They often tell me that So-and-so has no sense of humour. Lack of this
sense is everywhere held to be a horrid disgrace, nullifying any number
of delightful qualities. Perhaps the most effective means of
disparaging an enemy is to lay stress on his integrity, his erudition,
his amiability, his courage, the fineness of his head, the grace of his
figure, his strength of purpose, which has overleaped all obstacles,
his goodness to his parents, the kind word that he has for every one,
his musical voice, his freedom from aught that in human nature is base;
and then to say what a pity it is that he has no sense of humour. The
more highly you extol any one, the more eagerly will your audience
accept anything you may have to say against him. Perfection is unloved
in this imperfect world, but for imperfection comes instant sympathy.
Any excuse is good enough for exalting the bad or stupid brother of us,
but any stick is a valued weapon against him who has the effrontery to
have been by Heaven better graced than we. And what could match for
deadliness the imputation of being without sense of humour? To convict
a man of that lack is to strike him with one blow to a level with the
beasts of the field--to kick him, once and for all, outside the human
pale. What is it that mainly distinguishes us from the brute creation?
That we walk erect? Some brutes are bipeds. That we do not slay one
another? We do. That we build houses? So do they. That we remember and
reason? So, again, do they. That we converse? They are chatterboxes,
whose lingo we are not sharp enough to master. On no possible point of
superiority can we preen ourselves save this: that we can laugh, and
that they, with one notable exception, cannot. They (so, at least, we
assert) have no sense of humour. We have. Away with any one of us who
hasn't!
Belief in the general humorousness of the human race is the more
deep-rooted for that every man is certain that he himself is not
without sense of humour. A man will admit cheerfully that he does not
know one tune from another, or that he cannot discriminate the vintages
of wines. The blind beggar does not seek to benumb sympathy by telling
his patrons how well they are looking. The deaf and dumb do not scruple
to converse in signals. 'Have you no sense of beauty?' I said to a
friend who in the Accademia of Florence suggested that we had stood
long enough in front of the 'Primavera.' 'No!' was his simple,
straightforward, quite unanswerable answer. But I have never heard a
man assert that he had no sense of humour. And I take it that no such
assertion ever was made. Moreover, were it made, it would be a lie.
Every man laughs. Frequently or infrequently, the corners of his mouth
are drawn up into his cheeks, and through his parted lips comes his own
particular variety, soft or loud, of that noise which is called
laughter. Frequently or infrequently, every man is amused by something.
Every man has a sense of humour, but not every man the same sense. A
may be incapable of smiling at what has convulsed B, and B may stare
blankly when he hears what has rolled A off his chair. Jokes are so
diverse that no one man can see them all. The very fact that he can see
one kind is proof positive that certain other kinds will be invisible
to him. And so egoistic in his judgment is the average man that he is
apt to suspect of being humourless any one whose sense of humour
squares not with his own. But the suspicion is always false,
incomparably useful though it is in the form of an accusation.
Having no love for the public, I have often accused that body of having
no sense of humour. Conscience pricks me to atonement. Let me withdraw
my oft-made imputation, and show its hollowness by examining with you,
reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the public than I am),
what are the main features of that sense of humour which the public
does undoubtedly possess.
The word 'public' must, like all collective words, be used with
caution. When we speak of our hair, we should remember not only that
the hairs on our heads are all numbered, but also that there is a
catalogue raisonne' in which every one of those hairs is shown to be in
some respect unique. Similarly, let us not forget that 'public' denotes
a collection not of identical units, but of units separable and (under
close scrutiny) distinguishable one from another. I have said that not
every man has the same sense of humour. I might have said truly that no
two men have the same sense of humour, for that no two men have the
same brain and heart and experience, by which things the sense of
humour is formed and directed. One joke may go round the world,
tickling myriads, but not two persons will be tickled in precisely the
same way, to precisely the same degree. If the vibrations of inward or
outward laughter could be (as some day, perhaps, they will be)
scientifically registered, differences between them all would be made
apparent to us. 'Oh,' is your cry, whenever you hear something that
especially amuses you, 'I must tell that to' whomever you credit with a
sense of humour most akin to your own. And the chances are that you
will be disappointed by his reception of the joke. Either he will laugh
less loudly than you hoped, or he will say something which reveals to
you that it amuses him and you not in quite the same way. Or perhaps he
will laugh so long and loudly that you are irritated by the suspicion
that you have not yourself gauged the full beauty of it. In one of his
books (I do not remember which, though they, too, I suppose, are all
numbered) Mr. Andrew Lang tells a story that has always delighted and
always will delight me. He was in a railway-carriage, and his
travelling-companions were two strangers, two silent ladies,
middle-aged. The train stopped at Nuneaton. The two ladies exchanged a
glance. One of them sighed, and said, 'Poor Eliza! She had reason to
remember Nuneaton!'... That is all. But how much! how deliciously and
memorably much! How infinite a span of conjecture is in those dots
which I have just made! And yet, would you believe me? some of my most
intimate friends, the people most like to myself, see little or nothing
of the loveliness of that pearl of price. Perhaps you would believe me.
