The Mystery of Laughter

In the second month, the normal human infant breaks into its first smile. The expression is often considered a reflex action, but it soon becomes social, and in the fourth month develops into that explosive, exclusively human breath pattern called laughter. Laughter serves man well. It can relieve his anxiety and tension, pave the way to friendship and enable him to tolerate his own--and life's--absurdities. Laughter is vital in helping to define what is human: its absence is generally taken as a sign of grave psychic stress. Yet laughter itself has never been satisfactorily defined. "The laughable is what we laugh at," writes New Zealand-born Philosopher D. H. Monro in his survey of prevailing theory. Argument of Laughter. "We laugh because we have seen something laughable. That seems all we can say."

Nature and Culture. Most recently, the mystery has been explored by George B. Milner, a linguist at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In New Society magazine, Milner argues that laughter restores man's balance on his precarious tightrope trip through life. "Man is doomed," he writes, "to be a product of culture, but not to be wholly cultural; and to be a product of nature, but not to be wholly natural." Half civilized, half beast, man struggles endlessly to harmonize the conflicting poles of his being. Pulled too far in either direction, he instinctively recognizes the danger and laughs out of embarrassment and relief.

"We laugh at the lady who wants to dress all cows, dogs and cats because she finds their natural state indecent," Milner says. "She is being too cultured. We laugh at cannibalism, on the other hand, because man is acting too much like an animal." Yet there are other forms of laughter that do not fit Milner's theory--the laugh of sheer physical or emotional exuberance, for instance.

Yesterday's Fashions. To Germany's great pessimistic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, laughter was man's dauntless ally in the battle against "that strict, untiring, troublesome governess, Reason." Man laughs whenever he can get the best of her, as in nonsense jokes, or when he finds connections that reason would surely forbid. The witticisms of Oscar Wilde nicely support the argument. After his imprisonment, for instance, Wilde said: "If this is the way the Queen treats her convicts, she doesn't deserve to have any."

French Philosopher Henri Bergson identified as laughable "something mechanical incrusted upon the living"--his somewhat pedantic phrase for the essential dualism of life. Civilization, said Bergson, unfolds so rapidly that its creator, man, is hard put to keep up. As a result, both culture and language are full of outdated forms. When man is abruptly made aware of them, he responds with chastened or chastening laughter. Why do yesterday's fashions invariably strike us as comic? Because, Bergson thought, they expose the ludicrousness of all fashion--an effort by a creature, born naked, to wear and animate his wardrobe as a kind of second skin.

Sigmund Freud transferred life's basic contradiction to the depths of the human psyche. There, he said, the conflict between the strong animal drives of the Id (nature) and the "civilizing" instructions of the Ego and Super-Ego (culture) bubbles up disguised in forbidden humor, such as jokes about sex and hostility. We laugh, Freud believed, at having successfully eluded the censor. We laugh, too, out of sheer relief because the enormous energy repressed in the Id is thus given vent.

Inappropriateness. From the works of these and other theorists, Philosopher Monro has distilled a list of ten occasions or circumstances that are likely to produce laughter: 1) any breach of the usual order of events (eating with chopsticks when one is accustomed to spoons); 2) any forbidden breach of the usual order (belching in public); 3) indecency; 4) importing into one situation what belongs in another (the drunk in church); 5) anything masquerading as something it is not (two men in a horse costume); 6) wordplay; 7) nonsense; 8) minor misfortunes (the man slipping on a banana skin); 9) any shortage of knowledge or skill (the paperhanger tangled up in his paper); 10) veiled insults (Wife: To you, marriage is just a word. Husband: It's more than a word, it's a sentence).

From his list, Monro selects a few principles that may apply to all forms of humor. One is freshness or surprise, an element so necessary to laughter that, as Milner points out, no joke seems as funny in the second telling. Equally important is inappropriateness: "the linking of disparates, the collision of different mental spheres, the obtrusion into one context of what belongs in another." Writes Monro: "We must realize how much of our thinking really is controlled by stereotypes and conventions."

In the end Monro, like most others before him, concludes that lists and theories can tell us scarcely more than what we laugh at and when, and then only imprecisely. They do not tell us why. For, like a joke, the human gift of laughter defies analysis. To track it to its source is to make it disappear.

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