One characteristic of this savage jocosity is so frequently referred to by travellers that I cannot pass it by. We have seen that the teasing of the women is apt to take {235} on an indecent form. We are told, again and again, that savage jokes are commonly low and immoral. The coarser the joke, we are informed, the better it is liked by the natives of the Gold Coast.[177] The jests of the natives of the islands in the Pacific are said to be “low and immoral to a disgusting degree”.[178]
Possibly the European is not permitted to know the worst of this aspect of savage mirth. It is easy, however, to give it too serious a significance. To the simpler feeling of savages, untrammelled by the laws of decency as civilised people know them, there may be no suggestion here of a delight in the immoral as such. Their laughter may well indicate the fact that for them an undisguised reference to what we insist on hiding up has in it nothing improper; that they are just within sight of the stadium of culture at which convention begins to brand such references as obscene. Young children among ourselves will, I believe, often laugh at such open and direct mention of unmentionable things and much in the same way. It is hardly more in many cases, I surmise, than a little bravado, a glorying in doing something unusual which they are beginning to suspect is forbidden, though this is no doubt apt to be accompanied by a perception of the indignity done by this uncovering to the person involved.[179]
We may now turn to those forms of savage laughter which involve a more disinterested contemplation of things, and a rudimentary sense of their ludicrous phases. There {236} is no doubt that the enjoyment of the droll side of their world fills a large place in the life of savages. One may conjecture that it is a larger pastime in their case than in that of most boys; for though the intellect of a savage may not surpass that of a boy, his experience and matured good sense enable him to judge of the unseemly and the incongruous with considerable skill and quickness, and to derive much mirth from the contemplation of them.
The simplest form of this merriment, serving, as in the case of the child, as a bridge from joyous expansion under a new sensuous excitement to an appreciation of the odd, is the common laughter of savages at what is strikingly new to them, and at the same time takes their fancy. For example, the natives of Borneo were very much amused at a piano, and when they saw the dampers of the keys jumping up and down they “fairly laughed aloud”.[180] In like manner the Indians of Hudson Bay took a compass for a toy and laughed at it, refusing to accept the owner’s account of its use.[181] These are pretty clear examples of a mirthful delight at something which is new, devoid of import, and appealing to the play-appetite. The later stages of the laughter at the lively little compass-toy were, perhaps, more expressive of a dim sense of the absurdity of the suggestion that a dear wee play-thing could do such marvels. This gleeful greeting of what is at once new and exhilarating to sense answers in the case of these simple people to what in ourselves is joyous admiration. Thus, we read of certain African ladies, wives of a king, who expressed their delight at European works of art by repeated loud bursts of laughter.[182] Our own children show us now and again how the new, when it not only captures the sense by its novelty, {237} but holds it by its charm, may evoke this purely mirthful greeting, as free from the stiff attitude of curiosity as it is from fearsomeness.[183]
It is a good step from this childish abandonment to the fun of a new toy-like thing to the recognition of something as foreign and opposed to the tribal custom. In these simple communities the unwritten laws of custom play a most important part. Violations of them on the part of any tribesman are apt to be dealt with seriously. This at once tends to limit the range of savage laughter; the pressure of custom is too tyrannical to allow of a full display of the odd and irregular in human behaviour. These elements of the amusing have accordingly to be supplied from without; and they are supplied in good measure, partly by other neighbouring tribes whose manners are observable, and to a still larger extent by the Europeans who visit them with a virtuous intention to reform and civilise.
Let us first take a glance at the hilarious appreciation of the other tribe’s ways. The spectacle of the foreigner will grow particularly entertaining when he seems to bungle in doing something which is perfectly familiar to the observer’s own tribe. The Tahitians, it seems, are laughed at by the dwellers in the neighbouring islands when they try to kill a turtle by pinching its throat. As may be supposed, the trick, so useful to the beast, of drawing in the head gives a veritable look of the absurd to these attempts. So, too, the enlightened people of one island drew voluminous amusement from the news that those of another island who had just come into possession of the novelty, a pair of scissors, tried to sharpen them by baking them.[184] These two illustrations show a dim apprehension of the fitness of things as {238} determined, not by the relative standard of “my way,” but by an objective standard.
