theory of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, as presented in a
special treatise on laughter, of which an excellent translation by C.
Brereton and F. Rothwell has lately been published in this country.
Bergson recognises, as not every investigator has done, the essentially
spontaneous character of laughter, and he insists with Darwin on
postulating queerness as an indispensable element in the laughable.
But, as he sees it, the queerness must be of a specific sort in order
to excite laughter—must consist, in fine, in an automatic inelasticity,
whether of form, action, or thought, which is in sharp contrast to
the wonted mobility of life. It is our immediate recognition of this
automatism and rigidity that moves us to laughter.
When, Bergson affirms, we laugh at a man who stumbles and falls in the
street, our laughter is caused, not by his sudden change of attitude,
but by the involuntary element in this change. “Perhaps there was
a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided
the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through
absent-mindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy—as a result, in
fact, of rigidity or of momentum—the muscles continued to perform the
same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something
else. That is the reason of the man’s fall, and also of the people’s
laughter.” So with our laughter at the appearance and horseplay of a
clown. We laugh at his painted face because we immediately recognise in
it “something mechanical encrusted upon the living,” and we laugh at
his antics because of their automatic, machine-like character.
In fact, “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being
a thing. We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed
into the air like a foot-ball. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned
into a cannon-ball and travelling through space.” In laughter caused
by puns, jests, and witticisms, the same principles of automatism and
inelasticity obtain, though of course in much subtler form. Analyse
closely all varieties of the comic and you always get back to the
basic idea of “something mechanical in something living.” Or, Bergson
concludes, “The comic is that side of a person which reveals his
likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its
peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of
automatism, of movement without life.”
Really to appreciate both the plausibility and the shortcomings of
this novel theory of the laughable one must read Professor Bergson’s
book. It is there elaborated so ingeniously that one finds it
difficult to give instances of the comic to which it cannot in some
way be applied. Even the laughter of children at the bobbing up of
their jack-in-the-box, the fall of their house of cards, or the
tail-chasing gyrations of their kitten, may conceivably be explained
on the assumption that what the children laugh at is the automatic
character of the bobbing, the falling, and the whirling. On the other
hand, these very examples irresistibly suggest that the Bergsonian
explanation is, after all, rather strained and far-fetched, and that,
in common with its less thorough-going predecessors, it overlooks
the elusive something fundamental to the laughable. This impression
is deepened when we recall the extent to which automatism, rigidity,
inelasticity, prevail in the affairs of men without exciting so much as
a smile.
“The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body,” says
Professor Bergson, in stating one of his many subsidiary laws of the
comic, “are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us
of a mere machine.” Why, then, do we not laugh when we observe the
machine-like precision with which a company of soldiers march on parade
or execute the evolutions of drill? Surely one could not find a better
example of “something mechanical in something living.” And, again,
“any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a
single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression
of a mechanical arrangement.” The bobbing of the jack-in-the-box meets
this formula, and we do laugh at the jack-in-the-box. But it is met
equally well by the strangely lifelike movements of such devices as the
automatic chess-player and the type-setting machine, yet these do not
ordinarily elicit any appreciable manifestation of mirth.
It is, however, when we turn to Bergson’s deductions from his theory
of the comic that we are most strongly impelled to question its
soundness. Emphasizing as he does the element of automatism in the
laughable, he logically enough infers that the function of laughter
is to serve as a social corrective. “The rigid, the ready-made, the
mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing, and the
living, absent-mindedness in contrast with attention, in a word,
automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the defects that
laughter singles out and would fain correct.” We laugh, that is to say,
only at imperfections in our fellow-men, or at things which remind
us of imperfections, and the reason we laugh is that, consciously
or unconsciously, we wish to call attention to them by way of, in
Bergson’s own words, “a kind of social ragging.”
