AGE OF GIGGLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 February 1927, Page 8

AGE OF GIGGLE

ENGLISH LAUGHTER PASSING

In a restaurant a man laughed heartily and half the people in the room stopped talking in order to look at him —some smiling, some frowning., The man himself looked quite frightened; the people with him looked rather ashamed. He had committed the new sin. He had laughted! Are we Englishmen forgetting how to laugh and learning how to giggle? (queries Hartley Kemball Cook in the “Daily Mail”). If so, we are losing one of the Englishman's chief characteristics. The Englishman was ever a great laugher, leaving the giggle and the snigger to lesser races. All through our literature' we have been laughing heartily. Our jests have been broad, racy of the soil, easy to understand, laughter-compelling. From Chaucer, through Shakespeare down almost to our own times, ?we would have none of that whispering and giggling in a corner; a man held his sides and laughed and grew fat. You can hear the great Englishmen of all times laughing down the centuries, opening their mouths, throwing back their heads, slapping their knees. Then came the blighting age of “refanement” —the age of giggle. Jolly John Leech and Charles Keene were not “refaned,” nor were the jokes they illustrated. They had body; they were not the pale wraiths of the moderns.

But then the ideal of humour became that thin, sniggering wit which sometimes amuses a college common room. There arrived the humour of Baillol, very amusing in its way perhaps, but not in the least the humour of the English; the kind of thing which suggests a pallid smile and a vegetarian diet. One half of English society discovered that it was vulgar to laugh. Fafnt titters pay the expected tribute. Those who were prepared to be witty for our edification have been going about for years in terror of laughter as a symptom of vulgarity. The war broke the spell for a time, but the gigglers have asserted themselves again. It is good to smile; there is a quiet humour which demands no more. The man who guffaws at a quiet shaft of wit is as great a nuisance aa, the man who giggles when laughter should be holding both his sides.

There is a time, then, to smile and there is a time to laugh; the unfortunate thing is that we are forgetting how to laugh and beginning to snigger instead of smiling. But there is hope; the reform may come from below. The masses have not forgotten to laugh, and they may teach us the secret anew. Get into the gallery when a George in a country alehouse and you will hear the real laughter. Go down into the country and take your mug of beer in a country alehouse and you will hear something of the old English laughter. I hope the time will never come when that laughter is to be heard no more; for the complete triumph of the age of giggle will produce a race of Englishmen English only in name.