The friends of laughter have, however, always existed, and even in these rather dreary days are perhaps more numerous than is often supposed. In support of this idea one may recall the curious fact that, as the essayist just quoted remarks, we all shrink from the “awful imputation” implied in the words “You have no sense of humour”. This recognition of the capacity for appreciating a joke as a human attribute which it is well not to be without is, of course, very far from being proof of a genuine love of fun in the recognisers themselves. Yet it at least attests the existence of this love in a respectable number of their fellows.
Now this true friend of laughter (ὁ φιλόγελως) may urge his own objection to our proposed discussion, an objection less irritating perhaps than that of the zealous laughter-hater and of the indifferent agelast, but on the other hand of a more penetrating thrust. He not unnaturally dislikes the idea of his daily pastime being made the subject of grave inquiry. He feels in its acutest form the resentment of the natural man on seeing his enjoyment brought under the scalpel and lens of the scientific inquirer. He urges with force that the chucklings of humour are the very lightest and flimsiest of human things; and that to try to capture them and subject them to serious investigation looks much like the procedure of the child whose impulsive hand would seize and examine his dainty soap bubbles.
To these objections from the true friends of the mirthful god one owes it to reply courteously and at length. Yet the answer cannot well be given at the outset. A discourse on laughter can remove this kind of objection, if at all, only by showing in its own treatment of the subject that serious thought may touch even the gossamer wing of the merry {4} sprite and not destroy; that all things, and so the lightest, are things to be comprehended, if only we can reach the right points of view; and that the problems which rise above the mental horizon, as soon as we begin to think about man’s humorous bent, have a quite peculiar interest, an interest in which all who can both laugh at things and ponder on them may be expected to share.
It seems evident that one who is to probe the spirit of fun in man, and to extract its meaning, should have special qualifications. It is by no means sufficient, as some would seem to suppose, that he should be able to think clearly. He must couple with the gravity of the thinker something of the intellectual lightness and nimbleness of the jester. That is to say, he must be in warm touch with his theme, the jocose mood itself, realising his subject at once vividly and comprehensively by help of a rich personal experience.
Now it cannot be said that those who have offered to teach us the secrets of laughter have commonly exhibited these qualifications in a conspicuous measure. It is a part of the whimsicality which seems to run through human affairs that the spirit of fun should be misunderstood not merely by the avowedly indifferent and the avowedly hostile, but by those who, since they offer to elucidate its ways, might be expected to have some personal acquaintance with it. The combination of a fine feeling for the baffling behaviour of this spirit with a keen scientific analysis, such as is found in Mr. George Meredith’s Essay on Comedy, seems to be a rarity in literature.
This want of the familiar touch is especially observable in a good deal of the treatment of laughter by philosophic writers. It is not necessary to dwell on the sublime subtleties of the metaphysicians who conceive of the comic as a “moment” in the dialectic process which the æsthetic “Idea” {5} has to pass through. The account of the gyrations which the Idea has to describe, when once it passes out of that state of harmonious union with the sensuous image which we call “the beautiful,” reads strangely enough. Having, for reasons that are not made too clear, torn itself away from its peaceful companion (the image), and set itself up as antagonist to this in “the sublime,” the august Idea encounters the unpleasant retaliation of the image it has discarded in “the ugly,” where we see the determination of the injured party to defy its late companion; though, in the end, it revives from the “swoon” into which this rude behaviour of the image has plunged it, and recovers its legitimate claims—with which it would seem it was at the outset dissatisfied—in what we call “the ludicrous”.
I have here tried to put the speculative subtleties of these Hegelian writers, so far as I am able to catch their drift, into intelligible English, and not to caricature them. Even favourable critics of these theories have found it difficult not to treat them with some amount of irony; and, so far as I am aware, no rehabilitator of Hegelian thought in England has as yet been bold enough to introduce to our insular mind a chapter of the sacred mysteries which, as they may well suspect, so easily lends itself to profane jesting.
How remote this kind of conception of the ludicrous is from the homely laughter of mortals may be seen in such attempts as are made by these Hegelian thinkers to connect the two. Hegel himself, in touching on the nature of comedy, asserted that “only that is truly comic in which the persons of the play are comic for themselves as well as for the spectators”. This seems to mean (it is always hazardous to say confidently what a Hegelian pronouncement does mean) that a large part of what the world has {6} foolishly supposed to be comedy, including the plays of Molière, are not so.[2]
It is, perhaps, too much to expect that the aspiring metaphysician, when, as he fondly thinks, he has gained the altitude from which the dialectic process of the World-idea is seen to unfold itself, should trouble himself about so vulgar a thing as our everyday laughter. But laughter has its mild retaliations for the negligent, and the comedian of to-day, as of old, is more likely to pluck from those who tread the speculative cloud-heights material for his merriment than any further enlightenment on the mysteries of his craft.
It is, however, more to the purpose to refer to those theorists who make some show of explaining what the ordinary man understands by the ludicrous, and of testing their theories by an appeal to recognisable examples. It is instructive to note the cautiousness with which they will sometimes venture on the slippery “empirical” ground. Schopenhauer, for example, in setting out his theory of the ludicrous—a theory which we shall deal with later on—in the first volume of his chief work, thought it “superfluous” to illustrate his theory by example. In the second volume, however, he comes to the help of the “intellectual sluggishness” of his readers and condescends to furnish illustrations. And what does the reader suppose is the first to be selected? The amusing look of the angle formed by the meeting of the tangent and the curve of the circle; which look is due, he tells us, to the reflection that an angle implies the meeting of two lines which, when prolonged, intersect, whereas the straight line of the tangent {7} and the carve of the circle are able merely to graze at one point, where, strictly speaking, they are parallel. In other words, we laugh here because the angle which stares us in the face is irreconcilable with the idea of a meeting of a tangent and a curved line. With a charming candour the writer proceeds: “The ludicrous in this case is, no doubt, extremely weak; on the other hand, it illustrates with exceptional clearness the origin of the ludicrous in the incongruity between what is thought and what is perceived”.[3]