One of the great difficulties in thought is that often the same
word expresses quite different concepts. Some superficial
resemblance has taken possession of the mind and expressed itself
in a unifying word, disregarding the fundamental differences.
Take the word "play." The play of childhood is indeed a
pleasurable activity to the child, but it is really his form of
grappling with life, a serious pursuit of knowledge and a form of
preparation for his adult activities. It is not a way of
relaxation; on the contrary, in play he organizes his activities,
shuffles and reshuffles his ideas and experiences, looking for
the new combinations we call "imaginations." The kitten in its
play prepares to catch its prey later on; and the child digging
in a ditch and making believe "this is a house" and "this is a
river" is a symbol of Man the mighty changing the face of Nature.
The running and catching games like "Tag" and "I spy," "Hide and
go seek," "Rellevo" are really war games, with training in
endurance, agility, cool-headedness, cooperation and rivalry as
their goals. Only as the child grows older, and there is placed
on him the burden of school work, does play commence to change
its serious nature and partake of the frivolous character of
adult life.
For the play of adult life is an effort to find pleasure and
relaxation in the dropping of serious purposes, in the
"forgetting" of cares and worries, by indulging in excitement
which has no fundamental purpose. The pleasure of play for the
adult is in the release of trends from inhibition, exactly as we
may imagine that a harnessed horse, pulling at a load and with
his head held back by a check-rein, might feel if he were turned
loose in a meadow. This is the kind of play spirit manifested in
going out fishing, dressed in old clothes, with men who will not
care whatever is said or done. There is purpose, there is
competition and cooperation and fellowship, but the organization
is a loose one and does not bear heavily. So, too, with the
pleasure of a game of ball for the amateur who plays now and
then. There is organization, control and competition; but unless
one is a poor loser, there is a relaxed tension in that the
purpose is not vital, and one can shout, jump up and down and
express himself in uninhibited excitement. Whether this
excitement has a value in discharging other excitement and
feelings that are inhibited in the daily work is another matter;
if it has such a value, play becomes of necessary importance. In
outdoor games in general, the feeling of physical fitness, of
discharging energy along primordial lines and the happy feeling
that comes merely from color of sky and grass and the outdoor
world, bring a relief from sadness that comes with the work and
life of the city man.
Often the play is an effort to seek excitement and thus to forget
cares, or it is a seeking of excitement for its own sake. Thus
men gamble, not only for the gain but because such excitement as
is aroused offers relief from business worries or home
difficulties. The prize fights, the highly competitive
professional sports of all kinds are frequented and followed by
enormous numbers of men, not only because men greatly admire
physical prowess, but because the intense excitement is sought. I
know more than one business and professional man who goes to the
"fights" because only there can he get a thrill. There is a
generalized mild anhedonia in the community, which has its origin
in the fatigue of overintense purposes, failure to realize ideals
and the difficulties of choice. People who suffer in this way
often seek the sedentary satisfaction of watching competitive
professional games.
Indeed, the hold of competition on man exists not alone in his
rivalry feeling toward others; it is evidenced also in the
excitement he immediately feels in the presence of competitive
struggle, even though he himself has little or no personal stake.
Man is a partisan creature and loves to take sides. This is
remarkably demonstrated by children, and is almost as well shown
in the play of adults. A recent international prize fight
awakened more intense interest than almost any international
event of whatever real importance. That same day it passed
practically unnoticed that America ended a state of war with
Germany.
A law of excitement, that it lies in part in a personal hazard
accounts for the growth of betting at games. The effort to gain
adds to the interest, i. e., excitement. That it adds tension as
well and may result in fatigue and further boredom is not
reckoned with by the bettor or gambler. To follow the middle of
the road in anything is difficult, and nowhere is it more beset
with danger than in the seeking of excitement.
Games of skill of all kinds, whether out of doors or within;
baseball, cricket, billiards, and pool afford, then, the pleasure
of exertion and competition in an exciting way and yet one
removed from too great a stake. Defeat is not bitter, though
victory is sweet; a good game is desired, and an easy opponent is
not welcomed. The spirit of this kind of play has been of great
value to society, for it has brought the feeling of fair play and
sportsmanship to the world. Primitive in its origin, to take
defeat nobly and victory with becoming modesty is the civilizing
influence of sportsmanship. In the past women have lacked
good-fellowship and sportsmanship largely because they played no
competitive-cooperative games.
I shall not attempt to take up in any detail all the forms of
pleasure-excitement seeking. Dancing, music, the theater and the
movies offer outlets both for the artistic impulses and the
seeking of excitement. In the theater and the movies one seeks
also the interest we take in the lives of others, the awakening
of emotions and the happy ending. Only a few people will ever
care for the artistic wholesale calamity of a play like "Hamlet,"
and even they only once in a while.