Stated thus baldly, the underlying defect of such an explanation of
laughter becomes plainly apparent.[3] What has happened is that its
author has read into the phenomenon of laughter a meaning applicable
only under special circumstances. If it were true that we laugh
only at what is imperfect and therefore ugly, however attenuated in
ugliness, it would be impossible to understand the well-nigh universal
eagerness for laughter; an eagerness which has led mankind to reward
lavishly, even extravagantly, those who make it their business to
provide occasions for laughter—the writers of farces and comedies,
the fun-making actors and clowns, the producers of “comic pictures.”
The egregious falsity of this “deformity” theory, as it may fairly be
called, becomes still more manifest when we endeavour to apply it to
account for the laughter of childhood, the period of life when laughter
is most free and exuberant, but precisely when it is incredible to
assume that it is motivated by any corrective impulse, conscious or
otherwise.
To tell the truth, the attempt to reach a wholly satisfactory solution
of the problem of laughter by striving to define the characteristics
of the laughable seems foredoomed to failure. For, after all, the
laughable must always remain a more or less uncertain quantity, if
only for the reason that, as shown by facts of everyday observation,
what makes one person laugh may not be in the least laugh-provoking to
another. Yet everybody, or almost everybody, does laugh to some extent,
and therefore the proper point of approach would rather seem to be
through a study of the act of laughter itself and of its consequences
with regard, not to the person or thing or phrase laughed at, but to
the person doing the laughing.
Attacking the problem from this altogether different angle, one is
soon in a position to discern several facts of real helpfulness in
an explanatory way. By no means the least important is the extreme
exuberance of laughter in childhood, to which reference has just been
made. Once the child has begun to laugh—usually during the fourth or
fifth month after birth, although occasional outbursts of a shadowy
sort of laughter have been observed before the fourth month—it laughs
with a truly amazing spontaneity and frequency. There seems to be
nothing which may not become an object of laughter to a child, and,
more than this, in direct contradiction to all theories postulating a
reflective element at the bottom of every laugh, as often as not the
laughter of childhood is conspicuously devoid of such an element.
For example, to cite a few observations from the record of a lady,
Miss Milicent Shinn, whose painstaking study of the infancy of her
niece Ruth is among the most stimulating of contributions to the modern
science of child psychology, it appears that toward the end of the
fifth month this little girl “habitually laughed with glee when any
one smiled or spoke to her.” And when, two months later, she was taken
into the open and allowed to roll about on a quilt, “the wooing of
the passing freshness, the play of sun and shadow, the large stir of
life in moving and sounding things, all this possessed her and made
her ‘laugh and ejaculate with pleasure.’” Also, like almost every
child of her age, little Ruth would be moved to hilarious mirth by
being given a ride on somebody’s foot, or tossed and jumped about in
one’s arms. Laughter, again, followed the successful accomplishment of
any intellectual or muscular feat, such as pointing out pictures she
had been asked to identify, climbing stairs, or deliberately letting
herself fall “so as to come down sitting with a thud.”
The same tendency to excessive, even seemingly causeless laughter in
the opening years of life has been noted by other close students of
the emotions and their expression. Some have attempted, with the usual
futile results, to explain it by an analysis of the things at which
the child laughs. Others, more cautiously and more accurately, content
themselves with describing it as a means whereby Nature provides a
salutary outlet for surplus nervous energy.
It is undoubtedly this. Ask any child who has learned to talk—or,
better, ask a grown person who has retained to a marked degree the
faculty for hearty laughter—and the chances are you will be told that,
while in any given instance the laugher may be far from clear as to
why he has laughed, he does know that the involuntary movements of the
laughter to which he yielded were preceded by peculiarly compelling
sensations, variously expressed in such phrases as, “I had to laugh
or burst,” “I had to do something to relieve the strain,” “I felt
bubbling over,” “I felt a quiver, a thrill, a creepy feeling passing
from my stomach to my mouth.”
