The beneficial effects of laughter have not been overlooked by the pedagogue. Mulcaster, for example (born about 1530), gives a high place to laughing among his “physical” or health-giving exercises. The physiological reasons adduced are sometimes funny enough: for the author relies on Galen and the doctrine of “spirits”. He thinks that laughter will help those who have cold hands and cold chests and are troubled with melancholia, since it “moveth much aire in the breast, and sendeth the warmer spirites outward”. Tickling under the armpits may well be added, seeing that these parts have a great store of small veins and little arteries “which being tickled so become warme themselves, and from thence disperse heat throughout the whole bodie”.[20]
How far these benign effects on health, which are recognised by the modern physician as well as by his predecessor, are due to the vigorous reinforcement brought by laughter to the work of respiration and of the circulation of the blood, it is not easy to say. The latter process reminds one of the circulation of pedestrians and vehicles in our London streets. In a general way it manages itself fairly well. Yet now and again a lusty “Move on!” from a policeman seems to be distinctly beneficial. Similar benefits may be extended to the organs of digestion and the rest.
At the same time we must not lose sight of the possibility that laughter may act beneficially on our hard-pressed {36} frames in another way. As has been suggested above, the lusty cachinnation is nature’s way of voicing gladness, a sudden increase of pleasure. Now it has been held by psychologists that pleasurable feelings tend to further the whole group of organic functions, by adding to the nervous vigour which keeps them going. Laughter may owe a part of its benign influence on our bodily state to the fact that it produces a considerable increase of vital activity by way of heightened nervous stimulation.[21]
One feature of the laughing outburst may pretty safely be ascribed to this increase of nervous action under pleasurable excitement. In all genuinely hilarious moods, the laugh is accompanied by a good deal of diffused activity of the voluntary muscles. This is seen most clearly in the unsophisticated laughter of children and savages. The sudden glee which starts the laugh starts also movements of arm, leg and trunk, so that arms flap wing-like, or meet in the joyous clap, and the whole body jumps. In older people matters may not be carried so far, though there are examples of the large shakings of laughter, notably that of Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh, whose great laugh was one “not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel”; and it is hard perhaps for any man taken by the “stab” of a good joke to keep his arms down and his body vertical.
It may be added that this supplementing of the energetic {37} respiratory actions by movements of the limbs gives to laughter its clear title to be called a muscular exercise. As such it is vigorous, voluminous and bordering, so to speak, on the violent. Its salutary influence, like that of the surgeon’s knife, will consequently depend on the celerity of its operation.
Here we come to the other column in the reckoning. If laughter does good by its occasional irruption into a domain which otherwise would have too much of drowsy monotony, its benefit is rigorously circumscribed. Only too easily can it overdo the “flushing” part, and inundate and destroy when it should merely cleanse. In other words, the mirthful cachinnation, just because it is an irruption, a disorderly proceeding, must not be unduly prolonged.
At what moment in a prolonged fit of laughter the undesirable effects begin to appear, it is not easy to say. It must be remembered that a good part of what remains of modern laughter is by no means pure hilarity. There is in it from the first ejaculation something of a biting sensation, or something of a melancholy pain. Yet, waiving this and looking on what begins as genuine hilarity, we shall find that it is not so simple a matter to determine the moment when further prolongation of the exercise will be weakening rather than strengthening. The excitement of laughter, like that of wine, may in its measurements have to be adjusted to individual constitution. Among the humiliations of life may be reckoned the discovery of an inability to go on laughing at the brilliant descriptions of a caricaturist, and an experience of aching exhaustion, of flabby collapse, while others continue the exhilarating chorus.
It is natural to look on the tears which often accompany boisterous laughter as an unfavourable symptom. Things which do us good should not, we argue, make us cry. Yet {38} we may reflect that men have been known to cry out of sheer happiness. With some laughers, too, the moisture may come at an earlier stage than with others. Was Shakespeare, one wonders, thinking of a violent laughter when he made Iachimo tell Imogen that her lord Leonatus had mocked the French lover’s lugubrious despondencies “with his eyes in flood with laughter”? Perhaps in Shakespeare’s age, when laughter was held in with looser rein, the tears came more readily.
According to Darwin, who has made a careful study of laughter’s tears, their appearance during a violent attack is common to all the races of mankind. He connects them with the contraction of the muscles round the eyes which has for its purpose the compressing of the gorged blood-vessels and so the protection of the eyes. This is the meaning of the tears alike in the case of grief and of extravagant mirth. The paroxysm of excessive laughter thus approaches the other extreme of violent grief; and this fact, Darwin thinks, may help us to understand how it is that hysterical patients and children often laugh and cry alternately.[22]
However it may be with the tears, there is no doubt that violent and prolonged laughter works mischief in other ways. The sigh that so frequently follows the laugh, and has been supposed to illustrate the wider truth that “all pleasures have a sting in the tail,” need not be taken too seriously. It is the sign of restoration of equilibrium after the hilarious upset. The prostrating effects of violent laughter were well known to Shakespeare. Thus he speaks of being “stabbed” {39} with laughter, of laughing oneself “into stitches”—an experience which Milton probably had in mind when he wrote of “laughter holding both his sides”—of the heart being almost broken “with extreme laughing” and of laughing oneself “to death”.[23] The American returns speak of a whole Iliad of evil after-effects: fatigue, weakness, sadness, giddiness, breathlessness and so forth. It may, however, be urged that these unpleasant experiences hardly justify us in applying to laughter the rather strong epithet of “killing”. They are, under normal circumstances, temporary inconveniences only, and to the lover of fun do not seriously count as against its substantial blessings. When laughter kills, as it does sometimes, it is because it has degenerated into something distinctly abnormal, allying itself to hysterical grief or to the unhinging effect of a great mental shock.