. The production of the sounds by the spasmodic expiratory movements shows that the passage from the trachea into the pharynx, viz., the glottis or chink between the vocal cords, is partially closed. The quality of the sounds is explained by the particular arrangements, at the moment of the cachinnation, of the vocal apparatus, and more particularly the shape of the resonance chamber of the mouth.’

Let those who are given to boasting of their sense of humor as though it were one of the highest achievements of which humanity is capable look on this ‘slow-motion ’ picture of a laugh and realize that all their sense of humor can do for them is to enable them, like any other animal, to make spasmodic expiratory movements through a partially closed passage from the trachea to the pharynx.

II

Perhaps it was their realization of the essentially animal nature of laughter that led so many philosophers, saints, and authorities on behavior to condemn it. Plato, in the Republic, censures Homer for having degraded the gods by making them laugh in the sentence: ‘Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw Hephæstus bustling about the mansion.’ And he expresses his dislike of laughter still more strongly in the same book when he makes Socrates declare that the guardians of the State ought not to be given to laughter, and that persons of worth must never be represented as being overcome by laughter. Pythagoras, again, is a philosopher of whom we are told that ‘he would avoid laughter and all pandering to tastes such as insulting jests and vulgar tales.'

It is true that there have been philosophers of a less unbending disposition, such as Spinoza, of whom it is said that ‘after protracted studies’ he ‘ would mix with the family party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter.; But it is a significant fact that among philosophers there is only one who is known as the Laughing Philosopher, and the learned assure us that Democritus was not really a laughing philosopher at all.

I do not know whether we are any longer permitted to believe the story that Democritus used to walk down to the harbor of Abdera in his lighter moments and ‘laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.’ Even Burton, who repeats the story, describes Democritus as ‘a little wearish old man, very melancholy by nature,’ and an older authority declares that he used to train himself ‘by a variety of means to test his sense-impressions by going at times into solitude and frequenting tombs.’

Yet this man is apparently the nearest thing to a laughing philosopher that the world has seen.

As for the saints, though many of them have been cheerful men, few of them have been conspicuous for their hilarity. Some of them have even thought it was a sin to laugh. Saint John the dwarf, for example, on seeing a monk laughing uncontrollably at dinner one day was ‘so horrified that he at once began to cry,’ and Saint Basil wrote against the wickedness of laughing, declaring that it was the one bodily affection that the Founder of the Christian religion ‘does not seem to have known.'

I fancy the saints of all the religions and all the churches have been the same in this respect. One does not imagine John Knox as a patron saint of laughter, and I am sure that the Presbyterian elder who rebuked someone for whistling on Sunday in the sentence, ‘Mon, this is no day for whustlin’,’would have equally rebuked anyone whom he had heard laughing on the sacred day.

And when we leave the saints and come to more worldly authorities on behavior we find the same thing. The greatest English gentleman who ever left detailed instructions as to how to behave like a gentleman was Lord Chesterfield, and in his Letters to His Son he declares emphatically in more than one passage that a man who wishes to be regarded as a gentleman must avoid laughter above all things. Everyone knows the passage in which he warns his son: ‘Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh, since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is, therefore, only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.'

In a further letter, Lord Chesterfield returns to and reiterates his warning. He writes: —

Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made any body laugh; they are above it. They please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter; and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. A man’s going to sit down, in the supposition that he has a chair behind him, and falling down upon his breech for want of one, sets a whole company a laughing, when all the wit in the world would not do it; a plain proof, in my mind, how low and unbecoming a thing laughing is. Not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions. Laughter is easily restrained, by a very little reflection; but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition; and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as any body; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.

Chesterfield then goes on to denounce the ‘very disagreeable and silly trick of laughing,’ and to speak contemptuously of ‘a man of very good parts, Mr. Waller, who cannot say the commonest thing without laughing; which makes those who do not know him take him at first for a natural fool.’ And indeed Lord Chesterfield, in his assertion that nobody had ever heard him laughing, had noble predecessors through the ages. Johnson declares that nobody had ever heard either Swift or Pope laughing. And was it not said of the grandfather of the great Crœsus that ‘he never laughed but once in his life, and that was at an ass eating thistles’? One feels that he might have chosen a more exciting occasion.