That is the worst of it: one never knows. The most sensitive
intelligence cannot predict how will be appraised its any treasure by
its how near soever kin.
This sentence, which I admit to be somewhat mannered, has the merit of
bringing me straight to the point at which I have been aiming; that,
though the public is composed of distinct units, it may roughly be
regarded as a single entity. Precisely because you and I have sensitive
intelligences, we cannot postulate certainly anything about each other.
The higher an animal be in grade, the more numerous and recondite are
the points in which its organism differs from that of its peers. The
lower the grade, the more numerous and obvious the points of likeness.
By 'the public' I mean that vast number of human animals who are in the
lowest grade of intelligence. (Of course, this classification is made
without reference to social 'classes.' The public is recruited from the
upper, the middle, and the lower class. That the recruits come mostly
from the lower class is because the lower class is still the least
well-educated. That they come in as high proportion from the middle
class as from the less well-educated upper class, is because the 'young
Barbarians,' reared in a more gracious environment, often acquire a
grace of mind which serves them as well as would mental keenness.)
Whereas in the highest grade, to which you and I belong, the fact that
a thing affects you in one way is no guarantee that it will not affect
me in another, a thing which affects one man of the lowest grade in a
particular way is likely to affect all the rest very similarly. The
public's sense of humour may be regarded roughly as one collective
sense.
It would be impossible for any one of us to define what are the things
that amuse him. For him the wind of humour bloweth where it listeth. He
finds his jokes in the unlikeliest places. Indeed, it is only there
that he finds them at all. A thing that is labelled 'comic' chills his
sense of humour instantly--perceptibly lengthens his face. A joke that
has not a serious background, or some serious connexion, means nothing
to him. Nothing to him, the crude jape of the professional jester.
Nothing to him, the jangle of the bells in the wagged cap, the thud of
the swung bladder. Nothing, the joke that hits him violently in the
eye, or pricks him with a sharp point. The jokes that he loves are
those quiet jokes which have no apparent point--the jokes which never
can surrender their secret, and so can never pall. His humour is an
indistinguishable part of his soul, and the things that stir it are
indistinguishable from the world around him. But to the primitive and
untutored public, humour is a harshly definite affair. The public can
achieve no delicate process of discernment in humour. Unless a joke
hits in the eye, drawing forth a shower of illuminative sparks, all is
darkness. Unless a joke be labelled 'Comic. Come! why don't you laugh?'
the public is quite silent. Violence and obviousness are thus the
essential factors. The surest way of making a thing obvious is to
provide it in some special place, at some special time. It is thus that
humour is provided for the public, and thus that it is easy for the
student to lay his hand on materials for an analysis of the public's
sense of humour. The obviously right plan for the student is to visit
the music-halls from time to time, and to buy the comic papers. Neither
these halls nor these papers will amuse him directly through their art,
but he will instruct himself quicklier and soundlier from them than
from any other source, for they are the authentic sources of the
public's laughter. Let him hasten to patronise them.
He will find that I have been there before him. The music-halls I have
known for many years. I mean, of course, the real old-fashioned
music-halls, not those depressing palaces where you see by grace of a
biograph things that you have seen much better, and without a headache,
in the street, and pitiable animals being forced to do things which
Nature has forbidden them to do--things which we can do so very much
better than they, without any trouble. Heaven defend me from those
meaningless palaces! But the little old music-halls have always
attracted me by their unpretentious raciness, their quaint monotony,
the reality of the enjoyment on all those stolidly rapt faces in the
audience. Without that monotony there would not be the same air of
general enjoyment, the same constant guffaws. That monotony is the
secret of the success of music-halls. It is not enough for the public
to know that everything is meant to be funny, that laughter is craved
for every point in every 'turn.' A new kind of humour, however obvious
and violent, might take the public unawares, and be received in
silence. The public prefers always that the old well-tested and
well-seasoned jokes be cracked for it. Or rather, not the same old
jokes, but jokes on the same old subjects. The quality of the joke is
of slight import in comparison with its subject. It is the matter,
rather than the treatment, that counts, in the art of the music-hall.
Some subjects have come to be recognised as funny. Two or three of them
crop up in every song, and before the close of the evening all of them
will have cropped up many times. I speak with authority, as an earnest
student of the music-halls. Of comic papers I know less. They have
never allured me. They are not set to music--an art for whose cheaper
and more primitive forms I have a very real sensibility; and I am not,
as I peruse one of them, privy to the public's delight: my copy cannot
be shared with me by hundreds of people whose mirth is wonderful to see
and hear. And the bare contents are not such as to enchant me. However,
for the purpose of this essay, I did go to a bookstall and buy as many
of these papers as I could see--a terrific number, a terrific burden to
stagger away with.
I have gone steadily through them, one by one. My main impression is of
wonder and horror at the amount of hebdomadal labour implicit in them.
