The ludicrous side of the paradoxical, of what is violently opposed to common-sense—a matter to be dealt with more fully presently—illustrates the effect of intellectual naïveté. All exaggeration in description and other extravagance of statement are laughed at, in part at least, as showing ignorance of what is credible. On the other hand, insistence on the well known and the obvious, especially when it is accompanied by a laboured argument, amuses us by ignoring the circumstance that the hearer or reader is already quite familiar with the matter.
A delightful exhibition of the naïve intelligence is given by a gross misapprehension of what is happening or of what is being said at the moment. The Londoner may delight his country listener with his misunderstandings of {105} what to the latter seems perfectly self-explanatory. The tickling force of such misapprehension is heightened when it involves an idea which is the very reverse of the truth. The good story of the Yorkshire juryman who remarked that “Lawyer Scarlet gets all the easy cases” turns on the delicious inversion of causal relations. When travelling once in a train I heard a mother say to her little girl, who had been complaining of the heat, “The more you think of it the worse it will be”; upon which the child remarked in a drily humorous tone, “I should say the worse it is the more I shall think of it”. The mother’s remark had probably seemed an inversion of the true relation.
Other examples of what we call naïveté come, in part at least, under this head. The want of tact, the bringing in of that which has no relevance to the circumstances or the ideas of the moment, is an excitant of laughter for men of all levels of culture. The inappropriate ways in which the kindly savage or child tries to minister to his visitor’s comfort are a pretty example of such simplicity. Irrelevances in conversation and discussion, such as mal à propos, mistakings of the issue, unfortunate suggestions of reasons, and the like, are among the recognised tributaries of the river of laughter. These irrelevances make a large contribution to the lighter enjoyment of social intercourse. An irrelevance having a peculiarly broad effect is a response to a question which wholly misses its point, as when one reads of a man on a descending balloon who asked a yokel, “Where am I?” and received for answer only the absurdly obvious, “In a balloon”.
Children’s naïveté—a mine of wealth to the discerning seeker after the laughable—illustrates this tickling property of a perfect simplicity of intelligence, and of those {106} irrelevances of behaviour and of utterance which by their mighty compass seize and occupy for the instant the field of contemplative vision. One of its most valuable manifestations is the habit of quietly substituting the child’s point of view for the adult’s. A large number of the “funny remarks” of children illustrate this. Here is an example. An improver of occasions asked a child who had seduced her grandfather into a rather alarming romp, “Isn’t grandpapa very kind to play with you, dear?” and received the sharp correction, “I’m playing with him”.
A bare reference may be made to other illustrations of the intellectual simplicity which entertains the mirthful eye. The effect of prejudice and passion in narrowing the mental outlook and setting up erroneous views of things is a favourite subject of comic treatment. As we shall see, the spectacle gains a higher value when the degraded intelligence approaches that of the disordered, and the amusing person, wholly preoccupied with his illusions, utters a string of remarks so widely irrelevant to the actual circumstances of the moment as to upset the gravity even of a serious spectator.
The limiting influence of relativity in the appreciation of this branch of the amusing has been pretty plainly illustrated in what has been said. The lack of skill or of knowledge which excites our merriment is the lack of that which is a familiar possession of our set, which accordingly we, at least, tend to look for in others. Hence, the man of society is amused at your not knowing one kind of thing, say, the history of the British Peerage, the bucolic at your ignorance of another, say, the ways of calves, and so forth. The simplicity of a child’s mind only impresses us in relation to our own grown-up and complex ways of thinking. Even the absurdities of paradox are relative, for what we are {107} pleased to regard as the stable, unalterable body of common-sense is, in reality, subject to change.
(9) We will now touch on a group of facts on which writers on the ludicrous are accustomed to lay stress. The spectacle of a child wearing a man’s hat, fully considered above, shows us the laughable directly and unmistakably as a juxtaposition of two foreign elements, the semblance of a whole made up of incongruous parts. Here we see the sense of fun fixing its eye on relations. It is recognised by all that the perception of certain relations, more particularly the unfitting, the disproportionate, the incongruous and the logically inconsistent, plays a large part in calling forth the more refined sort of laughter.
In dealing with this laughable aspect of relations we must draw a distinction. When a person laughs, say, at the imbecile movements of a skater as he tries to save himself from a fall, or at an outrageous costume, or at the fantastic language of some précieuse, he may be aware of half-perceiving a relation; such as want of fitness, extravagant departure from the normal. He knows, however, that his mental eye is not focussed for this relation; on the contrary, he feels as if the presentation in itself, by giving the required jerk to his apperceptive tendencies, were directly provocative of mirth.
On the other hand, he will, I believe, hold that there are cases where the enjoyment of the laughable depends on the mental eye directing itself to a relation. The relation may not be apprehended in a perfectly precise way; but the point is that it is mentally seized, if only for the fraction of a second; and, further, that a degree of definiteness is given to the apprehension of the relation by a glimpse, at least, of the related terms.
This localising of the laughable in a relation is most {108} evident in the case of those complex presentations where lack of harmony and of mutual fitness—what we call incongruity—appear in the several parts of the whole which are present to the eye, and forces itself on the attention in a thoroughly aggressive fashion. A country woman displaying in her dress or in her speech a bizarre mixture of the peasant and the fine lady, a proposal to climb a mountain in dainty high-heeled shoes, the couching of a vote of thanks in language far below or above the needs of the occasion, these pull at the muscles of laughter because they strike us as a forcing together of things which hurtle and refuse to consort. The same holds true of cases in which the incongruity lies between one presentation and another which has preceded and is still present to the imagination, as in the clown’s utter failure to reproduce the model action of the expert which he sets out to equal.