“Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to
ourselves and nature.”
—_Sir Philip Sidney._
To ask one to write to such a title is a challenge to be taken up, but
one does not expect to vanquish the challenger. The funniest thing I
ever saw would not make you laugh because you never saw it and if I had
the skill to make you see it probably you would not think it funny. Then
again the older you grow the few funnier things you see. What a lot of
laughter there was thirty or forty years ago. Whither has it fled? In
childhood nearly every discomfort or disaster to others is food for
laughter whilst your own little troubles are tragedies fit for tears.
It is a curious thing that the funny things you see always involve a
certain amount of cruelty, pain or at least discomfort to others, and I
suppose as one grows older the painful side of the matter oppresses you
more than the funny side inspires you to laughter. There are some human
attributes that are always laughable. Of these the chief is fatness.
The troubles of a fat man or woman are always comic. Littleness, if it
amounts to wee-ness, is comic in a somewhat less degree and thin-ness may
move folk to laughter but scarcely unless it be added to some amusing
eccentricity. Height and tall-ness are not funny. One never heard of a
king employing a giant as a jester or a butt. The dwarf on the other
hand has been cast for such parts from time immemorial.
I believe quite small babies see a lot of funny things. Certainly they
laugh to themselves without end and seem to find their surroundings
full of amusement. I have no doubt the funniest thing one ever saw is
cinematographed on some ancient film at the back of one’s brain so far
out of reach that the memory cannot get at it. Children undoubtedly see
most of the fun. I remember many years ago Louis Calvert, the well-known
actor, was staying with me in a little house in a remote corner of
Wales. The house had a small verandah doorway with two narrow doors,
one of which was usually bolted as it was a windy place and the outlet
by the half door was, to say the least of it, meagre. Louis Calvert was
in those days, I will not say fat or stout or corpulent—these ample men
are so susceptible—but he was a fine figure of a man and he was then
as he is now a great actor in both comedy or tragedy. It was a summer
afternoon and I was lolling in a deck chair beneath our only tree, and
the children, four of them, from five years old to twelve, were sitting
on the lawn in front of the doorway basking in the sun. Suddenly Calvert
appeared at the doorway and accidentally stuck in it as he was coming
through. The children caught sight of him and on the moment were off in
fits of laughter which good manners required them to stifle as he came
among us. But if laughter challenges manners, the latter generally get
the worst of it, and the mere memory of the incident sent one or another
off into small explosions of laughter. Calvert who always wanted to be
in at any fun sought explanations, which only made them laugh the more
and reprove each other for doing it, and whilst their attention was so
engaged I told Calvert what the joke was. A few minutes later he went
back into the house making an elaborate sideway entrance, which started
the young audience on the laugh again and all eyes were fastened on the
door watching for his return.
And he did return and gave us one of the finest pantomimes I have ever
seen. He came along loading a pipe and not looking at the doorway at all
and stuck fairly fast in it before he was aware that he was up to it
and opened his eyes in annoyance and amazement. Four shouts of laughter
greeted him. Fingers of delighted mockery were pointed at him and he
made a face as if he were on the brink of tears, which drew echoing
tears of uncontrollable laughter from the youngsters. Then his pipe
dropped on to the shingle path in front of the door and he dived to get
it and failed and grabbed and kicked in the air until the children threw
themselves on the ground and sobbed and begged him to leave off for he
was hurting them. Then Calvert, to give them a moment’s respite, pulled
himself together and still fast in the doorway rested his hand on the
door-post and thought dismally while the audience sobbed and sniffed
and slowly recovered breath enough to laugh again. By a mighty effort
he now backed out of the doorway and approached it as Uncle Remus would
say “behime” first. This was a signal for yells of delight, the more so
as the manœuvre resulted in the most undignified and comic failure. All
beautiful and simple people have a thoroughly broad and healthy laugh for
the “behime” quarters of man in awkward positions. A man sitting down
on the ice, a man sitting on another’s hat—these are situations that
can never cease to be funny whilst there is any fun left in the world
and simple minds to be moved to laughter. But this effort at an exit
was only one of many. A carefully designed strategetic move edgeways,
after the fashion of Bob Acres, which was so nearly successful that it
grew really exciting to watch, ended in hilarious shouts and yells,
when the climax of it was the victim waving his arms and head out of
the door and kicking violently inside the house and calling for help.
This business having nearly reduced the audience to exhaustion there
was further pantomime of deep expressive thought followed by a solemn
retirement within the doors and a laboured and careful pulling at the
bolts of the other half of the door and a ceremonial entrance through the
whole double space of it with a smile and sigh of supreme content at the
glorious triumph over difficulties undergone and vanquished. I can see in
my mind’s eye a middle-aged gentleman with tears rolling down his cheeks
and four absolutely limp children lying on the grass still gasping with
laughter—dying with laughter as the phrase is—and begging Calvert in the
intervals of their spasms to “Do it again!”
Now this may not seem one of the funniest things in the world nor was
it perhaps the funniest thing I ever saw, for unfortunately I was only
the middle-aged gentleman and my days for seeing funny things were more
or less over. But to the children it was certainly one of the funniest
things they ever saw, only the question that haunts me is—will they, when
they grow up, be able to describe the fun they saw so as to impart a
tithe of it to those who never saw it? And although I know that, at some
period of my life, I must have seen equally funny things that moved me to
equally stormy and glorious laughter, yet the storm and the glory have
died so completely away that the memory of them is gone and I cannot even
remember from what point of the compass they sprang.
And in my view grown up people really see beautifully funny things only
in the conduct of children and these incidents can only be described to
fathers and mothers, or people who love children as though they were
their fathers or mothers. One of the funniest things I ever saw since
I was grown up was a baby struggling to find its way to its mouth with
a rusk. Why don’t they have a baby doing that at a music hall to slow
music, or at least show one on a cinematograph? I could laugh at such a
thing “sans intermission an hour by the dial.” How it jabs itself in the
eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and loses
the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother
finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed
energy and at length is rewarded by success.
There is plenty of comedy and laughter about a baby as well as sleepless
melodrama in the middle of the night—but it must be your own baby. There
is no fun in next-door babies except when the Clown gets hold of them in
a pantomime.
And now having solemnly failed to recount the funniest thing I ever saw,
let me again remind you that I said from the first that the task was
impossible, since the thing to be funny must be seen, and the funniest
thing I ever saw you never saw. But the way to see funny things and to
enjoy them is to keep your heart like the heart of a little child, for it
is only children who are moved to the purest and healthiest laughter as
the trees are moved in the breeze by a power they know nothing of. And of
course if you have never been a child—and some poor people are born grown
up—you will never have been able to see the funniest thing you ever saw.