The field in which they cull most of their facetious enjoyment of the doings of outsiders would seem to be the ways of their white visitors. There the differences, the departure from “our way” and the inability to acquire this are great enough to appeal strongly to their crude sense of the ludicrous. They see the odd white people do a number of things which strike them as extraordinary and quite useless. If the Englishman laughs at the foreigner for not taking his morning tub, the simple savage will turn the tables by making merry over our elaborate washings. Thus the Fuegians, though living much in the water, have no idea of washing themselves; accordingly “when Europeans first came among them, the sight of a man washing his face seemed to them so irresistibly ludicrous that they burst into shrieks of laughter”.[185] Here is an example of a rather more complex feeling in presence of new-fangled European ways. It seems that a South African Prince, presumably as a compliment to the white man’s custom, wished to shave himself and, as our youths frequently do on first attempting the feat, cut himself. He then asked his European visitor to perform the office for him. The natives present “stood mute with admiration during the whole performance, gazing with the utmost eagerness in their countenances, and bursting at length into a general peal of laughter—this being their customary mode of expressing delight, astonishment, nay even embarrassment and fear.”[186] The last part of this statement is a little loose, since, as we have seen, it is not so much the astonishment, the embarrassment, or the fear in itself, which laughter expresses, as a relaxation of the strain involved in these attitudes. {239}
The laughter excited is of a rather more intellectual kind when the action of the white man presents itself as absurd, not merely because it rudely diverges from the customs of the natives, but because it involves something out of the range of their comprehension, and so appears incredible. It is then that the white man shows his superiority in evoking laughter: his arts, his apparatus—when like the photographic camera they do not excite fears—are apt to evoke incredulous laughter. A traveller in South Africa had learned some sentences of the speech of a tribe (the Sichuana language) from his man. He then wrote them down and read them off before the man. This simple fellow laughed “most heartily” when his white master told him that it was the marks he had made in the book which showed him what he was to say.[187] A child would pretty certainly join the savage in laughing at the idea of getting sounds out of the inert, stupid-looking word-symbols, if it were suddenly introduced to him in this way.
When the white man’s doings are not absolutely new, he may expose himself to the laughter of these merry folk by the odd manner of them. One would like to know all the jokes which the natives of South Africa, of Polynesia, and the other abodes of the mirthful “Naturkind” have had over the dress, the gestures, and the speech of their white visitors. Yet this would be hard to get at. We do know, however, how they are wont to greet some of our highly civilised performances. This is the way in which some Tasmanian women behaved on a first introduction to the European manner of singing. They listened attentively while it lasted; then some applauded by loud shouts; others laughed to splitting, while the young girls, {240} no doubt more timid, remained silent.[188] This laughter was, presumably, more than the expression of a wild delight. Those who laughed may be supposed to have been the most susceptible to the absurdity of this unheard of manner of song. In the case of the closely allied art of dancing, we are distinctly told that our highly approved style may appear ridiculous to the savage onlooker. The Sumatrans, writes one authority, have very slow dances which are thought to be ludicrous by Europeans. Yet, funnily enough, they think our customary dances “to the full as ludicrous”. They compared our minuets to the fighting of two game cocks.[189] Did they also see a galop, one wonders, and if so, what did the lovers of slow dances say about this? The “refinements” of the arts of civilised men are ever apt to appear laughable to those lower down.
The laughter of these uninstructed people grows loud when the clever white man fails to achieve one of their own simple accomplishments. More particularly, his inability to pronounce the sounds of their language seems to be a prolific source of merriment. The Tasmanians, writes one whom we have quoted more than once, often laughed to splitting when, wishing to repeat their words, “I made mistakes or pronounced them badly”.[190] Another traveller, speaking of the natives of the West Coast of Vancouver’s Island, writes: “That they had some standard of correct speech is evident from the readiness of the children to ridicule a stranger who mispronounces native words”.[191] A third example comes from Borneo. The girls, a visitor reports, made Europeans repeat sentences of their language after them, and burst out into loud laughter “either at our pronunciation or at the {241} comical things they had made us utter”.[192] Nothing, perhaps, more clearly exhibits the ludicrous value of the violation of a perfectly uniform custom than a mispronunciation of language.[193] Nor is this all. It seems absurd to a savage, just as it does to an average English child, that the foreigner should fail to do what seems to him not merely to require no effort, but to be something one cannot help doing, like laughing itself or crying. No doubt some feeling of superiority to the foreign ignoramus enters into the enjoyment here. Perhaps the children of Vancouver’s Island felt this superiority most of all. In some cases, however, we are distinctly told that the ineptitude of Europeans, when it provokes laughter, calls out also the soothing accompaniment of kindly encouragement.