An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development and Its Value

by James Sully

If the smile of amusement with which we greet this spectacle comes from the dissolution of the idea of the adult male figure, we should expect the enjoyment of the ludicrous aspect to be especially conspicuous when the hat appears an instant before the child-wearer, and so thought is compelled to travel in the required direction. Let us suppose that a child in his nursery puts on his father’s hat and stands on a chair, and that you enter the room and catch a glimpse of the hat first, say above a piece of furniture, and for a brief moment expect to see an adult beneath. No doubt you will be aware of a definite movement of thought in the required direction and of the dissolution into nothing of the expectant idea. But will the element of clear anticipation and its annihilation intensify your feeling of the funniness of the spectacle, or even make the funniness more patent? You would, no doubt, in such a case, experience a little shock, the full excitement of surprise, and that might add volume to the whole feeling of the moment. You might, too, not improbably, laugh more heartily, for you would have a sense of having been taken in, and there would be a side-current of hilarity directed against yourself. But I venture to affirm that the spectacle as such would not impress you as being one whit more ludicrous when seen in this way, first the hat and then the wearer, than if your eye had lighted on the two together.

What seems to happen when we are amused by this little comic scene in the nursery? Do we not at a glance perceive a grotesque whole, viz., a hat on the wrong head, and is not our amusement too swiftly forthcoming to allow of our singling out a part of what is seen and going through the {13} process of thought described by the ingenious author of this theory? Science seems to bear out what common observation discovers, for the newer psychology teaches that in the first moment of perceiving an object we obtain not a distinct apprehension of parts, but a vague apprehension of a whole into which detail and definiteness only come later and gradually.

An ensemble, which can only be described as a whole made up of ill-fitting parts, this seems to be the object on which our attention is focussed when we laugh at the child under the needlessly capacious hat. This intuition involves, no doubt, some rapid seizing of details: but the attention to parts is not to separate objects, as the language of Dr. Lipps suggests, but to related parts, to the hat as worn in relation to the wearer.

This seems to be an adequate account of what takes place so far as it is the palpable unfitness of dimensions which moves us to laughter. But it may be urged, and rightly urged, that the laughable spectacle is more than this, that what tickles us is the uncustomary and topsy-turvy arrangement of things. And here, it may be said, there certainly is implied a movement of thought, namely, to something outside the spectacle, to what is customary and in order.

The supposition is a highly plausible one. Since, moreover, what we perceive is a whole, it is reasonable to assume that if such a movement occurs it must be, not, as Dr. Lipps supposes, from one part of it to another, but from the present whole as oddly and wrongly composed to some other whole as rightly composed. Do we not, it may be asked, here carry out a process fairly well described in Schopenhauer’s theory of the ludicrous, that is, conceive of “an incongruity between the real object and its idea,” and so, by implication, go back to this idea? {14}

To this I would reply that, so far as I can analyse my own mental state at such a moment, I do not find the presence of any idea of another and normal whole to be a necessary element in a full enjoyment of the grotesque whole before my eyes. Such a second whole would, one supposes, have to be either the same hat on the right head, or the same head under its proper covering, and I find that I am perfectly well able to enjoy the comedy of the child crowned with the tall hat without making present to my mind either of these combinations.

Here, again, I think, a better scientific theory bears out the result of one’s individual self-examination. Psychology has made it clear that in recognising an object, say a weasel crossing the road on which we are walking, we do not need to have present to our mind (in addition to the perception of the object) a pictorial idea or image of a weasel as formed from past observations. Owing to the organising of a certain perceptual disposition—a readiness to see an object as a familiar one, as of a particular “sort”—our mind instantly greets it as a weasel. In other words, we recognise things by the help not of images present to the mind at the moment, but of certain ingrained “apperceptive” tendencies or attitudes. All the higher animals seem to share with us this highly useful capability of immediate and instantaneous recognition.

Now I take it that there is another side to these apperceptive tendencies. Not only do they secure for us, without the necessity of calling up distinct ideas, these instant recognitions of a sort of thing, they enable us as well as intelligent animals mentally to reject presentations which do not answer to “the sort of thing”. I can say that this wax figure is not a man without having any distinct image of the living man present to my consciousness. This ability {15} to recognise what we see as not of a particular kind of thing, without calling up a definite idea of this kind, extends to combinations and arrangements of parts in a whole. When, after my servant has dusted my books and rearranged them on the shelves, I instantly recognise that they are wrongly placed, I may at the moment be quite unable to say what the right arrangement was.[8]

According to my view, the perceptions of the laughable which Dr. Lipps illustrates are instantaneous perceptions. As such, they may, and commonly do, arise immediately, that is, without any reversion to the idea of what is the customary or normal arrangement.

But the reader may urge with force that the enjoyment of this charming bit of childish pretence involves more than a perception of the unusual and the irregular. Do we not at least apprehend the fact that the hat is not merely unfitting, and grotesquely wrong, but a usurpation of the prerogative of the superior? Is not the behaviour of the child so deliciously whimsical just because we fix the mental eye on this element of make-believe? And if so, does not this imply that we have present to the mind the proper belongings of the hat, viz., the father’s head and figure?