An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development and Its Value

by James Sully

The last remarks suggest that in any attempt to deal with the conditions favourable to laughter reference should be made to those physiological characteristics which are supposed to determine the particular temperament of a man: his special bent, say, towards jollity on the one hand, or towards a brooding melancholy on the other. Our forefathers had pretty definite ideas about the sort of bodily constitution which was the foundation of the {81} laughter-loving temper. A full “habit” tending to obesity, as in Falstaff, was, and is, I believe, popularly supposed to be a mainstay of the laughing spirit. The saying “Laugh and grow fat” may imply a vague apprehension of this relation, as well as a recognition of the benefits of laughter. Yet the precise organic substrate of this happy endowment is unknown. Health and all that makes for “good spirits” are no doubt favourable to a voluble laughter of the elemental kind. On the other hand, as we shall see, the laughing capacity frequently co-exists with physiological conditions of quite another kind. Men are to be found of a lean habit, and with a strong bent to grave reflection, who are nevertheless able, not merely to provoke laughter from others, like the “melancholy Jaques,” but themselves to contribute a sonorous laughter to the higher intellectual domains of mirth. It is conceivable that the disposition to laugh may have its own restricted physiological conditions in a special instability of the mechanism concerned. This again may presumably include some as yet undefinable property of the nerve-centres which favours rapid change in the mode of brain activity, and those sudden collapses of tension which seem to be the immediate physiological antecedent of the motor discharge in laughter.

CHAPTER IV. VARIETIES OF THE LAUGHABLE.

In the preceding chapter we have examined those early and elementary forms of laughter which arise from the action of such causes as tickling, the attitude of play, and the sudden uplifting in a feeling of joy. These do not, it is evident, imply the existence of that specific faculty which we call the perception of the laughable in things, or what is commonly spoken of as the sense of the ludicrous. We have now to inquire into the mode of operation of this more intellectual cause of laughter, and to connect it, if possible, with that of the simpler processes of excitation.

The peculiarity in this case is that there is not only an external excitant, such as tickling fingers, but an object of the laughter. A tickled child laughs because of the tickling, but not at this as an object. The same is true of a good deal of the laughter of play: it is only when play represents something funny, or when the play-illusion is interrupted by a moment’s critical glance at the poverty of the doll or other plaything, that it gives rise to a proper enjoyment of the laughable; and a like remark holds good of the laughter which springs out of a relief of tension and a sudden transition from grave to gay. In the laughter of educated men and women we see an intellectual element, the perception of a laughable quality in an object, and the justification of the action by a reference to this. The examination of this intellectual type of laughter will bring {83} us to what is undoubtedly at once the most interesting and the most difficult problem in our study.

The objective reference in laughter implied in speaking of the “laughable” may be illustrated by a glance at the contemptuous laughter of the victor surveying his prostrate foe. The boy of ten who danced and screamed and laughed after he had killed his playmate in a street fight[52] was hardly possessed with what we call a sense of the comicality of things. The laughter, though directed at something, had not, in the complete sense of the expression, its object. The boy himself would not have laughed at the spectacle at another time, but viewed it with quite different feelings. And the object would not have presented itself as laughable to others who chanced to see it. In other words, the laughter was not caused by a mere contemplation of an object, but was conditioned by a particular relation between the laugher and this object.

To say that a thing is laughable, just as to say that a thing is eatable, implies an element of permanence and of universality. This is true even when a person says about a spectacle, e.g., that of a drunken man walking, “It is laughable to me,” since he means that for his experience at least it is a general rule that the sight of such movements excites laughter. But the word laughable clearly connotes more than this, a universality which embraces others as well as the individual. A thing is only rightly so called when it is supposed to be fitted to provoke men’s laughter in general. Language has been built up by men living the social life, and interested in common forms of experience; and the word laughable and all similar words undoubtedly refer to such common forms. {84}

These common forms of experience may be conceived of narrowly or widely. Much of what is called laughable by a schoolboy, by a savage, or even by an educated Englishman, is made to appear so by the special habits and correlated modes of thought of his community or his class. This clearly holds good of laughter at strange forms of dress, language and the like. Its “universality” is thus strictly conditioned. In dealing with the laughable we shall have constantly to allude to its relativity to particular customs and expectations. It will be a part of our problem to disengage from among the common excitants of laughter what seems to possess a truly universal character.

In speaking of an object of laughter as having universal potency, we do not imply that it will, as a matter of fact, always excite the outburst. The expression means only that a man will be ready to laugh at it, provided that he has certain requisite perceptions with the correlated emotional susceptibilities, and that nothing interferes with the working of these. Hence we shall have to speak of the laughable as answering to a tendency only, and to note the circumstances which are apt to counteract it. It is obvious, for example, that the limitations of class-custom, so far as they make laughter relative, will render a man blind to what is “objectively” laughable in his own customs. In truth, the adoption of such relative and accidental standards, which marks all the earlier stages in the growth of intelligence and of æsthetic sentiment, is the great obstacle to a clear recognition of what is laughable in a wider and more strictly universal sense.

Again, when we are considering the question of fact, “What do men really laugh at?” it is important to bear in mind that the tendency to laugh may, on the one hand, be reinforced by a favourable psycho-physical condition at the {85} moment, as well as by previously formed tendencies to apperceive things on their laughable side; while, on the other hand, it may be checked and wholly counteracted by unfavourable conditions, such as a sad mood, or an acquired habit of looking at those aspects of things which excite feelings antagonistic to laughter. Owing to the action of these forces, we find, not only that one man may fail to discern the laughable in an object which moves another to a hearty outburst, but that in many cases in which two men join in laughing at something they may not be touched by the same laughable feature or aspect of the presentation. Nothing, indeed, has more of that appearance of caprice which comes from the influence of uncertain subjective factors than the laughter of men, even of those who have a normal sense of the ludicrous.