Men and women seek variety, they seek excitement in any and all
directions, they want relief from the tyranny of purpose and of
care. But also,--they hate a vacuum, they can usually bear
themselves and their thoughts for only a little while, because
their thoughts are often basicly melancholy and full of
dissatisfaction. So they seek escape from themselves; they try to
kill time; reading, playing and going to entertainments. In fact,
most of our reading is actuated by the play spirit, and is an
effort to obtain excitement through the lives of others.
Humor[1] is a form of pleasure seeking and giving, but depends on
a certain technique, the object of which is to elicit the laugh
or its equivalent. The laugh is a discharge of tension, and while
usually it accompanies pleasure, it may indicate the tension of
embarrassment or even complex emotional states. But the laugh or
smile of humor has to be elicited in certain ways, chief of which
are to bring about a feeling of expectation, and by some novel
arrangement of words, to send the mind on a voyage of discovery
which suddenly ends with a burst of pleasure when the "point" is
seen. The pleasure felt in humor arises from the feeling of
novelty, the pleasure of discovering a hidden meaning and the
pleasure in the "point" or motive of the story, joke or conduct.
[1] I use this term to include wit, satire and even certain
phases of the comic.
Usually, the humorous pleasure has these motives: it points at
the folly and absurdity of other people's conduct, thought, logic
and customs. It gives a feeling of superiority, and that is why
all races love to poke fun at other races: certain
characteristics of Jew, Irishman, Yankee, Scot, etc., are
presented in novel and striking fashion, in a playful manner.
It points out the weak and absurd side of people and institutions
with which we have trouble; and this brings in marriage,
business, mothers-in-law, creditors, debtors, as those whose
weakness is exposed by the technique of humor.
Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity;
we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a
cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right
to their places. So the humorous technique deals with the
get-rich-quick folk, the foolish nobleman, the politician, the
priest (especially in the Middle Ages), etc.
Not only does humor seek to obtain pleasure from an attack on
others and thus to feel superior or to compensate for
inferiority, but also it reaches its highest form in exposing man
himself, including the humorist. The humorist, seeking his own
weaknesses and contradictions, his falsities, strips the disguise
from himself in some surprising way. Bergson points out that to
strip away a disguise is naturely humorous unless it reveals too
rudely the horrible. The humorist takes off the mask from himself
and others, and in so far as we can detach ourselves from pride
and vanity, we laugh. The one who cannot thus detach himself is
"hurt" by humor; the one who somehow has become a spectator of
his own strivings can laugh at himself. Thus humor, in addition
to becoming a compensation and a form of entertainment, is a form
of self-revelation and self-understanding carried on by a
peculiar technique. On the whole this technique depends upon a
hiding of the real meaning of the story or situation under a
disguise of the commonplace. The humorist phrases his words or
develops his situation so as to send the thoughts of the listener
flying in several directions. There is a brief confusion, an
incongruity is felt, then suddenly from under a disguise the
point becomes clear and the laugh is in part one of triumph, in
part one of pleased surprise.
I shall not attempt an analysis of the psychology of humor, for
illustrious writers and thinkers have stubbed their intellectual
toes on this rock for centuries. In later years the analyses of
Freud and Bergson are noted, but there is a list of writers from
Aristotle down whose remarks and observations have brought out
clearly certain trends. For us the direction that any one's humor
takes is a very important phase in the study of character.
Humor is a weapon, and the humorist has two ends in view: the one
to please his audience and to align them on his side, the second
to attack either playfully or seriously some person or
institution with the technique of humor. Certain trends are seen
in humor, one to seek a feeling of superiority by revealing the
inferiority of others in a surprising way, another to release a
burdensome[1] inhibition, a third to play with and in a sense
mock the disagreeable features of life, and the fourth to seek
detachment from one's self, to seek relief from sorrow,
disappointment and deprivation by viewing the self as from afar.
[1] In this way humor is an effort for freedom; through humor one
tastes of experiences otherwise forbidden.
So there is a sarcastic humor which points out the foibles and
weaknesses of others either grossly or delicately. Usually these
others are those differing from one's own group--the Irish, Jew,
farmer, Negro--and the jokes either deal with their personal
appearance (a low humor) or their characteristic expressions,
points of view and actions. The audience is convulsed at their
quaintness or folly, though often enough on the stage the comic
figure delivers a sort of wisdom mingled with his foolishness,
and this adds to the humorous explosion. The sarcastic humor in
its highest form reaches satire, where under a disguise powerful
institutions or the habit and ways of life of a group are
criticized. In polite society people are continually attacking
each other in a kind of warfare called repartee, in which the
tension is kept just without the bounds of real hostility, while
the audience sides with the one whose shaft is the most telling.
In the lower ranks this interchange, which is surprisingly
frequent, is coarse and insulting. It is supposed to be a test of
character to be able to "stand" these attacks with equanimity and
even to join in the laugh against oneself. To "kid" and take
"kidding" is thus an important social trait.
