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

by James Sully

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole plot of one of these comedies consists in the showing up of the grotesque unsuitability of the comic character to its environment. It groups its persons and arranges its scenes as if with the intention of demonstrating the futility of the attempt of this droll figure, lop-sided, and of an awkward gait, to move about in our ordered world. This helps us to understand why Molière, though, as observed above, he now and again resorts to older and more elemental sources of mirth, is able to be so economical in the use of disguise {370} of improbable encounters, and of the other mechanical devices of the entertaining show. The situations themselves as well as the action seem to arise out of the fundamental facts, the given characters and their relations. Thus, one is hardly surprised to find Harpagon in the ignoble part of a money-lender, to whom the son he has pinched betakes himself.

The enjoyment of the comedy here provided presupposes a trained faculty. There must be the quick observant eye that catches in side-glance all the relations, and yet remains accommodated for the laughable. There is no place for a mixed tone, for a blend of laughter with melancholy sentiment. The serious is envisaged less as the serious, than as the framework within which the comic figure moves. The mood is one of a purely gay observation, which has no room for pity, indignation, or any other emotion; which is brightly and coldly intellectual; which is content with just looking and being amused.

For a right understanding of the scope of laughter in comedy, we need to glance at another of its developments. In the so-called “Comedy of Manners,” as illustrated in the English plays of the Restoration, we have undoubtedly to do with a very special trend of the comic spirit.

In the art of Molière we have for the most part the presentation of an individual grotesquely transformed from the common social type which surrounds him. It is only in a few comedies, as Les Femmes savantes and Les Précieuses ridicules, that we have spread out for mirthful contemplation the characteristics of a set of persons. In these, the moderate sensible world, against which the cultivation of “the fine shades” looks so entertaining, is still indicated, though, of course, less immediately and fully.

In the plays of Congreve and his contemporaries, we meet {371} with a comic treatment of more widespread “manners” of the hour. The sources of their fun are pretty obvious. There is something of the utter abandonment to disorder and revelry which we met with in the works of Aristophanes.[310] The ordered world, with its interaction of normal characters, seems blotted out of existence. The plot is, as with Plautus, a love-intrigue, and has much of the coarseness and the degradation of situation which mark the popular Latin comedy. Yet it is at least marked off by the feature that it frees men from the sordid business of sending menials to bid for the prize, and sets them face to face with the women they are bent on obtaining. The women, again, are not shy maids, but range from experienced wives to the would-be simpletons fresh from the country. They are, moreover, while saucy and disposed to make good show of resistance, untrammelled by any sentimental or other attachment to their chains.

It seems undeniable that this “artificial” comedy can make good its claims to be entertaining. It has vivacity and stirring movement, the full frolicsomeness of the practical joke, and it abounds in scenes of voluminous gaiety. Its dialogue at its best has, along with its coarseness, an unmistakable brilliance of wit.

But how are we to define the point of view where there is no ordered world as background? There seems no question here of laughing at the affectations of a few, who are viewed as comic aberrations from a reasonable type. The whole world is affected with frolicsome disorder.

We are not now concerned with the mental attitude of the spectators for whom these comedies were written. {372} To them, no doubt, the spectacle was a merry one as bringing a sense of relief from the gloom of the Puritan’s reign. It may, as Taine suggests, have been served up as a kind of “Appetitsbischen” between meals, in order to stimulate the palates of the gallants who frequented the theatre; though it is difficult to attribute this function to what by common consent was intended to provoke mirthful laughter. What is of more importance is to get at the point of view of Charles Lamb and others who avow that they find a true comedy here.

Lamb himself has told us what attitude a man should bring to the appreciation of this comedy. He is to regard these “sports of a witty fancy” as “a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland”. His moral feelings are left at home with his morning suit. He goes to the play in order “to escape from the pressure of reality”. For him the figures that pursue one another across the stage have no moral substance, and are proper subjects neither for approval nor for disapproval. In other words, Lamb tells us that the comedy of Congreve and his school is to be taken as a pure show, holding no relations to the real, everyday world.

This view has been spurned by Macaulay, in a well-known Essay, as subversive of morals. To him, the comedy of the Restoration is a thing that is inherently anti-moral in spirit and intention; and he proceeds to pound it with weighty invectives.