But it is not only the philosophers, the saints, and the authorities on manners who have belittled laughter. One of the most fastidious spirits of modern times, the poetess Alice Meynell, devoted a carefully reasoned essay to an appeal to her fellow countrymen to laugh a little less loudly and a little less frequently than they do. The English, she observed, though they speak less loudly than the Continental nations, are given to laughing more loudly in the theatres, and, disliking noise, she held up to them for imitation ‘the Oriental estimation of laughter as a thing fitter for women, fittest for children, and unfitted for a beard.’ Mrs. Meynell was mistaken, it seems to me, if she thought that in her objection to laughter she was singular. The ordinary man may occasionally laugh, but he does not think much of laughter. He has as poor an opinion of it, indeed, as Plato or Mrs. Meynell herself. That the ordinary man cares little for laughter can, 1 think, be easily proved.

Consider, for one thing, what has been the most widely read literature of the past two generations. Is it not a conspicuous fact that among the most popular novels four or five are by writers who never try to make us laugh, or, at least, who never succeed Twenty years ago the ‘best-selling’ English novelists were Miss Marie Corelli and Mr. (now Sir) Hall Caine. To-day three out of four of our bestsellers are writers who depend for their effect scarcely at all upon humor of situation or character. I do not forget that Dickens, the permanent best-seller of English literature, was a humorist as well as a tragic sentimentalist. But, taking a general view of popular literature, we shall be safe in affirming that it is easier to become a best-seller with a book that does not contain a single laugh than with a book that, in the language of the reviewers, contains a ‘laugh on every page.’ A novelist may leave out the laughter of life, indeed, and appeal to the public, not only for his own time, but for all time, as Defoe does in Robinson Crusoe and Richardson does in Clarissa, but no novelist has ever succeeded in becoming immortal through laughter alone. Sterne has his sentimental interludes. As regards Cervantes, again, we are constantly reproached by some of his most enthusiastic admirers if we do not share his sorrows with Don Quixote, instead of laughing at his misfortunes. It is the same with nearly all the masterpieces of comedy. They are most ardently appreciated, not for comic, but for serious reasons. If you take up a book on Aristophanes or Rabelais or Molière, you will almost certainly find that it sets out to explain his serious purpose rather than to echo his hilarity,

III

All this—the consensus of saints, philosophers, men of fashion, and ordinary human beings — seems to constitute a very strong case against laughter. And, indeed, laughter is open to the objection that it is not only offensive to others, but tiresome in itself. It is one of the abnormal, rather than one of the normal, activities of a human being. I notice that, even by a famous physiologist, it is included in a list of ‘certain abnormal forms of respiration,’along with coughing, sneezing, clearing the throat, snoring, crying, sighing, yawning, and hiccoughing. All these things are good in their way, but none of them would be good all the time as a constant and normal part of our lives. Sneezing is a cure recommended by many modern doctors, for instance, for certain forms of catarrh. Useful as sneezing may be, however, no doctor has yet proposed it to us as an ideal that we should sneeze twenty-four — or even twelve — hours a day.

And the same thing is obviously true of laughter. The ordinary human being, if he went on laughing continuously for even three hours, would become totally exhausted. If you could imagine a farce so funny that every sentence sent the audience into fits of uncontrollable laughter, many people would be unable to sit out more than the first act; others would retire at the end of the second act; and the few who had enough staying power to last till the fall of the curtain would not have strength left to call the actors before it for a final round of applause. You will often notice at a farce that, however much laughter there is in the course of the performance, there is far less applause at the end of it than at the end of a tragedy or a melodrama. Even the comedies of Mr. Shaw, which have many other qualities besides laughableness, used to have an exhausting effect of this kind on the dramatic critics. Mr. Shaw once declared bitterly that during the performance of one of his plays he could see the critics rocking in their seats with laughter and that in the next morning’s papers they would all solemnly denounce his play as tedious and boring. The explanation is simple. He had worn them down physically with laughter, just as he would have worn them down if he had made them sneeze or cough violently for three hours on end.

Laughter, like sneezing and coughing, is, as I have said, abnormal, and Rabelais himself would not be tolerable if it were not that he discreetly intermingles with his comedy long passages of boredom. A comic writer must be either tragic in parts or sentimental in parts — he must be a critic of society or have the saving grace of dullness — in order to take his place among the world’s great writers.

Thus we arrive at the theory that laughter, being something abnormal like an accident or an electric shock, can play only a very small part in an ordinary man’s life. Its very essence is surprise and a break in the monotonous continuity of our thoughts or our experience. It is a physical appreciation of the surprising things of life, such as — to take some elementary instances — the spectacle of a man falling suddenly on ice, or sitting down on the floor instead of on a chair, or being shot in the leg by someone who was aiming at a pheasant.

