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Page 75
Then, after it is ascertained whether the timidity of the flies is because
this story has been passed around among them, or only because men have
already killed off all but the specially quick and timid ones; we hope our
investigators may find an answer to the farther question: (III) How, if a
tenth of what some folks say against flies is true, the human race has so
long survived?
To avoid misapprehension, it should be added that despite the
availability, in our boyhood, of flies as playmates, we don't like 'em,
especially when they light on our hands to help us write articles for this
REVIEW.
_Setting Bounds to Laughter_
That there is even a measure of personal liberty on the earth, is one of
our most pointed proofs that the universe is governed by design. For
liberty is loved neither by the many nor by the few; its defense has
always been unpopular in the extreme, and can be manfully undertaken only
in an age of moral heroism. The present is no heroic age, and hence our
personal rights fall one by one, without defense, and apparently without
regret. The losses thus incurred must be left to future historians to
weigh and to lament. There is, however, one of our natural rights, now
cruelly beset by its enemies, that is too precious to surrender to the
threnodies of the future historians. This is the right to laugh.
It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the first appearance of
organized efforts to curb the spirit of laughter. All good men and women
were hectored into believing that one should weep, not laugh, over the
absurdities of men in their cups. Next, we were warned that it is unseemly
and unChristian to laugh at a fellow-man's discomfiture--an awkward social
situation, a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a
poem spoilt by a printer's stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma that to
laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently grown into vigor
multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial, national and professional.
Not many years ago a censorship of Irish jokes was established, and this
was soon followed by an index expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our
colored fellow citizens promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the
expense of their race are "in bad taste"; and country life enthusiasts
solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing short of
national disasters. A recent press report informs us that the suffragette
joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits throughout the
country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic servants, stenographers,
politicians, college professors, and clergymen are organizing to establish
the right of being ridiculous without exciting laughter.
But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an old-fashioned aid to
digestion, more or less discredited by current medical authority? It is
time we learned that laughter has a social significance: it is the first
stage in the process of understanding one's fellow man. Professor Bergson
to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your intellect
alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy. You can not
laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a
Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a
Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in
the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world
laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.
When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a
book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person
observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school
readers narrated, with na�ve surprise, this maiden was destined to become
Franklin's faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect
such a result. The stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults
before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of
the sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some
small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced
to Bret Harte's gambler:
For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.
The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily written.
At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense of the group
represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal contest, and we have
a new order of jokes, in which the intended victim acquits himself well.
This, too, gives way to a higher order, in which race, nationality or
profession is employed merely as a cloak for common humanity. The
successive stages mark the progress in assimilation, induced, in large
measure, by laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating
mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in establishing
the essential unity of mankind underneath its phenomenal diversity.
Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to indenture the angel of charity
to the father of lies and the lord of hate.
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