Who writes for them? Who does the drawings for them--those thousands of
little drawings, week by week, so neatly executed? To think that daily
and nightly, in so many an English home, in a room sacred to the
artist, sits a young man inventing and executing designs for Chippy
Snips! To think how many a proud mother must be boasting to her
friends: 'Yes, Edward is doing wonderfully well--more than fulfilling
the hopes we always had of him. Did I tell you that the editor of Natty
Tips has written asking him to contribute to his paper? I believe I
have the letter on me. Yes, here it is,' etc., etc.! The awful thing is
that many of the drawings in these comic papers are done with very real
skill. Nothing is sadder than to see the hand of an artist wasted by
alliance to a vacant mind, a common spirit. I look through these
drawings, conceived all so tritely and stupidly, so hopelessly and
helplessly, yet executed--many of them--so very well indeed, and I sigh
over the haphazard way in which mankind is made. However, my concern is
not with the tragedy of these draughtsmen, but with the specific forms
taken by their humour. Some of them deal in a broad spirit with the
world-comedy, limiting themselves to no set of funny subjects, finding
inspiration in the habits and manners of men and women at large. 'HE
WON HER' is the title appended to a picture of a young lady and
gentleman seated in a drawing-room, and the libretto runs thus: 'Mabel:
Last night I dreamt of a most beautiful woman. Harold: Rather a
coincidence. I dreamt of you, too, last night.' I have selected this as
a typical example of the larger style. This style, however, occupies
but a small space in the bulk of the papers that lie before me. As in
the music-halls, so in these papers, the entertainment consists almost
entirely of variations on certain ever-recurring themes. I have been at
pains to draw up a list of these themes. I think it is exhaustive. If
any fellow-student detect an omission, let him communicate with me.
Meanwhile, here is my list:--
Mothers-in-law
Hen-pecked husbands
Twins
Old maids
Jews
Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers (not Russians, or other
foreigners of any denomination)
Fatness
Thinness
Long hair (worn by a man)
Baldness
Sea-sickness
Stuttering
Bad cheese
'Shooting the moon' (slang expression for leaving a lodging-house
without paying the bill).
You might argue that one week's budget of comic papers is no real
criterion--that the recurrence of these themes may be fortuitous. My
answer to that objection is that this list coincides exactly with a
list which (before studying these papers) I had made of the themes
commonest, during the past few years, in the music-halls. This twin
list, which results from separate study of the two chief forms of
public entertainment, may be taken as a sure guide to the goal of our
inquiry.
Let us try to find some unifying principle, or principles, among the
variegated items. Take the first item--Mothers-in-law. Why should the
public roar, as roar it does, at the mere mention of that relationship?
There is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion of a woman with a
married daughter. It is probable that she will sympathise with her
daughter in any quarrel that may arise between husband and wife. It is
probable, also, that she will, as a mother, demand for her daughter
more unselfish devotion than the daughter herself expects. But this
does not make her ridiculous. The public laughs not at her, surely. It
always respects a tyrant. It laughs at the implied concept of the
oppressed son-in-law, who has to wage unequal warfare against two
women. It is amused by the notion of his embarrassment. It is amused by
suffering. This explanation covers, of course, the second item on my
list--Hen-pecked husbands. It covers, also, the third and fourth items.
The public is amused by the notion of a needy man put to double
expense, and of a woman who has had no chance of fulfilling her
destiny. The laughter at Jews, too, may be a survival of the old
Jew-baiting spirit (though one would have thought that even the British
public must have begun to realise, and to reflect gloomily, that the
whirligig of time has so far revolved as to enable the Jews to bait the
Gentiles). Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which alone
can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans, Italians,
Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. The British public
has never got used to them, to their faces and tricks of speech. The
only apparent reason why it laughs at the notion of Frenchmen, etc., is
that they are unlike itself. (At the mention of Russians and other
foreigners it does not laugh, because it has no idea what they are
like: it has seen too few samples of them.)
So far, then, we have found two elements in the public's humour:
delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar. The former motive is
the more potent. It accounts for the popularity of all these other
items: extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness,
stuttering, and (as entailing distress for the landlady) 'shooting the
moon.' The motive of contempt for the unfamiliar accounts for long hair
(worn by a man). Remains one item unexplained. How can mirth possibly
be evoked by the notion of bad cheese? Having racked my brains for the
solution, I can but conjecture that it must be the mere ugliness of the
thing. Why any one should be amused by mere ugliness I cannot conceive.
Delight in cruelty, contempt for the unfamiliar, I can understand,
though I cannot admire them. They are invariable elements in children's
sense of humour, and it is natural that the public, as being
unsophisticated, should laugh as children laugh. But any nurse will
tell you that children are frightened by ugliness. Why, then, is the
public amused by it? I know not. The laughter at bad cheese I abandon
as a mystery. I pitch it among such other insoluble problems, as Why
does the public laugh when an actor and actress in a quite serious play
kiss each other? Why does it laugh when a meal is eaten on the stage?
Why does it laugh when any actor has to say 'damn'?
If they cannot be solved soon, such problems never will be solved. For
Mr. Forster's Act will soon have had time to make apparent its effects;
and the public will proudly display a sense of humour as sophisticated
as our own.