Such things make us laugh, of course, — as we read about them in Pickwick Papers, for example, — only if the results are not too serious. If a man died as the result of any of these accidents, nobody but a savage would think it funny, however surprised he might be. What makes us laugh is a mixture of the shock at an accident that looks as if it might be serious and the realization that it is not after all a hundredth part as serious as it might have been. The shock is obviously one of the things that make us laugh in such cases, but among civilized people the surprise of finding that the shock was superfluous is equally necessary.

You will see an excellent example of this in motoring accidents. At present, motoring accidents are not as a rule funny, because we are apprehensive that the results may be fatal. Recently, however, someone has invented a kind of cowcatcher for motor cars which tosses the astonished pedestrian into the air and deposits him safely in a net; and it is certain that if this comes into general use motor accidents in the future will become more generally funny. As you walk down Piccadilly on a spring afternoon, you will see whole clutches of messenger boys, policemen, clubmen in top hats, and all sorts of people, tossed by motor cars as by bulls and left sprawling, alive and kicking, in a tangle of network — a scene that, I am sure, will make most people laugh even more heartily than Democritus laughed at the sights he saw in the harbor of Abdera. Saints, philosophers, and perfect gentlemen may not laugh; but ordinary human beings will, and in this, I think, they will show their humanity. For to laugh at an accident that ends happily proves not so much that one enjoyed the accident as that one enjoyed the happy ending. We should find the accidents that happen to Don Quixote intolerable if any of them ended fatally. We enjoy them only on the understanding that the Don is a cork who sinks under the sea for a few moments to rise again and bob as buoyantly as ever on the surface. We laugh at the accident, indeed, on the assumption that the victim will speedily recover from it. The escape as well as the disaster contributes to our mirth. It is cruelty suddenly merging into kindness. Hence we find that, at its best, it is the characteristic of humane men — of Shakespeare and Cervantes, of Fielding and Dickens.

Even so we can see why, on this assumption, saints and Utopian philosophers are on the whole hostile or indifferent to laughter. The saint and the Utopian philosopher have a vision of a perfect world in which accidents do not happen. The saint realizes that, if Adam and Eve had never sinned, we should all have been as the angels, and angels never have their hats blown off or slip on the ice or sit down on the floor instead of a chair or get chased in their dressing gowns through the streets, like Mr. Winkle, by needlessly suspicious husbands. Laughter is a confession of the sins and silliness of the world, but it is also a kind of genial acquiescence in these sins and sillinesses. To the saint, the stumblings of man are tragic, proving that he is not yet an angel. To men and women with a sense of humor, the stumblings of man — even on his way to perfection — are largely comic, proving that he is only a human being after all. We may deplore, if we like, the saint’s lack of humor, but in this I think we may be wrong. He has a vision that we have not. Our sense of humor is only a compensation for our lack of his vision. We should never have possessed it if we had remained in Eden. It is the grace of our disgrace — a consolation prize given to a race excluded from Paradise.

IV

Hence it is natural enough that laughter should play a comparatively small part in the great literature and records of the human race. No doubt the characters named in the Old Testament often laughed, but there is not a single laugh described in all its pages that infects us with mirth as we read of it to-day. The tears of David over the dead Absalom still touch the heart, but the merriment of the days before the Flood no longer moves us to sympathetic mirth. The laughter referred to in the Bible is for the most part the laughter of scorn. The more cheerful kind of laughter— the laughter of the fool, as it is called — is even compared to its detriment by the Wise Man to ’the crackling of thorns under a pot.’ Homer, again, though he made the gods themselves laugh, has given us no supreme comic scene as a companion picture to that supreme tragic scene in which Hector parts from Andromache. There may have been Greek writers who were as comic as Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, but their fun died with them, and even Aristophanes, the greatest comic writer of antiquity, and some say of all time, is not, I am sure, as funny as he used to be.

Tragedy can live as long as a mummy — as long, one might almost say, as one of the immortal gods. It affects us as profoundly three thousand years afterward as it affected men in the year in which it was born. Laughter, on the other hand, is as a rule as volatile as eau de Cologne sprinkled on a handkerchief. A few great writers have been able to imprison this essence and give it, if not immortality, at least a life thirty times as long as that of the oldest brandy. A jest unfortunately does not improve with age as brandy does, and many even of Shakespeare’s jokes have to be explained to modern readers in footnotes. At the same time, if we may change the metaphor, a small handful of men of genius have been able to make the best of their jokes permanently explosive, like Mr. Wells’s radioactive bomb. This is, undoubtedly, one of the most difficult miracles in literature.