Humor is often used to expose the folly of the pretentious. Much
of the stock in trade of the humorist lies in his attack on the
pedant, the pompous, the great, the new-rich, the over-important
of one kind or another. To find them less than they pretend to be
gives two especial kinds of pleasure to the audience; the first
the stripping away of disguise (Bergson), and the second the
relief of our own feeling of inferiority in their presence by
showing how inferior they really are.
Since inhibition wears on us, the great inhibitions are directly
attacked by the humorist. Thus sex forms one of the great
subjects of humor, and from the obscene story told by those on
whom the sex inhibitions rest lightly to the joke about clothes,
etc., told by those who mock the opposite sex, the whole idea is
to bring about pleasure in the release of inhibitton and the play
of the mind around the forbidden. Freud has some interesting
remarks on this type of humor, which he regards largely as sexual
aggression. It is necessary to say that the release of inhibition
is always that of an inhibition not too strongly felt or
accepted. A really modest person, one to whom the sex code is a
sacred thing, does not find pleasure in a crude sex joke.
Similarly with the inhibition surrounding marriage, which is a
stock subject of humor. The overearnest person dislikes this type
of humor and reacts against it by calling it "in bad taste." In
the Middle Ages (and to-day among those opposed to the Catholic
church), the priest and nun were slyly or coarsely attacked by
the humorist, and in all times those somewhat skeptical find in
religion, its ceremonials and customs, a field for joke and
satire.
The most interesting of the types of humor flirts with the
disagreeable. Man is the only animal foreseeing death and
disaster, and he not only quakes in the knowledge of misfortune,
but also he jokes about it. It may be that the excitement of
approaching in spirit the disagreeable is pleasant, and perhaps
there is pleasure in attacking disaster, even in a playful way.
The ability to joke about other people's misfortunes is not, of
course, a measure of gallantry or courage and usually indicates a
feeling of superiority such as we all tend to feel in the
presence of the unfortunate, even where no element of weakness
has caused their mishap. But to joke about one's own troubles,
danger and disaster at least indicate a sense of proportion, an
ability to stand aloof from oneself.
This propensity is remarkably manifest in hospitals, in war and
wherever disaster or danger is present. The soldiers nickname in
a familiar way all their troubles and all their dangers. The
popular phrases for dying illustrate this,--croaked, flew up the
spout, turned up the toes, etc. In the war the different kinds of
guns and missiles had nicknames, and puns were made on the
various dreaded results of injury. It was declared by the
soldiers that no missile could injure any man unless it has his
name and address on it, which is, of course, a poetical, humorous
comparison of the missile to a longed-for letter. I heard a
wounded man say the only trouble was that the postoffice
department mistook him for another fellow. Grim humor always is
evident in grim situations; it is a way of evasion and escape,
and also it is a challenge.
When one objectifies himself so that he sees himself, his
purposes and his weaknesses in the light in which others might
see him and find him "funny," then he has reached the heights in
humor. Certain people are notoriously lacking in this quality of
detachment, and they cannot laugh at themselves or find any humor
in a situation that annoys, mortifies or hurts them. Others have
it to a remarkable degree, and if they possess at the same time
the art of telling the humorous story about themselves, they
become very popular. This popularity accounts for a good deal of
seeming modesty and humorous self-depiction; it is a sort of
recompense for the self-confessed foible and weakness; it is a
way of seeking the good opinion and applause of others and is
sometimes sought to a ridiculous extreme.
The character and the state of culture stand revealed in the type
of humor enjoyed. If a man laughs heartily at sex jokes, one may
at least say, that while he may live up to the conventions in
this matter, it is certain that he regards the inhibitions as
conventions, even though he give them lip-homage. No one finds
much humor in the things he holds as really sacred, and if these
are attacked in the joke he may laugh, but he is offended and
angry at heart. Any man permits a joke on women in general, but
he will not permit an obscene joke about his wife or his mother.
Humor must not arouse the anger of the audience or the reader,
and in this it resembles wrestling matches and friendly boxing,
which are pleasant as attacks not seriously intended, but the
blows must not exceed a certain play limit or war is declared.
To be entertained, to entertain, to escape from fatigue,
monotony, inhibition, to seek excitement, to while away the time
and thus to escape from failure, regret and sorrow are parts of
the life and character of all. They who have nothing else but
these activities in their lives are to be pitied, and they are
unwise who allow themselves too little amusement and recreation.
But we have not spoken of pleasure as a whole, pleasure apart
from entertainment, play and humor. The satisfaction of any
physical desire is pleasant, so that to eat and drink and have
sexual relations become great pleasure trends. There are some who
live only for these pleasures, ranging from glutton to epicure,
from the brutally passionate to the sexual connoisseur. Others
whose appetites are hearty subordinate them to the main business
of their lives, achievement in some form. There is a whole range
of taste in pleasures of this kind that I do not even attempt to
analyze at this point, even if it were possible for me to analyze
it.
