Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

The naturalist has lately found a monkey of the Gibbon family, which has a voice that is divided into distinct notes that correspond to our scale and run an octave or more, clear, musical, and firm. What an invaluable prize this would be for M. Offenbach and his opera bouffe! for the creature has all the flexibility and briskness, all the parody of human nature, and all the lubricity which this style of art requires, with the caudal emphasis appended; and great economy would be gained in exempting more expensive human performers from moral degradation. We would all pay our money for such an exhibition, rejoiced to see the drama recovering from its decay.

But, as yet, no cosey couples of clever apes have been discovered in paroxysms of laughter over the last sylvan equivoque; nor have elephants been seen silently shaking at a joke too ponderous for their trunks to carry. Everybody has observed how ducks will gather into a corner of the farm-yard and stand still, and apparently breathless, as if listening to a jocose tale fished out of their Decameron of a gutter, then break into hearty quacking, which reminds one of the wheezing of snips of fellows over their muddy jest. But probably the ducks are only holding a caucus on the question of food, to nominate the next pool to be dredged, and make it unanimous.

But when we consider that the higher animals can compare objects and make selections, exercise a memory and have association of ideas concerning each other and the outer world, we come near to that human quality which is the ground of the function of laughter. These mental traits are the buried roots of the consciousness which blossoms into smiles in the sun of wit and humor. For the power to combine or to contrast two or more objects, to remember one absent object by another present one, to experience a feeling that two objects are associated, leads to the highest manifestations of wit. In the delicate structures of men and women, which are bequests to them descending through the whole inviolate entail of Nature, refined by it and amplified till they entertain keenly the pathos of life, all mental traits accumulate into the faculty of imagination, upon which every thing that is laughable depends.

With this faculty man makes shift to relieve the moments when existence, with its incessant toil and merciless persistency of routine, threatens to become insupportable. One day is not exactly like another, if hearty laughter loosens its handcuffs and lets the prisoner stretch his frame and have a little run. Every laugh reddens the blood, which goes then more blithely to dissipate the fogs of a moody brain. Multitudes of our American brains are badly drained in consequence of a settling of the wastage of house-grubbing and street-work into moral morasses which generate many a chimera. So there is something positively heroic in the hilarity which braves, light-armed as it is, our brood of viperous cares, and attacks their den. One flash of a smile shears off Medusa's head with impunity.

No creature that is not capable of being bored can be capable of laughing at its own incongruous circumstances. The more simply constructed the brain and nervous system are, the less liability is there to that misfortune of ennui. We cannot imagine that a turtle's head gets tired of lying around, decapitated, for a week or more; or that a toad imprisoned in a rock or tree for one or two thousand years should become jaded by its close confinement. When the miner's pick releases him, his hop is as alert, and his appetite for the next fly as keen, as before his prison stole upon him. The lower animals are as contented as the forests and waters in which they pass an instinctive existence. Continually cheerful we may suppose they are, even when the larder is empty and the springs run low. Their monotonous round of hungering, feeding, and procreating sympathizes with the reposeful temper in which the whole of the inanimate nature discharges those functions, as we see the flower absorb, fructify, and exhale. But as the brain becomes more complicated, and capable of breeding more positive ideas and feelings,—such as the questing of a greyhound, the tact of setters and retrievers, the attachment of dogs for persons,—we may expect to observe a liability to suffer tedium. How plainly a good dog can show his disappointment when he goes out with a green sportsman, or with one who is so abstracted in his mood that he neglects the chances to shoot! The dog's natural language is that he will not tolerate such an irreligious abuse of providence: he will soon begin to sulk and not put up any more game.

If an animal is capable of having a consecutive dream, as Miss Mitford's greyhound was, who regularly every year, just before the coursing season began, used to dream of going out, and quested in his sleep, such an animal can feel the torment of ennui. He is not blindly indicating that a season has come around,—as a wound made by the bite of a lion will gape anew in the same month of the following year, and the juice of the grape is agitated in remembrance of its vintage,—but the animal is conscious that the time has come for him to resume his talent.

Such dogs become tired of waiting if their masters are absent, and are disquieted if their day's routine be changed. And you will notice in a zoölogical garden many of the better-educated animals to whom the monotony of their life is a positive sorrow, till, like opium, it stupefies their spirits. They have not the resource of man, who is also devoured with ennui, but, furnished with imagination, can dissipate its most tragic moods by heart-shaking and sky-splitting laughter. His most climbing grief is like an Alpine flower that sits close to the snow-line and takes its color; but near at hand are hillsides sprinkled with winking wild-flowers, and the blue succory stands amid the corn. There is but a step from one to the other.

That step is taken, and the gravity of life upset whenever any of our ideas can suddenly and for a moment join an object or another idea, and appear to belong to it, though essentially different in every respect, and only capable of seeming like by the imagination starting a pretence of it. Things that are incongruous are forced to touch at one point, and for one moment to feign congruity. The surprise to the mind is a laughable one, because it is in the habit of regarding ideas and objects as they naturally cohere or differ. Sanity and business depend upon this habit. The understanding is at home in the ordinary congruities of things, and is not prepared to admit that two things which are absolutely incongruous can be ever made for a single instant to agree. Such a result cannot be soberly contemplated: the order of the world and the mental consistency which pays the butcher for his meat and the milkman for his refreshing dash of the hydrant forbid it. It becomes laughable precisely because this gravity of order is against it. If a thing cannot be done soberly, and yet is done, the result is fatal to sobriety. This is the root of every laugh: two things which never met before, and ought not to meet, hail each other and set up a claim of relationship on this very ground,—namely, that it was always impossible that they could be related. In the farce of "Box and Cox," says one of these doubles to the other eagerly, "Have you the mark of a strawberry between your shoulders?" "No," answers the other. "Oh, then you are indeed my long-lost brother!" It is so in the relations which make laughter. There should be the mark of a strawberry; but just because there is not, the whim of fraternity is raised, and for a moment it appears as if the two things must have been twins at birth, though separated since.