That is to say, the evidence from the abounding laughter of
childhood—pre-eminently a period of rapid physical growth and of the
accumulation of a large store of nervous energy—as also the evidence
from the laughter of unusually mirthful adults, who are, as a rule,
persons of large build and of corresponding nervous force, suggests
irresistibly the conception of laughter as an instinct implanted in
us for the performance of an important physiological function. This
view finds additional support in the familiar “giggling silliness”
of the adolescent period, that strange period of unusual growth and
stress, and the one in which are most likely to occur those singular
attacks of untimely hilarity at funerals and on other solemn occasions,
as mentioned among the responses to President Hall’s questionnaire.
No more than the little child or your friend the jolly man does the
adolescent always know at what he is laughing. He simply knows that he
is impelled to laugh by forces latent in his being and over which he
has no control.
Nor is it only as a relief from neural tension that laughter benefits
the one who laughs. In the studies of laughter in childhood made by
such investigators as Preyer, Sully, and Miss Shinn, one finds frequent
allusion to occasions when laughter is obviously a reaction from a
state of mental strain, and has a specifically useful effect in easing
the mind. There is reason to believe that this is actually one of
its constant ends—that it is a device for lightening the burden of
mentation by temporary interruption of the thought process.
As all educators are well aware, the first years of life and the
adolescent period are not only the years of greatest physical growth,
but the years when the severest demands are made on the mind, both
by the task of acquiring knowledge and by the perturbations of
adolescence. They are the years when the mind, in its immaturity, is
most in need of some protective mechanism to enable it automatically
and at frequent intervals to take a holiday as it were. Such a
mechanism is admirably provided in laughter, which, as every laugher
will at once appreciate, when not unduly prolonged leaves behind it
a pleasurable feeling of exhilaration and greater mental as well as
physical well-being.
We laugh, then, in infancy and adolescence, not primarily because we
are “light-hearted” or “amused,” but to satisfy a natural instinct
of both physiological and psychological utility. We laugh less in
maturity, partly because we have not, as a rule, the same necessity
of getting rid of surplus nervous energy, partly because our minds
have passed the tender formative age, and partly because widening
experience has developed sentiments and ideas tending to inhibit
laughter. Nevertheless we do still need to a certain extent the relief
which laughter brings; we feel in some degree the old hunger for it,
and consequently, often at very slight provocation, we yield, and
even cultivate opportunities for yielding, to the impulse which was
so conspicuously operant in the years of our youth. As with every
instinct, moreover, the laughing process may, and occasionally does,
become perverted, as in the laughter of cynicism and contempt, and in
the abnormal laughter of the overwrought—itself, however, the modern
medical psychologist assures us, a medium of relief from an unbearable
strain.
As to the things at which we commonly laugh—the “laughable” whose
nature has so perplexed philosophers—all that may safely be said is
that their laugh-provoking power depends not so much on an inherent
“comicality” as on the circumstances under which they occur to us, and
our point of view toward them as determined by previous training and
experience. Certainly, for instance, we cannot laugh at a subtle bit
of wit until we have had education in the appreciation of the skilful
use of language. The instincts of imitation and of sympathy, further,
have a share in determining on many an occasion the functioning of
the laughing instinct. Time and again we laugh merely because we see
other people laughing. Personally I am inclined to think also that
much at which we laugh as adults is laughable to us only by reason of
subconscious association with similar occurrences which chanced to move
us to laughter in our childhood. But on this point nothing positive
should be asserted pending psychological investigation which has yet to
be made.
Conceding, however, that the laughable is and must always remain
elusive, baffling, uncertain, there need be no uncertainty as to
our view of laughter itself. To laugh—to laugh spontaneously and
heartily—is under nearly every circumstance a good thing both for
the body and for the mind. Like sleep, it refreshes; like food,
it strengthens. Humanity in truth would be the poorer—and the
shorter-lived—were it ever to lose this splendid heritage of the power
to laugh.
This is why I have said so much about laughter in the present book. To
parents in especial knowledge of its true significance is important.