Pleasure in dress, in ceremonials, in all the ornamentation of
life, forms part of the artistic impulses. The love of music is
too lofty to be classed with the other pleasures. This is true of
only a few people. For most of us music is an entertainment and
is usually poorly endured if it constitutes the total
entertainment. As part of the theater, of the movie, of dancing,
it is "appreciated" by everybody. To most it stirs the emotions
so deeply that its pleasure vanishes in fatigue if too long
endured. The capacity to enjoy music, especially the capacity to
express it, is one of the great variables of life. It is true
that the poseurs in music and the arts generally seek superiority
by pretending to a knowledge, interest and pleasure they do not
really have, just as there are some who really try to enjoy what
they feel they should enjoy. Nowhere is there quite so much
pretense and humbug as in the field of the artistic tastes.
Nowhere is the arbitrariness of taste so evident, and nowhere is
the "expert" so likely to be a pretender. I say this in full
recognition of the fact that science and religion have their
modes and pretenses as well as art.
The "progress" of man is marked as much as anything by a change
in "taste," change in what is considered mannerly, beautiful and
pleasant. This progress is called refinement, although this term
is also used in relation to ethics. Refinement in cooking leads
to the art of the chef. Refinement in dress becomes developed
into an intricate, ever-changing relation of clothes and age,
sex, time of day, situation, etc., so that it is unrefined to
wear clothes of certain texture and hues and refined to wear
others. Refinement in manner regulates the tone of voice, the
violence of gesticulation, the exhibition of emotions and the
type of subjects discussed, as well as controlling a dozen and
one other matters, from the way one enters a room to the way one
leaves it. The savage is unrefined, say we, though he has his own
standards of refinement. An American is a boor if he tucks his
napkin in at the neck and uses bread to sop up the gravy on his
plate, whereas Italians find it perfectly proper to do these
things and find the bustle of the American life totally
unrefined.
That refinement and developed taste are matters of convention and
entirely relative is not a new thesis; it is an old accepted
truth. What I wish to point out is this, that every development
in refinement adds some new pleasure to the world but subtracts
some old ones. He who develops his musical tastes from ragtime to
the classics finds joys he knew not of, but is offended and
disgusted whenever he visits friends, attends a movie or a
theater. When people ate with their fingers there was little to
be disgusted at in eating; when people need spotless linen and
eight or ten forks, knives, and spoons for a meal, a single
disarrangement, a spot on the linen, is intolerable. The higher
one builds one's needs and tastes, the more opportunities for
disgust, disappointment and discontent.
Most of the people of the world have never understood this. To
the majority, acquisition, the multiplication of needs, desires
and tastes constitute progress and seem to be the roads to
happiness. Get rich, have horses, autos, beautiful things in the
house, servants, go where you please and when you please,--this
is happiness. The rich man knows it is not, and so does the wise
man. Desires grow with each acquisition, the capacity for
satisfaction diminishes with every gratification, novelty
disappears and with the growth of taste little disharmonies
offend deeply.
Some men have reacted in this way against gratification and
satisfaction, against the building up of needs and tastes, and in
every age we hear of the "simple life," the happy, contented
life, where needs are few and things are "natural." The ascetic
ideal of renunciation is the dominant note in Buddhism and
Christianity; fly from the pleasures of this world, give up and
renounce, for all is vanity and folly. To every struggler this
seems true when the battle is hardest, when achievement seems
futile and empty, and when he whispers to himself, "What is it
all about, anyway?" To stop struggling, to desire only the
plainest food, the plainest clothes, to live without the needless
multiplication of refinements, to work at something essential for
daily bread, to stop competing with one's neighbor in clothes,
houses, ornaments, tastes,--it seems so pleasant and restful. But
the competition gets keener, the struggle harder, tastes
multiply, yesterday's luxury is to-day's need--to what end?
Will mankind ever accept a modified asceticism as its goal? I
think it will be forced to, but it may be that the wish is father
to the thought. Sometimes it seems as if the real crucifixion for
every one of us is in our contending desires and tastes, in the
artificial competing standards that are mislabeled refinement. To
be finicky is to court anhedonia, and the joy of life is in
robust tastes not easily offended and easily gratified.
Perhaps this is irrelevant in a chapter on play and recreation,
but it is easily seen that much of play is a revolt against
refinement and taste, just as much as humor is directed against
them. In play we allow ourselves to shout, laugh aloud and to be
unrefined; we welcome dirt and disorder; we forget clothes and
manners; we are "natural," i. e., unrefined. The higher we build
our tastes the more we need play. If such a thing as a "state of
nature" could be reached, play and recreation in the adult sense
would hardly more than exist.