Under Dispute/The American Laughs
IT was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock—who knew whereof he spoke—that "no man should ask another why he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent. . . . Reason is in no way essential to mirth."
This being so, why should human beings, individually and collectively, be so contemptuous of one another's humour? To be puzzled by it is natural enough. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see. But to be scornful or angry, to say with Steele that we can judge a man's temper by the things he laughs at, is, in a measure, unreasonable. A man laughs as he loves, moved by secret springs that do not affect his neighbour. Yet no sooner did America begin to breed humorists of her own than the first thing these gentlemen did was to cast doubts upon British humour. Even a cultivated laugher like Mr. Charles Dudley Warner suffered himself to become acrimonious on this subject; whereupon an English critic retaliated by saying that if Mr. Warner considered Knickerbocker's "New York" to be the equal of "Gulliver's Travels," and that if Mr. Lowell really thought Mr. N. P. Willis "witty," then there was no international standard of satire or of wit. The chances are that Mr. Lowell did not think Mr. Willis witty at all. He used the word in a friendly and unreflecting moment, not expecting a derisive echo from the other side of the sea.
And now Mr. Chesterton has protested in the "Illustrated London News" against the vogue of the American joke in England. He says it does not convey its point because the conditions which give it birth are not understood, and the side-light it throws fails to illuminate a continent. One must be familiar with the intimacies of American life to enjoy their humorous aspect.
Precisely the same criticism was offered when Artemus Ward lectured in London more than a half-century ago. The humour of this once famous joker has become a disputable point. It is safe to say that anything less amusing than the passage read by Lincoln to his Cabinet in Mr. Drinkwater's play could not be found in the literature of any land. It cast a needless gloom over the scene, and aroused our sympathy for the officials who had to listen to it. But the American jest, like the Greek epic, should be spoken, not read; and it is claimed that when Artemus Ward drawled out his absurdities, which, like the Greek epic, were always subject to change, these absurdities were funny. Mr. Leacock has politely assured us that London was "puzzled and enraptured with the very mystery of the humour"; but Mr. Leacock, being at that time three years old, was not there to discern this for himself. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was there on the opening night, November 13, 1866, and found the puzzle and the mystery to be far in advance of the rapture. The description he was wont to give of this unique entertainment (a "Panorama," and a lecture on the Mormons), of the depressing, unventilated Egyptian Hall in which it was given, of the wild extravagances of the speaker, which grew wilder and wilder as the audience grew more and more bewildered, was funny enough, Heaven knows, but the essence of the fun lay in failure.
Americans, sixty years ago, were brought up on polygamous jests. The Mormons were our neighbours, and could be always relied upon to furnish a scandal, a thrill, or a joke. When they mended their ways, and ceased to be reprehensible or amusing, the comic papers were compelled to fall back on Solomon, with whose marital experiences they have regaled us ever since. But to British eyes, Brigham Young was an unfamiliar figure; and to British minds, Solomon has always been distinguished for other things than wives. Therefore Artemus Ward's casual drolleries presupposed a humorous background which did not exist. A chance allusion to a young friend in Salt Lake City who had run away with a boarding school was received in stupefied silence. Then suddenly a woman's smothered giggle showed that light had dawned on one receptive brain. Then a few belated laughs broke out in various parts of the hall, as the idea travelled slowly along the thought currents of the audience, and the speaker went languidly on to the next unrecognizable pleasantry.
The criticism passed upon Americans to-day is that they laugh often and without discrimination. This is what the English say of us, and this is what some Americans have said of the English. Henry James complained bitterly that London play-goers laughed unseasonably at serious plays. I wonder if they received Ervine's "John Ferguson" in this fashion, as did American play-goers. That a tragedy harsh and unrelenting, that human pain, unbearable because unmerited, should furnish food for mirth may be comprehensible to the psychologist who claims to have a clue to every emotion; but to the ordinary mortal it is simply dumbfounding. People laughed at Molnar's "Liliom" out of sheer nervousness, because they could not understand it. And "Liliom" had its comedy side. But nobody could have helped understanding "John Ferguson," and there was no relief from its horror, its pitifulness, its sombre surrender to the irony of fate. Yet ripples of laughter ran through the house; and the actress who played Hannah Ferguson confessed that this laughter had in the beginning completely unnerved her, but that she had steeled herself to meet and to ignore it.