They will not then fall into the mistake, too often made at present,
of curbing their children’s instinctive tendency to laugh. Rather, they
should deliberately seek to cultivate in them a keen sense of humour,
and encourage them in merriment—not because it is a thing pleasing in
itself, but because of its positive developmental value. Directly or
indirectly to repress this basic instinct is always dangerous, leading
to warpings of character, and at times undoubtedly contributing to the
causation of that strangest and most misunderstood of human maladies,
hysteria, to which we must now give some consideration.
VII
HYSTERIA IN CHILDHOOD
A little girl, a pupil in a German school, made her appearance in class
one morning with a bandage about her head. In answer to her teacher’s
questions, she said she had been operated upon for ear trouble at
a local hospital the day before. She described every detail of the
operation, which, it seemed, had been exceedingly painful.
For some time she wore the bandage to school every day, and frequently
complained that her ear was still troubling her. Her teacher was
properly sympathetic, and, chancing to meet one of the girl’s
relatives, expressed her anxiety for the child, and the hope that she
would soon be completely cured.
“Cured?” repeated the relative. “Cured of what?”
“Why, her ear trouble—the disease that has made it necessary for her to
keep her head bandaged.”
“But,” said the other, obviously puzzled, “I do not understand you. I
did not know she had any ear trouble, and I have never seen her with a
bandage.”
It was the teacher’s turn to be astonished. She could not believe
that the girl had been deceiving her; but, to get at the truth, she
decided to take her immediately to the hospital where the operation was
supposed to have been performed. There the child made her way about as
if perfectly familiar with the place, and greeted in a friendly manner
the surgeon in charge. He, however, did not seem to recognise her, and
when told the circumstances by the teacher, said:
“I can assure you I have never operated upon this girl.”
He then made a thorough examination of her ear, and found it to be
quite sound. After which, careful investigation developed the fact
that her sole knowledge of the hospital was derived from detailed
information given her by a friend, a lady who, curiously enough, had
been operated upon a little while previously for precisely the trouble
that the girl had attributed to herself.
In other words, no doubt remained that she had for weeks been acting a
lie, from what motive neither her teacher nor her parents could fathom.
Again, a clergyman writing to the Society for Psychical Research from
a little English village named Ham, urgently requested the despatch of
a skilled investigator to look into certain strange occurrences in the
house of a Mr. Turner. This house, the clergyman asserted, was haunted
by a “veritable ghost,” which amused itself by playing all sorts of
mischievous and annoying pranks.
Remaining invisible, it hurled boots, shoes, and other small objects
through the air, upset chairs and tables, and on at least one
occasion it had pitched the family cat into the fire. All this was
done, according to both the clergyman and several other intelligent
eye-witnesses, under circumstances that rendered it impossible that the
“manifestations” could be the work of any human agency.
“No one can explain it,” the clergyman declared. “It is quite a
mystery, and is causing great excitement through the countryside.”
The task of laying this “poltergeist,” or troublesome ghost, was
assigned to Mr. Ernest Westlake, an able psychical researcher.
Proceeding to Ham, he found that the Turner family consisted of Mr.
Turner, his wife, one son, and a deformed little daughter, Polly, not
quite twelve years old. So impressed was he with what he heard that
his first report indicated a belief that the phenomena witnessed might
be genuine evidences of some mysterious and unknown force. But, after
a few hours of watchful scrutiny, he sent word that “the Ham ghost is
a humbug _now_, whatever it may have been.” In detail Mr. Westlake
afterward added:
“After posting my first letter, I went to the Turners’ and sat on a
bench in front of the fire. No one else was present besides the child.
She sat on a low stool in the chimney on the right of the fire. On
the other side of the hearth there was a brick oven in which, much
to Polly’s interest, I placed a dish of flour, arguing that a power
capable of discharging the contents of the oven (one of the first
disturbances) might be able to impress the flour. After a time I went
to the oven to see how the flour was getting on, stooping slightly to
look in; but I kept my eye on the child’s hands, looking at them under
my right arm. I saw her hand stealing down toward a stick that was
projecting from the fire; I moved slightly, and the hand was withdrawn.
