When the conjoint laughter is less automatic and issues from community of ideas and sentiments, the contagious property still plays a part. It is as if the swift response of others’ laughter, the drowning of one’s own outburst in the general roar, effaced for the time the boundaries of one’s personality. To rejoice together in the full utterance of the laugh, though it moves us less deeply than to weep together, is perhaps no less potent in cementing a lasting comradeship.
The social side of laughter comprehends, however, much more than this. It is commonly recognised that the feeling expressed has something human for its object. Now those {256} who directly or indirectly serve as the butt are all the world over disposed, till the grace of a genial tolerance has been added, to dislike and resent the part thrust on them. So far, then, laughter would seem to be anti-social and dividing, and, alas, the history of literature will furnish the student with notable illustrations. Yet this hurtful edge in laughter becomes one of its valuable social properties. As the despised Greenlanders may teach us, laughter supplies a mode of punishment which combines with effectiveness, economy and humanity, a good deal of enjoyment for the onlookers. In all societies, if not exactly in the Greenland fashion, it has been accorded an important place among the agencies which, by castigating vices and follies, seek to lower their vitality.
The sharp edge of laughter represents, however, only one of its effects on the sensibilities of the butt. Savage life has given us illustrations, not only of its disagreeable consequences turned to judicial purposes, but of its agreeable consequences in cajoling others out of attitudes of hostility and stubbornness. This curious effect, as it may seem, of a mode of treatment which is primarily hurtful is to be explained in the main by its playful function. To substitute a joke for argument or coercive pressure is, like tickling, to challenge to play, and tends to call up the play-mood in the recipient of the challenge. The mutual teasings of savages serve, as we have seen, as a training, an ἄσκησις, in simple and estimable virtues, such as the maintenance of good temper, toleration, and the setting of comradeship above one’s private feelings.
One other social aspect of laughter illustrated by savage life needs to be touched on. In the instinctive tendency of the savage to ridicule the customs and ideas of outside folk we have one expression of the self-protective attitude of a {257} community against insidious outside influences. Just as the Hebrews ridiculed the religious ideas of the worshippers of Baal and so helped to keep their national faith intact, so these tribes low down in the culture scale have in their laughter at what is foreign a prophylactic against any contamination from outside peoples. No doubt this tendency in laughter will help to preserve once useful tribal characters when altered circumstances, introduced, for example, by the coming of the white man, require new adaptations. In this we see the essentially conservative function of laughter in the life of societies. On the other hand, as we have seen, novelties in dress introduced by the white man may attract and delight. In dealing with the connection between social progress and laughter, we shall need to consider very carefully the attitude which the mirthful spirit takes up towards social changes.
Now these aspects of laughter point, as we have seen, to a social utility in laughter. As offspring of the play-impulse, it might, indeed, be expected to share in those benefits which, as recent research has made clear, belong to play. In our study of its development and persistence in the life of progressive communities, we shall have occasion to illustrate this utility much more fully. That laughing is good, physically and morally, for its individual subjects has become a commonplace, at least to the student of literature. Here we shall be concerned with its distinctly social advantages, such as the maintenance of customs which from the point of view of the community, or of some class of the community, are to be regarded as good, the keeping down of vices and follies, and the furtherance of social co-operation.
The question how far this utility extends is one which cannot be answered simply. It will be found that societies, {258} so far from universally recognising laughter as a useful habit, have taken vast pains to restrain it. Indeed, our study of the fortunes of mirth in the advance of social life will show us that it has had throughout to struggle for its existence.
From what has just been said it will be clear that we shall have to consider the history of laughter and the movement of social evolution as inter-connected. Not only does a change in ideas, sentiments or institutions tend to modify the expression of the mirthful mood, there is a reciprocal influence of laughter upon ideas, sentiments and institutions. Such interaction holds good generally between amusements and serious pursuits; the recreations of a community serve in important ways to determine the measure of the vigour thrown into serious activities. In the case of laughter this reciprocal influence is much more marked, owing to the circumstance that mirth has been wont to play about serious things, to make these the target for its finely tipped shafts, now and again going so far as to shoot one into the midst of the solemnities of social life.
In the savage tribe we find but little of class division. The perception of what is unfit and the laughter which accompanies this are directed, for the most part, to members of other communities. The laughter is choral because it is that in which the whole tribe joins or is prepared to join; but for that very reason it has a monotonous sound. Some differentiation of groups within the community seems necessary, not merely for the constitution of a society, but for the free play of the laughing spirit. Diversity in thought and behaviour is a main condition of the full flow of social gaiety.
The germ of such diversity is present in the lowest {259} conceivable type of human community. The institution of male and female in which Nature, as if to combine divine work with human, at once joins together and puts asunder, has been with us from the beginnings of human society; and it might be an amusing pastime to speculate how the males of our ape-like ancestors first gurgled out their ridicule of female inferiority, and how the females managed to use their first rudiment of speech-power in turning the tables on their lords and masters. Some differentiation of rank, too, must have been found in the simplest human societies in the contrast between the old and the young, and the closely connected opposition of the rulers and the ruled. But it would be hazardous to reason that, in the early stages of social evolution, much in the way of exchange of fun passed between those who were presumably kept solemnly apart by the sense of their relative station.
It is only when we move on to a society with a considerable amount of class differentiation that its relation to the nurture and distribution of the spirit of mirth grows apparent. In glancing at these divisions we may conveniently adopt M. Tarde’s expression, “social group”. Such a group may be either a class, the members of which have like functions and a common character connected with these, such as priests and traders; or it may be a set constituted merely by community of knowledge and taste, as the members of a society standing on a particular level of culture. Although this double way of dividing social groups necessarily leads to overlapping, it seems desirable to adopt it here, so as to give an adequate account of the relation of group-formation to the particular directions of social laughter.