Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

Picture to yourself a familiar scene—the interior of a theatre crowded with people. On the stage the persons of the play move to and fro, speaking their lines. Presently a slight change is made in the current of the dialogue, and, presto! the spectators who have been so quietly listening and watching become weirdly agitated. Their features are distorted in strange grimaces, they throw back their heads, and give utterance to abrupt, explosive, unmelodious noises. Even their bodies take part in the amazing commotion.

Something “funny” has just been said by one of the actors, and those who have heard it are responding by an outburst of “laughter.”

Recall likewise the equally familiar picture of a huge circus tent with its bewildering array of equipment for the performance of feats of strength and daring, surrounded by tier upon tier of seats filled with expectant holiday-makers. The entertainment is about to begin; from an entrance come the blaring strains of a brass band, and a long, gaily bedecked procession circles slowly before the gaping throng. At the end of the procession are half a dozen men of uncouth gait and bizarre appearance, their faces whitened and spotted, queer conical caps on their heads, and wearing enormous, shapeless garments as white and spotted as their faces.

These men say nothing—they simply go through all sorts of foolish antics. But at the mere sight of them the same uproar of discordant sounds fills the air, the spectators, like those of the theatre and with even greater vehemence, uniting in a very bedlam of guffaws.

Pass, finally, to the open street, alive with men and women hurrying to their work. Some one has carelessly dropped on the sidewalk the slippery skin of a fruit. The first man to step on it feels his legs give way beneath him, strives frantically to keep his balance, waves his arms about, and ends by plumping to the ground with a heavy thud. At once he is beset by the “smiles” and “chuckles” of those who have witnessed his fall; and, hurt and annoyed, he scrambles to his feet, gives himself a hasty brush, and disappears as rapidly as possible.

Now, just what is this singular phenomenon of laughter, so readily induced and from such a variety of causes? What is there in the words of an actor, the antics of a clown, or the misfortune of another person, to provoke, under the circumstances mentioned, the peculiar reaction of bodily and facial contortion and inarticulate vocal utterance that, regarded dispassionately, seems almost repulsive? What useful purpose can be served by such behaviour, such an obvious departure from the well-ordered ways of the reasoning life? In a word, why do we laugh?

It is a question far more easily asked than answered, as every one has discovered who has really pondered it. The answer that immediately comes to mind—“We laugh because we are amused”—not only is hopelessly inadequate, but to a large extent is incorrect. It can readily be shown that people sometimes laugh in situations where their mental state is anything but that of amusement. In one well-authenticated instance a frontiersman, on returning to his home and finding it in ruins, with his wife and children mutilated corpses, began to laugh and continued laughing until he died from the rupture of a blood-vessel. In another case, cited among the responses to a questionnaire on laughter issued by that well-known American psychologist, President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, a number of young people from nineteen to twenty-four years of age were sitting together when the death of a friend was announced. “They looked at each other for a second, and then all began to laugh, and it was some time before they could become serious.”

A young woman, replying to the same questionnaire, confessed that she often laughed when hearing people speak of the death of their friends, “not because it is funny or pleases her, but because she cannot help it.” Another young woman reported that on hearing of the death of a former school-mate she felt deeply grieved, yet “laughed as heartily as she had ever done in her life,” and, in spite of every effort to control herself, “had to break out into a laugh repeatedly.” A third “must always laugh when she hears of a death, and has had to leave the church at a funeral because she must giggle.”

Even the shock of a severe physical pain is known to provoke occasionally, not tears but laughter. “A young man,” says C. G. Lange, “whom I was treating with a powerful caustic for an ulceration of the tongue, invariably, at the moment when the pain was at its highest, was attacked by a violent outburst of laughter.”

One has only to think also of the laughter caused by tickling to realise that it is not always true to say that we laugh because we are amused. And when it is true, this answer, instead of solving the problem of laughter, merely raises it in another form, since it then becomes necessary to explain why we are amused by the sayings and happenings at which we laugh. Most students of laughter have indeed felt that the important thing to do is to determine the nature of the laughable, a task itself of considerable difficulty and leading to the most diverse conclusions in the numerous explanatory formulas which have been advanced from time to time, but which, when closely scrutinised, are chiefly noteworthy for their incompleteness.