Whatever a dog’s powers of jocosity when uninstructed by man, it seems safe to set down a good share of his highly developed sense of fun to his profound susceptibility to man’s educative influence; which again (as the difference between the educability of the dog and of the cat at once shows) implies an unusual strength of those instincts of attachment to man which have made him almost the type of fidelity.
How far, one wonders, will this educative influence of man be likely to go in the case of the most companionable of our domestic pets? W. Preyer tells us, that the dog is capable of imitating the signs of human gaiety, that an {161} intelligent specimen, when confronted with our laughter will draw back the corners of his mouth and leap into the air with a bright lustre in the eye.[93] Here we seem to have a rudiment of a genuine laugh, and may perhaps cease to speak rather confusingly of a dog’s “laughing with his tail”. G. J. Romanes relates that he had a dog who went some way towards qualifying himself for the office of clown. This animal would perform a number of self-taught tricks which were clearly intended to excite laughter. “For instance, while lying on his side and violently grinning, he would hold one leg in his mouth.” Under these circumstances “nothing pleased him so much as having his joke duly appreciated, while, if no notice was taken of him, he would become sulky”.[94]
This animal must, one supposes, have been in an exceptional degree a “funny dog”. It seems a pity that the observer did not take a “snapshot” at that grin so that it might be a shade less abstract and “in the air” than the grin of the Cheshire cat, as treated by Mr. Lewis Carroll. What seems clear is, that the physiognomy of a dog manages to execute a weirdly distorted semblance of our smile. With respect to the vocal part of the expression, we must not expect too much. The bark may not be able to adjust itself to our quick explosions of gaiety. It is commonly said that the dog has a special bark for expressing pleasure, and it seems likely that he employs this when he is said to be seized by the sense of the funniness of things.
On the moral side, the possibility of the dog’s becoming a humorous beast looks more promising. He certainly exhibits rudiments of feelings and mental attitudes which {162} seem in man to be closely related to a reflective humour. As the inner circle of his human friends know, he can be terribly bored. I saw, not long since, a small dog undergoing the process of chaining by his mistress before she took him into a shop. He drew a long yawn, and his appearance was eminently suggestive of a keen sense of the absurdity of the shopping habits of ladies, a sense which only wanted the appropriate utterance to become a mild, tolerant kind of satire. Yet one must be mindful of one’s own warning against a too hasty interpretation of such actions.
We may now turn to animals much nearer ourselves in the zoological scale. Among monkeys we obtain, undoubtedly, something more closely akin to our smile and laugh. Darwin has made a careful inquiry into the similarities between the two. He tells us that some of the essential features of the facial expression during a laugh, the drawing backwards of the corners of the mouth, the formation of wrinkles under the eyes, etc., are “characteristic and expressive of a pleased state of mind in various kinds of monkeys”.[95]
With respect to laughter-like sounds, Darwin gives us several pertinent facts. A young chimpanzee will make a kind of barking noise when he is pleased by the return of any one to whom he is attached, a noise which the keeper interprets as a laugh. The correctness of this interpretation is confirmed by the fact that other monkeys utter a kind of “tittering sound” when they see a beloved person. A young chimpanzee when tickled under the armpits produces a more decided chuckling or laughing sound. “Young ourangs, also, when tickled will make a chuckling sound and put on a grin.”
It has been found by Dr. L. Robinson that the young of {163} the anthropoid apes are specially ticklish in the regions of the surface of the body which correspond with the ticklish regions in the case of the child. Not only so, a young chimpanzee will show great pleasure when tickled, rolling over on his back and abandoning himself to the pastime, much as a child does. When the tickling is prolonged he resembles a child further by defending ticklish spots. So, too, does a young ourang. It may be added that young apes, like many children, make a pretence of biting when tickled.
To sum up: the young of the higher apes have something resembling our smile and laugh, and produce the requisite movements when pleased. Their attempt at laughter, as we might be disposed to regard it, appears as a sign of sudden joy in circumstances in which a child will laugh, e.g., on the reappearance of a beloved companion after a considerable interval. It further occurs when the animal is tickled, along with other manifestations which point to the existence of a rudiment of the child’s capacity for fun and for the make-believe of play.
One more fact should be added in order to bring out the similarity here to the human attitude towards the laughable. It is probable, from the testimony of several observers, that monkeys dislike being laughed at.[96] Now, it is true that the enjoyment of fun and the dislike to being made its object are not the same thing. Nor do they seem to vary together in the case of men; otherwise the agelast would not be so often found among those who keenly resent being the object of others’ laughter. Nevertheless, they may be regarded in general as correlative traits; creatures which show a distinct distaste for being made the objects of laughter may be supposed to be capable of {164} the laughing attitude, so far at least as to be able to understand it.
Turning now from sub-human kinds of laughter to the full expression as we know it in ourselves, we may briefly trace the history of the smile and laugh during the first years of life. Here the question of the date of the first appearance of these expressive movements becomes important; and happily we have more than one set of careful observations on the point.