As to what the nature of the first laugh was after man had descended from the trees, the authorities on the subject differ. Father Ronald Knox has lately put himself on the side of those who hold that satire preceded humor in the history of our race, and that therefore man laughed first out of derision at the pain and humiliation of his fellow crcatures. For this view there is something to be said, for primitive savages who would see nothing amusing in Pride and Prejudice are said to roar with laughter at the spectacle of a man getting a bad fall or writhing in pain with fever. On the other hand, the baby is the most primitive type of human being that we know, and the baby in the cradle begins to laugh long before it knows that there are such things as pain and humiliation in the world, or can appreciate the humor of an accident. You will see a baby lying on its back in a perambulator and, as it looks up at the leaves of a tree dancing and twinkling on a windy, sunny day, laughing with an exuberance equal to that of any grown-up man or woman at a diaste to a fellow creature. You can make it laugh by peeping out at it from behind a handkerchief. You can make it laugh by tickling it. It is in tickling, perhaps, that we find the best evidence of the non-satirical origin of laughter. The psychologists in their works on laughter have written a great deal about tickling, and some of them have even experimented on their children to discover which, in their right order, are the most ticklish parts of the body. The order given by one writer is: ‘The sole of the foot, the armpit, the neck and part under the chin, the ribs.’ Darwin even experimented in tickling anthropoid apes, and discovered that they gave out ‘a reiterated sound, corresponding with our laughter, when they are tickled, especially under the armpits.’ Several authorities maintain that when dogs are tickled they respond with what is described as ‘an incipient smile.’ Others declare that pigs like being tickled, but the author in whose works I have seen a reference to this subject observes: ‘Never having been on tickling terms with pigs, I have nothing to say about them.'

Certainly the pleasure of being tickled is one of the earliest, pleasures known to a human being. One of the commonest metaphors used in describing laughter, indeed, is that which speaks of a person’s being ’tickled to death.’ This suggests — and I think it is Professor Sully’s view — that laughter originated in play rather than in derision. In the baby it is an expression of happiness without a breath of malice in it. And, apart from the evidence of tickling, if laughter be some subtle form of malice, how can we explain the smile with which friends greet each other when they meet and which most people wear when they are being introduced to a stranger? When you are introduced to a man, you smile, not because you have noticed something wrong with his clothes or in his personal appearance, but because you are pleased to meet him, as the saying is, or pretend to be. This may seem to conflict with the theory that angels never laugh, for angels must often experience pleasure. The laughter of human beings, however,seems to me to express an animal rather than a spiritual pleasure. Meredith traced English laughter to its sources in the gastric juices. The laugh has undoubtedly evolved since the days when Pharaoh’s daughter tickled the infant Moses, till now we are able to laugh at the wit of Anatole France and the humor of Chekhov. But it is still, at its best, play, even when salted with derision or bitterness.

As with play of all sorts, one of its chief functions is to release us from the hardening formulæ of our daily lives. We cannot help attempting to imprison ourselves and all our opinions and experiences in formulæ. We see our neighbors as formulæ walking. We are turned into formulæ ourselves by our habits. Thus we make a too rigid pattern of life, and deceive ourselves into believing that the world is a mechanical, settled, and law-abiding place in which nearly everybody will behave according to pattern. For instance, the ordinary English child has a formula in accordance with which he thinks that everybody ought to speak more or less like himself. When he hears a foreigner speaking, he is inclined to laugh. He will laugh at what he regards as the mispronunciations of a Scotsman or an Irishman. His laugh is partly derision — derision in defense of the pattern. But I think it is also a playful delight in novelty. Englishmen do not go to hear Sir Harry Lauder in his Scottish songs merely to deride the language of the ‘braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht.’ Similarly when they laugh at the mention of a ‘haggis,’ — as Englishmen, being queer creatures, do, — the laughter is not in derision of the Scottish diet so much as a playful escape from the pattern of the English menu.

