Then, after it is ascertained whether the timidity of the flies is because this story has been passed around among them, or only because men have already killed off all but the specially quick and timid ones; we hope our investigators may find an answer to the farther question: (III) How, if a tenth of what some folks say against flies is true, the human race has so long survived?
To avoid misapprehension, it should be added that despite the availability, in our boyhood, of flies as playmates, we don’t like ‘em, especially when they light on our hands to help us write articles for this Review.
Setting Bounds to Laughter
That there is even a measure of personal liberty on the earth, is one of our most pointed proofs that the universe is governed by design. For liberty is loved neither [pg 211]by the many nor by the few; its defense has always been unpopular in the extreme, and can be manfully undertaken only in an age of moral heroism. The present is no heroic age, and hence our personal rights fall one by one, without defense, and apparently without regret. The losses thus incurred must be left to future historians to weigh and to lament. There is, however, one of our natural rights, now cruelly beset by its enemies, that is too precious to surrender to the threnodies of the future historians. This is the right to laugh.
It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the first appearance of organized efforts to curb the spirit of laughter. All good men and women were hectored into believing that one should weep, not laugh, over the absurdities of men in their cups. Next, we were warned that it is unseemly and unChristian to laugh at a fellow-man’s discomfiture—an awkward social situation, a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a poem spoilt by a printer’s stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma that to laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently grown into vigor multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial, national and professional. Not many years ago a censorship of Irish jokes was established, and this was soon followed by an index expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our colored fellow citizens promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the expense of their race are “in bad taste”; and country life enthusiasts solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing short of national disasters. A recent press report informs us that the suffragette joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits throughout the country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic servants, stenographers, politicians, college professors, and clergymen are organizing to establish the right of being ridiculous without exciting laughter.
But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an old-fashioned aid to digestion, more or less discredited by [pg 212]current medical authority? It is time we learned that laughter has a social significance: it is the first stage in the process of understanding one’s fellow man. Professor Bergson to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your intellect alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy. You can not laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.
When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school readers narrated, with naïve surprise, this maiden was destined to become Franklin’s faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect such a result. The stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of the sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced to Bret Harte’s gambler:
For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.
The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily written. At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense of the group represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal contest, and we have a new order of jokes, in which the intended victim acquits himself well. This, too, gives way to a higher order, in which race, nationality or profession is employed merely as [pg 213]a cloak for common humanity. The successive stages mark the progress in assimilation, induced, in large measure, by laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in establishing the essential unity of mankind underneath its phenomenal diversity. Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to indenture the angel of charity to the father of lies and the lord of hate.