HOW PEOPLE LAUGH.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 18, 30 April 1892, Page 451

HOW PEOPLE LAUGH.

What would our homes be, asks a writer, but for the hearty and ringing laughter of our little ones ? These ar much as anything enable us to forget the cares and the burdens of business, and make us feel young again. Now, what is so natural to children and to young ladies is equally natural to us all, and let us, if we would consider our health and happiness, secure as opportunity occurs a deep, vigorous, and merry laugh. But though laughter is so beautiful and useful, though it is at once a good minister, and a ministry for good, a minister to whom we should give a call, and attend his ministry regularly, and love to seek much of his society, yet we have forms of laughter which are at once hateful and unnatural.

There is no amusement, no glee, no mirth, no joy in the laugh of the hysterical. It is a body without a soul, a casket without the jewel, the guinea stamp without the gold ; it is the carcase without the life, hence it pains, wounds, grieves, and distresses the onlookers. It springs not from health, as it ought, but from weakness ; not from gladness, but from a wounded spirit; and a laugh which otherwise would have been meaningful and beautiful is meaningless and unsightly. Some men have a Mephistophelian laugh— a devil’s laugh —the laugh of the fiend. Their grin—cold, chilly, awful — is offensive ; their smile is insulting, sickening and blighting, and their laugh is altogether from the pit. Their utterances are all misanthropic, irritating, and wounding. The cynic is cynical in all his puns, repartees, jokes, and anecdotes. He is ever spiteful, vindictive, and cruel, and let him disguise it as he may by assuming a humane veneer, it all comes off in time, and the real man himself is seen and he is seen to be a hateful creature. A young cynical husband was out with his wife one day, and pointing to a monkey cutting capers on the top of a barrel organ, he brutally said, ‘ That’s a relation of yours, Mary.’ ‘ 1 know it is,’ replied the wife, promptly, • but it is by marriage.’ He richly deserved that answer.

Some laughter is not unlike the chirping of a bird. With this difference : the chirping of the bird is natural and becoming, whereas the chirpy laughter is not either natural or comely. It is thin, soulless, and foolish. It has neither soul nor substance, sincerity nor significance, beauty nor blessing. We often wonder whether the poor creatures have any idea of the sounds they emit. They cannot have, or no such words as ‘ he-he-he,’ ‘a ha-ha,’ and * o-ho-ho,' would ever escape their lips. Sir Morell Mackenzie declared that no man hears accurately the sound of his own voice, and hence he does not know it when he hears it from

the phonograph. Laughter, though wonderfully varied, like music, like the human face, like the voice itself, has a substantial unity which is sadly outraged by those who chirrup. We must be natural in our laughter, and if we are to be so we must not be artificial, but really natural in ourselves. Our laughter will never be better than we are. It will be a reflection of our own souls, and it reveals whether there be depth in us or whether the sounds we make are but the outcome of habit. If your laughter is not natural and becoming, make it so. A bridegroom solemnly told the bride’s youngest brother, ‘ I take Mary away to-day, and will have her all to myself.’ • All right,’ said the youngest, ‘if you can stand it I can.’ But neither speaker nor hearer ought to be able to stand chirpy laughter.