It was said that British audiences were guilty of laughing at "Hedda Gabler," perhaps in sheer desperate impatience at the unreasonableness of human nature as unfolded in that despairing drama. They should have been forgiven and congratulated, and so should the American audiences who were reproached for laughing at "Mary Rose." The charm, the delicacy, the tragic sense of an unknown and arbitrary power with which Barrie invested his play were lost in the hands of incapable players, while its native dullness gained force and substance from their presentation. A lengthy dialogue on a pitch-black stage between an invisible soldier and an inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening nor terrifying. It would have been as hard to laugh as to shudder in the face of such tedious loquacity.
We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh, weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck's "Intruder" was played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia, they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented, degenerates swiftly into farce—into very bad farce, too, as Swift said of the vulgar malignities of fate.
The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it, was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary, was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us. My first experience was at the opening night of Ervine's "Mixed Marriage," in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I could judge by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the theological bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in a box with Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness of the house at the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar and vital to her was a matter of the purest unconcern to that particular group of Americans. The only thing that roused them from their apathy was the sudden rage with which, in the third act, Tom Rainey shouted at his father: "Ye're an ould fool, that's what ye are; a damned ould fool!" At these reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and animation. It was seemingly—though I should be sorry to think it—the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, "The Playboy of the Western World," was put on the American stage, men laughed—generally at the wrong time—out of the hopeless confusion of their minds. The "Playboy" was admittedly an enigma. The night I saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure what, hurled denunciations and one missile—which looked strangely like a piece of pie—at the actors. It was a disgraceful scene, but not without its humorous side; for when the riotous interruptions had subsided, an elderly man arose, and, with the manner of an invited speaker at a public dinner, began, "From time immemorial"—But the house had grown tired of disturbances, and howled him down. He waited for silence, and then in the same composed and leisurely manner began again, "From time immemorial"—At this point one of the policemen who had been restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the theatre; the play was resumed; and what it was that had happened from time immemorial we were destined never to know.
A source of superlative merriment in the United States is the two-reel comic of our motion-picture halls. Countless thousands of Americans look at it, and presumably laugh at it, every twenty-four hours. It is not unlike an amplified and diversified Punch and Judy show, depending on incessant action and plenty of hard knocks. Hazlitt says that bangs and blows which we know do not hurt provoke legitimate laughter; and, until we see a funny film, we have no conception of the amount of business which can be constructed out of anything so simple as men hitting one another. Producers of these comics have taken the public into their confidence, and have assured us that their work is the hardest in the motion-picture industry; that the slugging policeman is trained for weary weeks to slug divertingly, and that every tumble has to be practised with sickening monotony before it acquires its purely accidental character. As for accessories—well, it takes more time and trouble to make a mouse run up a woman's skirt at the right moment, or a greyhound carry off a dozen crullers on its tail, than it does to turn out a whole sentimental scenario, grey-haired mother, high-minded, pure-hearted convict son, lumber-camp virtue, town vice, and innocent childhood complete. Whether or not the time and trouble are well spent depends on the amount of money which that mouse and those crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and laughter-loving public.
The dearth of humorous situations—at no time inexhaustible—has compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed, violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner without coming to grief. Even the animals—dogs, donkeys and pigs—are subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life. Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these circumstances, a great protection. The human body, swathed in rolls of cotton-wadding, is safe from contusions and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the producers of comic "movies" know what "One crowded hour of glorious life" can be made to hold.
Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining causes—why should we?—until the contradictory definitions of philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another's misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough, spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. "We laugh from strength, and we laugh at weakness." Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in the amusement of civilized men who have gaged the folly and frivolity of their kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent motion-picture halls, says that the comic makes its appeal to "the intelligence pure and simple." He raises laughter to the dignity of a "social gesture" and a corrective. We put our affections out of court, and impose silence upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only because the corrective would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of sympathy and kindness. Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but one thing, that all humour is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our indestructible spirit of mirth to "the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination."
The illustrations given us by these eminent specialists are as unconvincing as the definitions they vouchsafe, and the rules they lay down for our guidance. Whenever we are told that a situation or a jest offers legitimate food for laughter, we cease to have any disposition to laugh. Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused. An entertainment which promises to be funny is handicapped from the start. It has to plough deep into men's risibilities before it can raise its crop of laughter. I have been told that when Forepaugh first fired a man out of a cannon, the audience laughed convulsively; not because it found anything ludicrous in the performance, but because it had been startled out of its composure, and relieved from a gasping sense of fear.
Sidney Smith insisted that the overturning of a dinner-table which had been set for dinner was a laughable incident. Yet he was a married man, and must have known that such a catastrophe (which seems to us to belong strictly to the motion-picture field) could not have been regarded by Mrs. Smith, or by any other hostess, as amusing. Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson was so infinitely diverted by hearing that an English gentleman had left his estate to his three sisters that he laughed until he was exhausted, and had to hold on to a post (he was walking home through the London streets) to keep himself from falling to the ground. Yet no reader of Boswell ever saw anything ludicrous in such a last will and testament. Sophocles makes Electra describe Clytemnestra as "laughing triumphantly" over the murder of Agamemnon; but Electra was a prejudiced witness. Killing an undesired husband is no laughing matter, though triumph over its accomplishment—when failure means death—is a legitimate emotion. Clytemnestra was a singularly august and composed sinner. Not from her did Orestes and Electra inherit their nervous systems; and not on their testimony should we credit her with an excess of humour alike ill-timed and unbecoming.
In our efforts to discover what can never be discovered—the secret sources of laughter—we have experimented with American children; testing their appreciation of the ludicrous by giving them blocks which, when fitted into place, display absurd and incongruous pictures. Their reactions to this artificial stimulus are of value, only when they are old enough for perception, and young enough for candour. The merriment of children, of little girls especially, is often unreal and affected. They will toss their heads and stimulate one another to peals of laughter which are a pure make-believe. When they are really absorbed in their play, and astir with delicious excitation, they do not laugh; they give vent to piercing shrieks which sound as if they were being cut into little pieces. These shrieks are the spontaneous expression of delight; but their sense of absurdity, which implies a sense of humour, is hard to capture before it has become tainted with pretence.
There are American newspapers which print every day a sheet or a half-sheet of comic pictures, and there are American newspapers which print every Sunday a coloured comic supplement. These sincere attempts to divert the public are well received. Their vulgarity does not offend. "What," asks the wise Santayana, "can we relish if we recoil at vulgarity?" Their dullness is condoned. Life, for all its antics, is confessedly dull. Our absurdities may amuse the angels (Walpole had a cheerful vision of their laughter); but they cannot be relied on to amuse our fellow men. Nevertheless the coloured supplement passes from hand to hand—from parents to children, from children to servants. Even the smudgy black and whites of the daily press are soberly and conscientiously scrutinized. A man, reading his paper in the train, seldom skips that page. He examines every little smudge with attention, not seemingly entertained, or seeking entertainment, but without visible depression at its incompetence.
