Precisely the same criticism was offered when Artemus Ward lectured in London more than a half-century ago. The humour of this once famous joker has become a disputable point. It is safe to say that anything less amusing than the passage read by Lincoln to his Cabinet in Mr. Drinkwater’s play could not be found in the literature of any land. It cast a needless gloom over the scene, and aroused our sympathy for the officials who had to listen to it. But the American jest, like the Greek epic, should be spoken, not read; and it is claimed that when Artemus Ward drawled out his absurdities, which, like the Greek epic, were always subject to change, these absurdities were funny. Mr. Leacock has politely assured us that London was “puzzled and enraptured with the very mystery of the humour”; but Mr. Leacock, being at that time three years old, was not there to discern this for himself. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was there on the opening night, November 13, 1866, and found the puzzle and the mystery to be far in advance of the rapture. The description he was wont to give of this unique entertainment (a “Panorama,” and a lecture on the Mormons), of the depressing, unventilated Egyptian Hall in which it was given, of the wild extravagances of the speaker, which grew wilder and wilder as the audience grew more and more bewildered, was funny enough, Heaven knows, but the essence of the fun lay in failure.
Americans, sixty years ago, were brought up on polygamous jests. The Mormons were our neighbours, and could be always relied upon to furnish a scandal, a thrill, or a joke. When they mended their ways, and ceased to be reprehensible or amusing, the comic papers were compelled to fall back on Solomon, with whose marital experiences they have regaled us ever since. But to British eyes, Brigham Young was an unfamiliar figure; and to British minds, Solomon has always been distinguished for other things than wives. Therefore Artemus Ward’s casual drolleries presupposed a humorous background which did not exist. A chance allusion to a young friend in Salt Lake City who had run away with a boarding school was received in stupefied silence. Then suddenly a woman’s smothered giggle showed that light had dawned on one receptive brain. Then a few belated laughs broke out in various parts of the hall, as the idea travelled slowly along the thought currents of the audience, and the speaker went languidly on to the next unrecognizable pleasantry.
The criticism passed upon Americans to-day is that they laugh often and without discrimination. This is what the English say of us, and this is what some Americans have said of the English. Henry James complained bitterly that London play-goers laughed unseasonably at serious plays. I wonder if they received Ervine’s “John Ferguson” in this fashion, as did American play-goers. That a tragedy harsh and unrelenting, that human pain, unbearable because unmerited, should furnish food for mirth may be comprehensible to the psychologist who claims to have a clue to every emotion; but to the ordinary mortal it is simply dumbfounding. People laughed at Molnar’s “Liliom” out of sheer nervousness, because they could not understand it. And “Liliom” had its comedy side. But nobody could have helped understanding “John Ferguson,” and there was no relief from its horror, its pitifulness, its sombre surrender to the irony of fate. Yet ripples of laughter ran through the house; and the actress who played Hannah Ferguson confessed that this laughter had in the beginning completely unnerved her, but that she had steeled herself to meet and to ignore it.
It was said that British audiences were guilty of laughing at “Hedda Gabler,” perhaps in sheer desperate impatience at the unreasonableness of human nature as unfolded in that despairing drama. They should have been forgiven and congratulated, and so should the American audiences who were reproached for laughing at “Mary Rose.” The charm, the delicacy, the tragic sense of an unknown and arbitrary power with which Barrie invested his play were lost in the hands of incapable players, while its native dullness gained force and substance from their presentation. A lengthy dialogue on a pitch-black stage between an invisible soldier and an inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening nor terrifying. It would have been as hard to laugh as to shudder in the face of such tedious loquacity.
We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh, weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck’s “Intruder” was played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia, they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented, degenerates swiftly into farce—into very bad farce, too, as Swift said of the vulgar malignities of fate.
The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it, was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary, was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us. My first experience was at the opening night of Ervine’s “Mixed Marriage,” in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I could judge by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the theological bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in a box with Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness of the house at the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar and vital to her was a matter of the purest unconcern to that particular group of Americans. The only thing that roused them from their apathy was the sudden rage with which, in the third act, Tom Rainey shouted at his father: “Ye’re an ould fool, that’s what ye are; a damned ould fool!” At these reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and animation. It was seemingly—though I should be sorry to think it—the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, “The Playboy of the Western World,” was put on the American stage, men laughed—generally at the wrong time—out of the hopeless confusion of their minds. The “Playboy” was admittedly an enigma. The night I saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure what, hurled denunciations and one missile—which looked strangely like a piece of pie—at the actors. It was a disgraceful scene, but not without its humorous side; for when the riotous interruptions had subsided, an elderly man arose, and, with the manner of an invited speaker at a public dinner, began, “From time immemorial”—But the house had grown tired of disturbances, and howled him down. He waited for silence, and then in the same composed and leisurely manner began again, “From time immemorial”—At this point one of the policemen who had been restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the theatre; the play was resumed; and what it was that had happened from time immemorial we were destined never to know.
A source of superlative merriment in the United States is the two-reel comic of our motion-picture halls. Countless thousands of Americans look at it, and presumably laugh at it, every twenty-four hours. It is not unlike an amplified and diversified Punch and Judy show, depending on incessant action and plenty of hard knocks. Hazlitt says that bangs and blows which we know do not hurt provoke legitimate laughter; and, until we see a funny film, we have no conception of the amount of business which can be constructed out of anything so simple as men hitting one another. Producers of these comics have taken the public into their confidence, and have assured us that their work is the hardest in the motion-picture industry; that the slugging policeman is trained for weary weeks to slug divertingly, and that every tumble has to be practised with sickening monotony before it acquires its purely accidental character. As for accessories—well, it takes more time and trouble to make a mouse run up a woman’s skirt at the right moment, or a greyhound carry off a dozen crullers on its tail, than it does to turn out a whole sentimental scenario, grey-haired mother, high-minded, pure-hearted convict son, lumber-camp virtue, town vice, and innocent childhood complete. Whether or not the time and trouble are well spent depends on the amount of money which that mouse and those crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and laughter-loving public.
The dearth of humorous situations—at no time inexhaustible—has compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed, violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner without coming to grief. Even the animals—dogs, donkeys and pigs—are subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life. Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these circumstances, a great protection. The human body, swathed in rolls of cotton-wadding, is safe from contusions and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the producers of comic “movies” know what “One crowded hour of glorious life” can be made to hold.
Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining causes—why should we?—until the contradictory definitions of philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another’s misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough, spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. “We laugh from strength, and we laugh at weakness.” Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in the amusement of civilized men who have gaged the folly and frivolity of their kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent motion-picture halls, says that the comic makes its appeal to “the intelligence pure and simple.” He raises laughter to the dignity of a “social gesture” and a corrective. We put our affections out of court, and impose silence upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only because the corrective would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of sympathy and kindness. Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but one thing, that all humour is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our indestructible spirit of mirth to “the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination.”