WHY WE LAUGH

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 July 1932, Page 4

WHY WE LAUGH

THE COMIC EXAMINED Everyone enjoys a good hearty laugh. But why does a human being laugh. “Because he or she hears or sees something funny?” “Why was it funny?” persists the psychologist and gets no clear-cut answer. “Your mother-in-law’s run down, said the physician to Mr. Henpeck. “I’m afraid you’lll have to send her to a warmer climate.” Mr. H.. went out and came back in a few minutes with an axe. “You do it, doctor,” he said, “I haven’t the heart.” Just one of the many well-worn mother-in-law jokes. Yet millions of people have laughed over trifles of that sort, even if they were ideal sons-in-law themselves, or mothers-in-law with a “sense of humour.” But why should murder of a relative appear amusing? asks a writer in the Sydney “Daily Telegraph.” A dignified, well-dressed man stalks down the street. A gust of wind whips his immaculate hat off. He chases it. The wind keeps whisking it out of reach. All his dignity gone, red-faced, panting, he finally trips over his feet and ends up, looking aggrieved, in a mud-puddle. And the spectators enjoy a hearty laugh, though a fellow-man has spoilt his clothes, lost his dignity, and maybe twisted his ankle or suffered concussion. “We laugh,” says- one school of psychologists, “at the misfortunes of others, through relief that it didn’t happen to ourselves. In effect, ‘There but for the grace of Qod, goes John Taxpayer.’ ” But it is easy to find jokes which do not fit this theory. A good joke can be told against oneself. And there are others. Many readers chuckled, no . doubt, on reading that a man snatched a woman’s bag in Darlinghurst, ran a mile and got—ninepence. His was a topical variant of the thugs who set on a Scotsman, and after half-an-hour’s fight, in which everyone was badly damaged, got threepence. “Just as well he didn’t have sixpence,” ruefully muttered one thief. “He’d have killed the lot of us.” The smile in both cases is for a thief risking arrest and imprisonment for what proves an inadequate reward. So another school of psychologists postulates that the essence of laughter is surprise. A surprise turn in conversation or action forms the basis of most humour —so much so that a joke re-told loses much of its savour unless some, at least, of the hearers have not heard it before. >

Physiologists point out that a laugh is really a series of guttural explosions, following a preliminary holding of breath. The latter is instinctive in persons suddenly surprised. It has persisted (says the physiologists) in modern man as a habit, even in persons deliberately preparing to be surprised, as at a “funny man’s” yarn.

A still better case is made out for incongruity as a laughter-basis, for this includes surprise. All “funny” fancy-dress costumes, a huge numbei* of stage and film knockabout comeedian acts, children’s answers, • and ludicrous misadventures and misapprehensions can be included.

CRUEL HUMOUR. Recently English papers published a letter from a woman who, hopelessly infatuated with a man who did not care for her, committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven. , “I am doped with youi’ love,” she wrote. “Thank God for you and also for the West Middlesex Gas, Light and Coke Company.” Something in this wording starts laughter—checked on realising that it represents the disordered thought of a dying woman. ( Professor Bergson wrote a monumental tome on laughter, stressing this point: “Whenever emotion enters, the sense of the comic disappears.” But this may be doubted. Much humour is frankly cruel. In ancient Carthage the legs of prisoners were broken, and they were thrown into a pit. Children were taken to see the maimed sufferers’ antics, much as modern children are taken to see the monkeys at Taronga. Modern Papuans treat animals and birds similarly to keep them from straying, .and are also amqsed. Children, exemplars of the primitive savage, extract humour from the torture of animals. A few weeks ago, boys in a country district tied a tin can to the tail of a horse. The animal went mad with fear, dashed into a tree, broke one of its legs, and had to be destroyed. “Done as a joke,” was the plea of the lads in Court.

And there is, of course, mental cruelty in all ironical humour. “I don’t look so much like an old woman now I’ve had my hair bobbed,” said a Wife. “No,” chuckled her. husband. “You look more like an old man.” Essentially .cr.uel, funnier ~to old men than old wfimen, and funniest, of course, to the young. ' The “laugh-at-misfortunes-of-others” theory has, in regard to these jokes, the best of it. But why people really laugh at some incident or story remains a mystery. Probe beyond the theories—why is the misfortune of others funny? Why is a well-dressed man sitting in a puddle a joke? And why do jokes “date,” so that a run through files of comic papers of 1870 cannot evoke a grin? No one can say, yet everyone is pathetically anxious to possess “a sense 6f humour,” or at any rate, to pass for having one. A huge crop of jokes deals with lack of this sense. Hang it, Professor, you wouldn’t see a joke if it was fired at you out of a cannon!” growled a disgusted wit. • Young man, you cannot fire jokes out of cannons,” solemnly replied the professor. A thin jest, yet it survives amid stronger brethren, every hearer laughing perfunctorily, lest the stigma “lack of sense of humour,” attach to him also. So if it is true that we laugh to express superiority, or sense of comic surprise, it is also true we do so to show we “see the point,” and to avoid being laughed at in turn.