There are two kinds of laughter: one is the most beautiful sound under heaven, the other the most cruel. This fact is generally recognised. We talk about laughing at someone and laughing with someone; one is nasty, one is nice. The extremes are worlds apart: the difference between the harsh echo in an ancient despot’s throat and the babbling of a baby cannot be overstated. It is too weak to say they are apples and oranges; they are more like apples and orangutangs. It would be polite to say they are chalk and cheese, but it would be truer to say they are chalk and charred bones. The same difference separates a woodfire from a wildfire; or a pulse from a pool. One is a saint in heaven, the other a stench from hell. We do not generally set the matter in such extreme terms; but we all understand the principle.
It is true that ancient despots are extinct, and modern despots (to their infinite satisfaction) are increasingly rare. But to see this as the end of the issue is a little simplistic. Indeed it is barely the beginning. For if I define the difference between the two kinds of laughter, I find it has nothing to do with despotism or tyranny; it even has nothing to do with deliberate wickedness – for many an evil philosophy has lodged in the most innocent minds. Diabolism aside, the diabolical variety of laughter is still present and prevalent; like the majority of mankind it is often well-intentioned and still far from harmless. It is the laughter that the strong laugh at the weak, and the smart laugh at the stupid. It contemns things because they are contemptible, and ridicules them because they are ridiculous. If you will, it is the sin of laughing at something because it is laughable; which is the same as striking a man when he’s down. And that is not a symptom of despotism, but a symptom of pride; which is like saying a symptom of sinister humanity.
To bring the issue to a point, let me set before you the funniest thing in the world, the one thing that most deserves to be laughed at; in the opinion of many, because it is the most contemptible, and in the opinion of others, because it is the most noble. I mean the glorious featherless biped. For in the stillest air, on the calmest day, an individual perfectly compos-mentis may be seen swept away by a squall of laughter, for no other reason – not the whimsicality of world, which may be as bleak as a saltpan, and in cities often is – than that they happen to be human. No hilarity is so hilarious as the hilarity of humanity. We are on the whole so hilarious that we must allow our humour to spill over onto other more incidental subjects, but like bread on the water it always comes back to us. Hence you will find that though a great deal of amusement may be had from the habits of cats and cattle, there are no great traditions of cat mockery or cattle jokes. The tradition of comedy, which is as old as the hills, and older than some, is properly the tradition of the mockery of man. What do they laugh at in Aristophanes? They laugh at superstition, sex, politics and poetry: in short, everything that is distinctly human. What do they laugh at in Terence? The love-lorn dreamer, the pompous flunkey, the greedy capitalist – in short, they laugh at people.
Indeed, is it not remarkable that a joke, which we are told goes stale quicker than anything, is the one thing that never goes stale at all? It is, I believe, a point of literary orthodoxy that poetry lasts forever, but the world has become so unpoetic as to need special training to appreciate Shakespeare. Wisdom is supposed to be eternal, but I am told the best place to find it is in the most up-to-date business books. Ethical principles are supposed to be unchanging – or rather, they were. But what you will find, if you read an ancient comedy – provided the translation is faithful – is that the ancient peoples were apparently exactly like ourselves, and their jokes exactly like ours. To some it seems uncanny. As soon as they start jesting, they become modern. (Even the famous statesmen are no exception: their jokes are as flat as our politicians.) As soon as they start speaking nonsense, they become intelligible. I grant that, strictly speaking, the reason is that our modern sense of humour remains pristinely primitive; but more important is the fact that the subjects of our modern humour are primitive, or rather the one subject: for the only thing we have ever deeply wanted to laugh at is ourselves.