I once had the pleasure of hearing a distinguished etcher lecture on the art of illustrating. He said some harsh words about these American comics, and threw on the screen a reproduction of one of their most familiar series. The audience looked at it sadly. "I am glad," commented the lecturer, "that you did not laugh. Those pictures are, as you perceive, as stupid as they are vulgar. Now I will show you some clever English work": and there appeared before us the once famous Ally Sloper recreating himself and his family at the seashore. The audience looked at him sadly. A solemn stillness held the hall. "Why don't you laugh?" asked the lecturer irritably. "I assure you that picture is funny." Whereupon everybody laughed; not because we saw the fun—which was not there to see—but because we were jolted into risibility by the unwarranted despotism of the demand.
The prohibition jest which stands preeminent in the United States, and has afforded French and English humorists a field which they have promptly and ably filled, draws its vitality from the inexhaustible springs of human nature. Readers and play-goers profess themselves tired of it; moralists deprecate its undermining qualities; but the conflict between a normal desire and an interdict is too unadjustable, too rich in circumstance, and too far-reaching in results, to be accepted in sober silence. The complications incidental to prohibition, the battle of wits, the turns of the game, the adventures—often sorry enough—of the players, all present the essential elements of comedy. Mrs. Gerould has likened the situation to an obstacle race. It is that, and it is something more. In earlier, easier days, robbery was made justifiably droll. The master thief was equally at home in northern Europe and in the far East. England smiled at Robin Hood. France evolved that amazing epithet, "chevalier d'industrie." But arrayed against robbery were a moral law and a commandment. Arrayed against wine are a legal ordinance and the modern cult of efficiency. It will be long before these become so sacrosanct as to disallow a laugh.
The worst that has been said of legitimate American humour is that it responds to every beck and call. Even Mr. Ewan S. Agnew, whose business it is to divert the British public, considers that the American public is too easily diverted. We laugh, either from light-hearted insensitiveness, or from the superabundant vitality, the half-conscious sense of power, which bubbles up forever in the callous gaiety of the world. Certainly Emerson is the only known American who despised jocularity, and who said early and often that he did not wish to be amused. The most striking passage in the letters of Mr. Walter Page is the one which describes his distaste for the "jocular" Washington luncheons at which he was a guest in the summer of 1916. He had come fresh from the rending anxiety, the heroic stress and strain of London; and the cloudless atmosphere of our capital wounded his spirit. England jested too. "Punch" had never been so brilliant as in the torturing years of war. But England had earned the right to jest. There was a tonic quality in her laughter. Page feared from the bottom of his soul lest the great peaceful nation, safe, rich and debonair, had suffered her "mental neutrality" to blot out from her vision the agony of Europe, and the outstanding facts which were responsible for the disaster.
This unconcern, which is the balance wheel of comedy, has tempered the American mind to an easy acceptance of chance. Its enthusiasms are modified, its censures are softened by a restraining humour which is rooted deeply in indifference. We recognize the sanity of our mental attitude, but not its incompleteness. Understanding and sympathy are products of civilized life, as clarifying in their way as tolerance and a quick perception of the ludicrous. An American newspaper printed recently a photograph entitled "Smilin' Through," which showed two American girls peering through two holes in a shell-torn wall of Verdun, and laughing broadly at their sport. The names and addresses of these frolicsome young women were given, and their enjoyment of their own drollery was emphasized for the diversion of other young women at home.
Now granted that every nation, like every man, bears the burden of its own grief. Granted also that every woman, like every man, has her own conception of the humorous, and that we cannot reasonably take umbrage because we fail to see the fun. Nevertheless the memories of Verdun do not make for laughter. There is that in its story which sobers the world it has ennobled. Four hundred thousand French soldiers gave their lives for that battered fortress which saved Paris and France. Mr. Brownell reminds us that there is such a thing as rectitude outside the sphere of morals, and that it is precisely this austere element in taste which assures our self-respect. We cannot analyze, and therefore cannot criticize, that frothy fun which Bergson has likened to the foam which the receding waves leave on the ocean sands; but we know, as he knows, that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste is bitter in our mouths. We are tethered to our kind, and it is the sureness of our reaction to the great and appealing facts of history which makes us inheritors of a hard-won civilization, and qualified citizens of the world.