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

by James Sully

The spread of knowledge and culture through all classes acts indirectly on group-distinctions by throwing open the occupations of one class to members of others, and more particularly of “lower” ones. The workman’s son who has a brain and cultivates it may, as we are often told, find his way to the university and take his place unchallenged {287} among the lawyers, the doctors, or the exalted “dons” themselves.

Now all sudden changes in class, especially such as involve elevation, are apt to appear laughable. Even when promotion comes by royal favour, we feel the leap into a higher sphere to be anomalous, and are wont to examine the grounds of the new title with some care. The conservative instincts of men oppose themselves laughingly to the appearance of new dignitaries very much as they oppose themselves to the appearance of new ideas, and some temporary unfitness in the person for his new social niche is to be expected. In the comedy of the Restoration, we are told, “no measure is kept in pouring contempt on the mushroom growths of yesterday, the knights of recent creation”.[248]

Something of this impression of the incongruously new is produced for a moment even in the case of a well-earned rise in the social scale. The young aspirant’s family and connections, living on in the less brilliant light, will perforce laugh, though perhaps with something of sympathetic admiration, at the oddity of the sudden elevation; and the rising young man will be singularly fortunate if he does not now and again betray an amusing unfamiliarity with the ways of the company he has joined.

Yet the confusion of ranks due to the universalising of education is small and unimpressive when compared with that arising from another cause. The great destroyer of fixed class-boundaries is the force which tends to transmute a community into a plutocracy. This tendency may, no doubt, illustrate in a measure the effect of a diffused education; for the successful fortune-builder will sometimes have attained success by scientific knowledge skilfully {288} applied. Yet the presence—or the absence—of other qualities than the intellectual seems to have much to do in these days with sudden elevations in the plutocratic scale.

As the comedy of Molière may tell us, the spectacle of a man standing at the foot of the social ladder and looking up wistfully at its higher region has something entertaining in it both for those on his actual level and for those on the level of his ambition. Later, when the wistful glance is followed by actual climbing, the unrehearsed performances may grow mirth-provoking even to the point of tearful mistiness. Nor does the attainment of the goal make an end of the fun, since the maintenance of a decorous equilibrium at the new altitude may turn out to be even more precarious than the climbing, especially when relatives and other accidents of the humbler state persist in their attachment.

On the other hand, these climbings exhibit much in the way of amusing imposture; for men, as Schopenhauer tells us, have been known to push their way, unqualified and impious, even into literary circles, and snatch a kind of reflected distinction by the use of arts at once ancient and vulgar.

The spectacle of changing one’s class exhibits the amusing aspect of fraud in another way. When leaders high up in “society” pay homage to the deity of the climbing money-maker by betaking themselves to trade under assumed names, the mirth of Midas and of his whole despised caste may find its opportune vent.

We may now briefly indicate the general effect of the social movements just sketched upon the quality and the mode of distribution of the hilarious moods of a people.

(a) To begin with, the advance and wider spread of the wave of culture will clearly tend to effect a general raising {289} of the standard of taste, and to develop an appreciation of the quality of the ludicrous. This result, though effected in part by the development of art and the extension of its educative influence, is in the main the direct outcome of intellectual progress and of that increase in refinement of feeling which seems to depend on this progress. One may describe this change by saying that the standard of ideas tends gradually to gain ground, hemming in if not narrowing that of custom. The primal laugh, void of intellectual content, becomes less general, the laugh of the mind more frequent. This effect of an introduction of ideas holds good in the case of members of all classes in so far as they enter into the higher culture group. In this way particular standards of locality and of social group begin to count less in our laughter.

This effect of expansion of the intellectual view is reflected in all the more refined varieties of comic art. Any manifest insistence on dignity of rank, more especially when the group is not of imposing aspect, whether the petite noblesse in a small “Residency” town on the Continent or the families which compose “Society” in an obscure town in England, is felt to be on the verge of the ludicrous. On the other hand, a magnifying of the dignity of a person or a class by those below, when accompanied by a cringing demeanour, is apt to take on the amusing aspect of flunkeyism, the due appreciation of which presupposes a certain maturity of the laughter of the mind.