But
why
has the excitation suddenly become 'redundant'; and why is it
discharged in laughter and not, say, in weeping -- which is an equally
'purposeless' activity? The answer to the second half of the question
seems obvious: the kind of excitation exploded in laughter has a different
quality or chemical composition, as it were, from the emotions which
overflow in tears. But the very obviousness of this answer is deceptive,
for the attempt to define this difference in 'quality and composition'
necessitates a new approach to the theory of human emotions.
At first sight there seehis to be a bewildering variety of moods involved
in different types of humour. The practical joke is frankly aggressive;
the lavatory jokes of children are scatological; blue jokes are sexual;
the Charles Addams type of cartoon and the 'sick' joke play on feelings
of horror and disgust; the satirist on righteous indignation. Moreover,
the same type of semantic pipeline can be made to carry different
types of fluid under varying degrees of pressure: for instance, 'they
haven't got a coat to turn' and 'I never aimed as high as that' are
both bisociations of metaphorical and direct meaning -- jokes of the
same logical pattern but with different emotional colouring. The more
sophisticated forms of humour evoke mixed, and sometimes contradictory,
feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain one ingredient whose
presence is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or
apprehension. It may be manifested in the guise of malice, derision,
the veiled cruelty of condescension, or merely as an absence of
sympathy with the victim of the joke -- a 'momentary anaesthesia of the
heart', as Bergson put it. I propose to call this common ingredient the
'aggressive-defensive' or 'self-asserting' tendency -- the reasons for
choosing this clumsy term will be seen later on. In the subtler types of
humour this tendency is so faint and discreet that only careful analysis
will detect it, like the presence of salt in a well-prepared dish --
which, however, would be tasteless without it.
It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the parodist, which
turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into comedy. It may be combined with
affection, as in friendly teasing; in civilized humour aggression is
sublimated and often unconscious. But in jokes which appeal to children
and primitives, cruelty and boastful self-assertion are much in evidence,
and the same is true of the historically earlier forms and theories of
the comic. 'As laughter emerges with man from the mists of antiquity
it seems to hold a dagger in its hand. There is enough brutal triumph,
enough contempt, enough striking down from superiority in the records of
antiquity and its estimates of laughter to presume that original laughter
may have been wholly animosity.' [1] In the Old Testament there are
(according to Mitchell [2]) twenty-nine references to laughter, out of
which thirteen are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, or contempt,
and only two are 'born out of a joyful and merry heart'. A survey among
America schoolchildren between the ages of eight and fifteen led to the
conclusion (which could hardly have surprised anybody) that 'mortification
or discomfort or hoaxing of others very readily caused laughter, while
a witty or funny remark often passed unnoticed'. [3]
Among the theories of laughter that have been proposed since the days of
Aristotle, the 'theory of degradation' appears as the most persistent. For
Aristotle himself laughter was closely related to ugliness and debasement;
for Cicero 'the province of the ridiculous . . . lies in a certain
baseness and deformity'; for Descartes laughter is a manifestation of joy
'mixed with surprise or hate or sometimes with both'; in Francis Bacon's
list of laughable objects, the first place is taken by 'deformity'. The
essence of the 'theory of degradation' is defined in Hobbes's
Leviathan
:
The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from
a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with
the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.
Bain, one of the founders of modern psychology, followed on the whole the
same theory: 'Not in physical effects alone, but in everything where a
man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomforting
a rival, is the disposition of laughter apparent.' [4]
For Bergson laughter is the corrective punishment inflicted by society
upon the unsocial individual: 'In laughter we always find an unavowed
intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.' [5]
Max Beerbohm found 'two elements in the public's humour: delight
in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar'. McDougall believed that
'laughter has been evolved in the human race as an antidote to sympathy,
a protective reaction shielding us from the depressive influence of the
shortcomings of our fellow men.' [6]
Thus on this one point there is agreement among the theorists, ancient
and modern; and not only agreement but exaggeration. One has only to
think of Aristophanes or Calderon;
A Midsummer Night's Dream
or Chateaubriand's
Maximes et Pensées
, to realize that
the aggressive charge detonated in laughter need not be gunpowder;
a grain of Attic salt is enough to act as a catalyst. Furthermore,
we must remember that aggression and self-defence, rage and fear,
hostility and apprehension, are as pairs of twins in their psychology and
physiology. One of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the
moment of the sudden cessation of danger, real or imaginary; and rarely is
the character of laughter as a discharge-mechanism for redundant tensions
more strikingly manifested than in the sudden change of expression on the
small child's face from anxious apprehension to the happy laugh of relief.
Whatever the composition of the emotional charge which a narrative
carries, it will produce a comic effect only if an aggressive-defensive
tendency, however sublimated, is present in it. You may be deeply moved
by a person's predicament, and yet unable to suppress a smile at its
ludicrous aspect; and the impression of the 'ludicrousness' of another
person's behaviour always implies an assertion -- conscious or unconscious
-- of your own superiority; you smile at his expense.