Next time I was careful to make no movement, and saw her hand jerk the
brand out on to the floor. She cried out. I expressed interest and
astonishment; and her mother came in and cleared up the debris.
“This was repeated several times, and one or two large sticks ready for
burning, which stood near the child, was thrown down. Then a kettle
that was hanging on a hook and chain was jerked off the hook on to the
coals. This was repeated. As the kettle refused to stay on its hook,
the mother placed it on the hearth; but it was soon overturned on to
the floor. After this, I was sitting on the bench that stood facing the
fire in front of the table. I had placed my hat on the table behind me.
The little girl was standing near me on my right hand. Presently the
hat was thrown down on to the ground. I did not on the first occasion
see the girl’s movements; but later, by seeming to look in another
direction, I saw her hand sweep the hat off on to the floor. This I
saw at least twice. A Windsor chair near the girl was then upset more
than once, falling away from her. On one occasion I saw her push the
chair over with both hands. As she was looking away from me, I got a
nearly complete view. After one of these performances, the mother came
in and asked the child if she had done it; but the latter denied it.”
(_Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. xii.)
Unquestionably, Mr. Westlake concluded, Polly was the “ghost.” Yet
he found it difficult to conjecture why she should have assumed so
singular a rôle. Neither she nor her parents—whom he exonerated from
all complicity—had profited a penny’s worth from her exploits. Indeed,
her parents had been put out of pocket by the damage to the household
furniture and utensils.
Consider, also, the case of a little Chicago boy who had fallen out of
a play-wagon and hurt one of his arms. The injury was in reality very
slight; but his mother, becoming greatly alarmed, declared her belief
that the doctor would say the arm was broken. What the doctor—D’Orsay
Hecht, of Northwestern University Medical School—did say was that a few
applications of witch-hazel would speedily remedy matters.
The mother, nevertheless, insisted on bandaging the arm, talked of
having an X-ray examination, and broadly hinted that a wrong diagnosis
had been made. Within a few days, as Doctor Hecht had expected, all
signs of injury disappeared. But now the boy complained that the hand
of the injured arm felt stiff; and, in a day or so, his mother reported
that both hand and arm were paralysed.
This was the situation when, passing along the street one day, Doctor
Hecht was astonished and amused to see his “paralysed” patient romping
with a number of children, quite as if nothing were the matter with
him. He used his injured arm freely, pushed and pulled his playmates,
and was pushed and pulled around by them.
“Ah,” thought the physician, with a feeling of relief, “evidently this
youngster is going to give no more trouble.”
He was mistaken. Within a week the mother sent for him, reporting that
her boy was suffering agonies, that he could not eat, and that his arm
had become contracted at the elbow. In fact, on visiting the boy he
found that at every attempt to flex the arm the little fellow screamed
with pain.
But on his next visit, when the child chanced to be asleep, Doctor
Hecht noticed that there was then no contracture of the arm, and that
he could move it without disturbing the boy in the slightest. So soon,
however, as he awoke, the contracture returned, and he wailed and
shrieked when his arm was touched. To the astonished mother, the doctor
said:
“I see what the trouble is. Your son needs a certain kind of treatment
that I can administer only at my office. Bring him there as soon as
possible.”
The treatment in question consisted in the application of a succession
of slight electrical shocks, just painful enough to be felt. These, the
doctor assured the boy, would cure him completely.
“If they do not,” said he, “your mother must bring you back, and I will
give you a stronger treatment next time. I don’t think, though, that
that will be necessary, do you?”
And, in point of fact, no second treatment was needed. From that moment
the boy ceased complaining of his arm, the contracture and paralysis
entirely disappeared, and he was like any normal, healthy child.