“The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body,” says Professor Bergson, in stating one of his many subsidiary laws of the comic, “are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” Why, then, do we not laugh when we observe the machine-like precision with which a company of soldiers march on parade or execute the evolutions of drill? Surely one could not find a better example of “something mechanical in something living.” And, again, “any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.” The bobbing of the jack-in-the-box meets this formula, and we do laugh at the jack-in-the-box. But it is met equally well by the strangely lifelike movements of such devices as the automatic chess-player and the type-setting machine, yet these do not ordinarily elicit any appreciable manifestation of mirth.
It is, however, when we turn to Bergson’s deductions from his theory of the comic that we are most strongly impelled to question its soundness. Emphasizing as he does the element of automatism in the laughable, he logically enough infers that the function of laughter is to serve as a social corrective. “The rigid, the ready-made, the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing, and the living, absent-mindedness in contrast with attention, in a word, automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would fain correct.” We laugh, that is to say, only at imperfections in our fellow-men, or at things which remind us of imperfections, and the reason we laugh is that, consciously or unconsciously, we wish to call attention to them by way of, in Bergson’s own words, “a kind of social ragging.”
Stated thus baldly, the underlying defect of such an explanation of laughter becomes plainly apparent.[3] What has happened is that its author has read into the phenomenon of laughter a meaning applicable only under special circumstances. If it were true that we laugh only at what is imperfect and therefore ugly, however attenuated in ugliness, it would be impossible to understand the well-nigh universal eagerness for laughter; an eagerness which has led mankind to reward lavishly, even extravagantly, those who make it their business to provide occasions for laughter—the writers of farces and comedies, the fun-making actors and clowns, the producers of “comic pictures.” The egregious falsity of this “deformity” theory, as it may fairly be called, becomes still more manifest when we endeavour to apply it to account for the laughter of childhood, the period of life when laughter is most free and exuberant, but precisely when it is incredible to assume that it is motivated by any corrective impulse, conscious or otherwise.
To tell the truth, the attempt to reach a wholly satisfactory solution of the problem of laughter by striving to define the characteristics of the laughable seems foredoomed to failure. For, after all, the laughable must always remain a more or less uncertain quantity, if only for the reason that, as shown by facts of everyday observation, what makes one person laugh may not be in the least laugh-provoking to another. Yet everybody, or almost everybody, does laugh to some extent, and therefore the proper point of approach would rather seem to be through a study of the act of laughter itself and of its consequences with regard, not to the person or thing or phrase laughed at, but to the person doing the laughing.
Attacking the problem from this altogether different angle, one is soon in a position to discern several facts of real helpfulness in an explanatory way. By no means the least important is the extreme exuberance of laughter in childhood, to which reference has just been made. Once the child has begun to laugh—usually during the fourth or fifth month after birth, although occasional outbursts of a shadowy sort of laughter have been observed before the fourth month—it laughs with a truly amazing spontaneity and frequency. There seems to be nothing which may not become an object of laughter to a child, and, more than this, in direct contradiction to all theories postulating a reflective element at the bottom of every laugh, as often as not the laughter of childhood is conspicuously devoid of such an element.
For example, to cite a few observations from the record of a lady, Miss Milicent Shinn, whose painstaking study of the infancy of her niece Ruth is among the most stimulating of contributions to the modern science of child psychology, it appears that toward the end of the fifth month this little girl “habitually laughed with glee when any one smiled or spoke to her.” And when, two months later, she was taken into the open and allowed to roll about on a quilt, “the wooing of the passing freshness, the play of sun and shadow, the large stir of life in moving and sounding things, all this possessed her and made her ‘laugh and ejaculate with pleasure.’” Also, like almost every child of her age, little Ruth would be moved to hilarious mirth by being given a ride on somebody’s foot, or tossed and jumped about in one’s arms. Laughter, again, followed the successful accomplishment of any intellectual or muscular feat, such as pointing out pictures she had been asked to identify, climbing stairs, or deliberately letting herself fall “so as to come down sitting with a thud.”
The same tendency to excessive, even seemingly causeless laughter in the opening years of life has been noted by other close students of the emotions and their expression. Some have attempted, with the usual futile results, to explain it by an analysis of the things at which the child laughs. Others, more cautiously and more accurately, content themselves with describing it as a means whereby Nature provides a salutary outlet for surplus nervous energy.
It is undoubtedly this. Ask any child who has learned to talk—or, better, ask a grown person who has retained to a marked degree the faculty for hearty laughter—and the chances are you will be told that, while in any given instance the laugher may be far from clear as to why he has laughed, he does know that the involuntary movements of the laughter to which he yielded were preceded by peculiarly compelling sensations, variously expressed in such phrases as, “I had to laugh or burst,” “I had to do something to relieve the strain,” “I felt bubbling over,” “I felt a quiver, a thrill, a creepy feeling passing from my stomach to my mouth.”
That is to say, the evidence from the abounding laughter of childhood—pre-eminently a period of rapid physical growth and of the accumulation of a large store of nervous energy—as also the evidence from the laughter of unusually mirthful adults, who are, as a rule, persons of large build and of corresponding nervous force, suggests irresistibly the conception of laughter as an instinct implanted in us for the performance of an important physiological function. This view finds additional support in the familiar “giggling silliness” of the adolescent period, that strange period of unusual growth and stress, and the one in which are most likely to occur those singular attacks of untimely hilarity at funerals and on other solemn occasions, as mentioned among the responses to President Hall’s questionnaire. No more than the little child or your friend the jolly man does the adolescent always know at what he is laughing. He simply knows that he is impelled to laugh by forces latent in his being and over which he has no control.
Nor is it only as a relief from neural tension that laughter benefits the one who laughs. In the studies of laughter in childhood made by such investigators as Preyer, Sully, and Miss Shinn, one finds frequent allusion to occasions when laughter is obviously a reaction from a state of mental strain, and has a specifically useful effect in easing the mind. There is reason to believe that this is actually one of its constant ends—that it is a device for lightening the burden of mentation by temporary interruption of the thought process.