Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

II

George Eliot, to quote her again, makes one of her philosophic characters declare that a liking for Bellini’s music “indicates a puerile state of culture.” Certainly the liking for practical jokes is an even more certain indication of this condition. And “puerile” is an aptly chosen adjective, since the practical joke is boyish; and boys are pitiably uncivilized. Until they tame their native energy they are callous to the sufferings of others and they even enjoy cruelties they inflict in the spontaneous expression of their thereby demonstrated superiority. Just as the Clown in the pantomime butters the slide so that the Pantaloon shall slip and tumble down tumultuously, so the boy in real life delights in disguising the frozen pavement with scattered snow so that the unsuspecting gentleman in spectacles will make a violent and vain struggle to keep his balance. This evokes joyful shouts from the youthful perpetrators of the unkindly act. If a grown-up happens to witness the mishap he is not moved to laughter; his immediate impulse is to go to the aid of the elderly victim.

Yet this same grown-up when he is one of the audience at a pantomime reverts to the puerile stage of culture and becomes a child again; for the two hours’ traffic of the stage he is subdued to what he gazes at; and he may be moved to loud merriment by deeds which, seen in the street, would cause him instantly to summon the police. He laughingly approves of the unprovoked assassinations of Punch.

We are assured by scientific investigators that civilization is only a thin veneer at best and that beneath the courtesy of the most civilized society there lie dormant the archaic instincts of primitive man. However remote we may think ourselves from our probably arboreal ancestor, the beast within us is never dead; and he is ever ready to rouse himself from his long slumber and to put us to shame sometimes by his blood-lust and sometimes by his monkey-tricks.

The scientists also assert that every one of us, from his conception to his coming of age, passes through the successive stages of the evolution of mankind, slowly rising year by year from savagery to barbarism and from barbarism to civilization (supposing that he is lucky enough to progress so far). If this must be admitted, then we need not be surprized that the audiences in our theaters can be interested by wit which is juvenile and by humor which is primitive. These audiences are made up of all sorts and conditions of men, in every stage of development. Even if we assume that most of these spectators are civilized (perhaps a precarious assumption), we cannot doubt that only a few of them have attained to a high level of culture; and by this very attainment these more advanced members of the audience are separated from the main body, which has not progressed in its preferences so far away from its ruder and cruder progenitors.

The larger the theater itself, the more closely compacted the spectators, the more primitive is the comic effect which will provoke the swiftest and the most uproarious response; and the refined and delicate-minded minority finds itself conforming to the primitive tastes of the less particular majority, even if it does so only for the moment. While the curtain is up the high-brow has a fellow-feeling with his low-brow companions; and he is therefore willing not merely to smile deprecatingly but even to laugh heartily at mechanical dislocations of the vocabulary and at equally mechanical practical jokes. When he is a spectator of the passing show, the self-conscious Pharisee of culture will consent to fellowship with publicans and with sinners.

In one of his earlier philosophical inquiries, that in which he analyzed the sources of laughter, Bergson recalled the old story of the man in church who remained dry-eyed when the rest of the congregation were dissolved in tears by the pathos of the sermon and who explained his failure to be moved as due to the fact that he did not “belong to that parish.” And Bergson asserted that this explanation, absurd as it may seem, is not unsatisfactory or illogical, if applied to laughter rather than to tears. “However hearty a laugh may be,” the French philosopher declared, “it always conceals an afterthought of complicity with other laughters, real or imaginary.”

So it is that when the spectators refuse to become accomplices before the fact, there is no certainty that they will respond to the wit or to the humor of the play they are witnessing. Only when they have yielded themselves to a communal intimacy, so to call it, can the dramatist find an immediate appreciation of his merry jests. Shakspere spoke out of abundant experience as player and as playwright when he declared that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it.” And Goethe was no less shrewd when he asserted that “nothing is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.”

III

The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the mot d’esprit. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the mot de situation. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are wont to call this the mot de caractère.