One can only conjecture that men began to discern and enjoy the amusing side of authority and its solemn ways of asserting itself, in their free moments, at a safe distance from tell-tale eyes.
What is known of the hard-worked slave of antiquity is suggestive not merely of play after toil, but of a safe turning on task-masters. When, as we read, the Egyptian workman got fun “out of the smallest incident in the day’s work—an awkward apprentice cutting his finger, a comrade sleeping over his task whom the overseer lashes to awaken him,” and so forth, did not something of a spirit of malicious crowing over the overseer express itself too? The analogy of the judiciously half-smothered laughter of the English schoolboy in playground or dormitory suggests the answer. We must not wonder if these dangerous excursions of the spirit of fun have failed to be recorded. {266} Still more significant is another picture from the same hand, representing a tussle between overseer and workmen in which “the stick vainly interferes,” so that “at least an hour elapses before quiet is re-established”.[236] This looks like the rollicking laughter of schoolboys at the spectacle of an orderly ceremony suddenly turned to disorder. The interpretation is borne out by the fact that these same Egyptians were able to enter into the fun of a loss of dignity in a solemn function, for example, the upsetting by a collision of the richly supplied table in the funereal boat, and the falling of a mummy on a priest during the ceremony of conveying it to its resting-place.[237]
The return of contemptuous laughter from the slave to his master was certainly allowed to some extent among the Romans. It became a well-recognised privilege during one of the chief annual festivals (Saturnalia). The slaves in the plays of Plautus treat the tyranny under which they live “in a spirit of gay bravado”.[238] Nor need we be surprised at these liberties if we remember that the modern schoolmaster must almost be perfect if he does not find it expedient, not merely to permit his pupils desipere in loco, but to allow them now and again to have a mild joke at his expense. The cajoling by means of jokes, which Miss Kingsley found so serviceable for managing the West African, may of course stop short of this, and its virtue lie in the substitution of a light, laughing treatment for bullying. Yet genial laughter, when the contempt has been vaporised out of it, necessarily tends at the moment to a levelling of planes, as is seen in the immediate assertion of {267} the right of reciprocity. This is perhaps the main reason why the schoolmaster is, in general, chary of introducing the method of jocosity. His laughter is apt to sound as if it held some of the gritty deposit of contempt.
The really delightful illustration of the turning of the tables on masters by those in subjection is to be found in woman’s retort on man’s contemptuous treatment. She has again and again managed to outwit him, as we have found him dolefully admitting, and has had her full laugh at his cumbrous attempts to manage her. The mediæval fabliaux are certainly disposed to award success in strategy to her, rather than to her lord. Her ways of befooling him, too, have often been so simple—as when she persuades him that he has been dreaming what he fancies he has observed—that the poor dupe ought, one supposes, to have died of chagrin. And, when there has been a call for the finer sort of manœuvring, she wins the unprejudiced reader to her side by displaying an admirable ingenuity and subtlety of invention, qualities which Mr. Herbert Spencer would probably regard as secondary sexual characters evolved during ages of marital tyranny. Of her modes of turning on him in these latter days there is no need to speak. The shout of contemptuous laughter seems to have passed from the one side of the eternal fray to the other. But this hardly belongs to the present division of our subject.
It may be added that the laughter of the laity at the clergy illustrates, in addition to the impulse already dealt with, the itching of spirited mortals to turn on oppressors. The denunciations and anathemas of this class, backed, as they asseverate, by supernatural sanctions, have always been trying to untamed men and women. And the appetite of our ancestors for stories disgraceful to monks and priests drew some of its keenness from this rebelliousness of {268} the natural man against spiritual tyrannies. Here is an illustration of the feminine retort: A woman was chatting with a gossip of hers in church: bidden by the preaching friar to hold her peace she exclaimed, “I wonder which babbles most of the two?”[239]
Still another variety of social laughter springs out of this distinction of superior and inferior groups. The impulse of exalted persons to assert themselves and to strike their inferiors with awe—an impulse by the way which the peacock and other birds will betray in the presence of their inferior, man—is apt to be disallowed by those for whom the display is intended. It is one thing, they feel, to acknowledge true authority, another to bow down to the exaggeration of its claim, to the boastful exhibition of power and rank. Hence, perhaps, some of the quickness of the mirthful eye for the entertainment latent in all braggadocio. The soldier who needlessly emphasises the fact that he possesses the height and spirit of his calling by strutting, by imposing vociferation and the rest, has probably always been a source of comic merriment, as the Miles gloriosus of Plautus and the Bobadil of Ben Jonson may remind us.
It will be evident that all this laughter of inferiors at superiors, whether these are so really or merely in their own opinion, must, so far as it has got home, have had a valuable corrective function. If the derision of the lord helps to keep in place his inferior dame or vassal, much more does the laughter of his inferior serve to hold him to what befits his rank. Noblesse oblige is a rule largely maintained by the demands of those below who are expected to pay homage. These, as we know, have been much employed in claiming modest rights from their “betters”. The curbing of a king’s tyrannies may have required a rebellion {269} of his barons, or a riot of his people: yet a good deal of checking of tyrannic propensities has been carried out by the unalarming expedient of ridicule. Even in a free and enlightened country we may observe in officials a tendency now and again to inflate their dignity unduly; so that one infers that the restraining force of the laughter of inferiors still counts.
The results of this spirited turning of the worm have been considerable. The impish spirit of mirth has taken up its abode with the common people, and instructed them in the rich sources of the laughable which lie in all rank and dignity. On the other hand, the “high and mighty” have, from a true instinct of self-preservation, waged fierce war with this irreverent attitude of the multitude. The struggles between the two will be spoken of presently.
The scope for laughter which, given the disposition, these divisions of group and of rank bring with them is further widened by the vital circumstance that, as groups in the same community, they have to enter into various relations with one another. A judicious mixture of opposition and harmony of interest seems to be most favourable to a rich production of mirth. This is illustrated even in such masterful relations as that of the overseer and the commanding officer, who may find that the compulsion of the rod is inadequate to the extraction of the required amount of work, and so have to cast about for other instruments.
The good effect of a skilful use of the cajoling laugh has already been illustrated. It is seen with particular clearness in the relation of husband and wife; for the fun of the situation is that, in spite of profound differences of taste and inclination and of a sharp antagonism, the necessity of {270} common interests and ends holds them together in daily association. This necessity, ever present to the wiser of them, has tempered the contempt and forced the derider to at least a pretence of good humour. The same may be said of the relation of the sexes in general. The quality and range of the fun which is wont to lighten a talk between a young man and a young woman on a first introduction are pretty closely determined by the consciousness of sexual relation on either side. Shyness, a disposition to regard the other suspiciously as opponent, together with the instinct to please and win admiration, and the desire to strike on points of sympathy—all this helps to bring about, and is reflected in the peculiar wrigglings in which the mirthful spirit expresses itself on such an occasion.