Take, by way of contrast, what seems to me the second funniest category in existence, which in the absence of a better term I call by the trying word ‘technology’. If I am not gravely misled, it should have us in stitches to visualise an enormous lump of mishappen metal wafting across the air with ease and even agility; but we watch it happening regularly, and quickly tire of laughing at it. Airplanes are much funnier in theory than in reality. It is the idea, not the appearance, that cracks us up. As with microwaves; for the idea of plastic cube that spins things magically until they are warm is quite tickling; but our laughter becomes all too polite once we have greeted the glowing box a dozen times or so. Use your own words, if you prefer: in any case, the concepts really are funny, because concepts are human; we laugh at the imaginations of our species, not because the things imagined are absurd, but because the imagination that comes up with them is. With the exception of the pareidolia of an automobile (with its headlight eyes and bumper mouth), it is the character, not the appearance, of a work of human absurdity that has power to amuse; because the character reminds us of human temerity. To make the point clearer: while even the thought of a steel sausage that flies around full of people is not lastingly funny, the thought of a person who flies around in a steel sausage is; and thought a piece of plastic that heats vegetables is not quite enough for the theme of a comedy, but the vegetable that is stirred to the heart with the depths of warmth and fervour by a piece of plastic might just do. Why? Because you have made the vegetable into something far more bizarre than a microwave; you have personified it.
Thus the world is full of laughable things, but of all of them the most laughable is the one that laughs. I venture it is because there is scarcely anything else grave enough to laugh at; but the more blackguardly philosophy we have touched on holds that it is because there is nothing else so irredeemable. I maintain that we should laugh at ourselves and our friends for the joy of existence and friendship; others believe we should laugh in spite of the joy of existence. It must have been some such person who in the distant, etymological past first called something that caused laughter a butt, as if it were something despicable. Perhaps it was Diogenes the Cynic. In the end, it is of the utmost importance how we laugh, whether in derision or in delight; for that is all the difference between the satisfied and the cynical, even between the jolly and the genocidal. In the one camp are the mirthful who laugh at people because they love them; in the other the murderous, who laugh at people and hate them. This is the only real justification for calling dirty humour dirty – not because we are Victorian prudes (which would be wildly inappropriate in the 21st century), but because dirty jokes cast dirt on all that is valuable. The principle has already been realised with regard to racial jokes, for there is today a party of the purest puritans on that matter, who realise how filthy it is to cast dirt on someone’s nation. But we are not so civilised as to apply it to the better part of our humour. We are not yet afraid of offending our bodies or space or time or God, though at least one of these has the right to object to dirt.
These are murky waters, and I should make it clear at once that my point is not moral, but philosophical. I am not attacking obscenity and sacrilege, which, after all, are reasonable at certain times in all reasonable worldviews, and all the time in some reasonable worldviews. But a wight will laugh at the weightiest matters, either in joy or in jeering, in grievance or gaudiation, with love or loathing, and I know which I prefer. I would be ready at the barricades with a stave in my hand if it came to it. The difference between the parties is not that the one is cheerful and the other sullen, for they are both cheerful, and they are both laughing. Really the difference is that one party thinks the world is meaningless and, really, despicable, while the other believes that it is holy: a vasty vaulted temple, as Cicero thought. The redcoats – for I believe this is the official view today, at least so far as jokesmithery goes – think that God is a hoax for the gullible, that the witless are worthless, that the weak are wretched, that sex is mere animal indignity, and that death is a bit like spit. They mock. The rebels – so they must be termed – think that heaven itself laughs at the thirty Irishmen with their electrics; not in derision, but because, by a delicious irony, something more splendid than the Seraphim stands at its post in each of them, and something more splendid than the Seraphim is fumbling with a simple lightbulb.
Most people, as people are in this iron age of ours, are not so loyal to a principle that they belong entirely to one camp. I should like to meet one who did, for I imagine they must be striking and peculiar. The rest of us jeer at one moment and grin the next; we are not so drunk on the joy of life that we do not slip imperceptibly into sobriety and that worst form of cynicism, cynical high spirits. But I do not doubt that when St Paul, himself so often ecstatic, forbade ‘wittiness’, he was referring to this very thing: this cynical hilarity, this poisonous pleasure of smiling scorn. And though Scripture speaks in spiritual terms and gives counsel for the health of the soul before God, I think the preference may be extended to the literary sphere. For I believe that even in the most profane literature, it is the mark of a great comedian that they jest out of selfless delight, and not with a sense of superiority. I have been reading Molière’s Misanthrope; where indeed the characters can be petty, and the author indeed shakes his head at them; but the most comic characters are given the dignity of either nobility or innocence. We find them funny, in fact, because to our surprise we find we are fond of them.
theparsnipoftime 