Laughter at the antics of a drunken man is also due in part to the fact that in not too fatal a way he breaks the expected pattern of life. If an ordinary sober man lets a coin fall on the pavement, his swift stooping down and picking it up does not make us laugh, for this is what we expect him to do. See a drunken man trying to pick up a fallen coin, however. His attempts to preserve his balance at each new bend of the body, his misjudgment of the distance at which the coin lies from his hand, his quite disproportionate air of determination and sobriety, are all a contradiction of common life. He no longer acts with the mechanical regularity which we expect in the behavior of human beings. He has dissolved the human pattern, and we on our part are dissolved in laughter. There are some people who deny that laughter can lake drunkenness as one of its themes, but this is because they see drunkenness entirely in terms of its tragedies. They see drunkenness, not as an accident, but as a doom, and, like the saints, are distressed because it is a negation of the perfect world. Ordinary men laugh at a thing, however, not because it is a negation of the perfect world, but because it is a contradiction of everyday life. If everybody were drunk all the time, nobody would see anything to laugh at in Sir Toby Belch.

V

Comedy gives us, indeed, a new and surprising pattern of life — a pattern that is a lampoon on the pattern to which we are accustomed. Mrs. Malaprop breaks the pattern of the ordinary English pronunciation and use of words, and as a result her ‘allegory on the banks of the Nile’ still sets the theatre in a roar. Lear in his nonsense verses breaks the pattern of intelligible speech, and we love his nonsense because he enables us to escape for the moment from the iron rule of sense. People do not laugh when a cock crows, but I have heard the gallery laughing uproariously when a man in the audience imitated a cock crowing. This is because, when a cock crows, he is acting in accord with the accepted farmyard pattern, but when a man crows he is breaking the pattern of human behavior. The amusement many people get from talking and performing animals may be explained in the same way. The parrot that uses blasphemous language is not behaving according to the monotonous rules of bird life. The dog that rises on its hind legs and fox-trots across the stage defies the laws laid down by Nature for the behavior of dogs. Lord George Sanger amused thousands of people some years ago by introducing into his circus an oyster that smoked a pipe. This would not have been amusing but for the fact that oysters do not, as a rule, smoke. Nobody would pay a penny to see a human being smoking a pipe. The oyster did not smoke a pipe either, but Lord Sanger was able to make people pretend to themselves that it did, and for one glorious moment the pattern of conventional oysterdom was smashed to pieces.

All the comic writers from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, from Swift to Lewis Carroll, have broken the pattern for us in a comparable way. They have taken us when we were tired of looking at life as though it were a series of demonstrable theories in Euclid, and have torn all those impressive triangles and circles into small pieces, and have dipped them in color and put them into a kaleidoscope, and have invited us to look at the result, in which all the legalism of Euclid has been turned into a chaos of ludicrous and distorted figures. Comedy has no respect even for the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. It does not care whether or not two parallel lines ever meet. It does not care whether the radii of a circle are equal. On the whole it prefers to suppose that they are not.

Laughter, then, springs largely from the lawless part of our nature. Hilarity is a kind of heresy — a cheerful defiance of all the laws, including the law of gravity. The planets are not amusing, since they obey fixed laws. Human beings are amusing because they do not. The saint or philosopher who believes that life should be lived according to law may therefore easily be tempted to regard laughter with suspicion. In this, however, I think he would be wrong. We must judge laughter, like other things, by its results. And a reasonable defense of laughter may be founded on the fact that it is not men with a comic sense who are the greatest lawbreakers. Murderers and thieves are not noted as a rule for their hilarity. They are for the most part serious men, who might have remained law-abiding citizens if only they had had a greater capacity for laughing.

It would be going too far to claim that all the laughers are virtuous men and all the non-laughers criminals. At the same time it is probably true that the laughing man, if he is virtuous, will as a result of his laughter be less offensively virtuous, and if he is vicious he will be less offensively vicious. Laughter gives a holiday both to the virtues and to the vices, and takes the imagination on its travels into a country in which the only principle is the principle of comic incongruity. Here man can resign himself to the enjoyment of life as a topsy-turvy wonderland as strange as any that Alice ever visited, and can see his dullest neighbors as a gallery of caricatures. It is a land of happy accidents, of large noses and blown-off hats, where words are misspelt and mispronounced, where men wear spats on their wrists instead of cuffs, the land of paradoxes and bulls and the things that could not happen. Whether it is worth visiting nobody will ever know for certain till the Day of Judgment.

The worst thing that can be said against laughter is that, by putting us in a good humor, it enables us to tolerate ourselves. The best thing that can be said for it is that for the same reason it enables us to tolerate each other.