Gag

“ You see, now'days in England, to beg much of a swag a feller has got to have some sort of a gag, and the hawkin' gag is as good as any. We've had shoe-strings, pencils, buttons, and lots of other things in stock; but all the good they've done us, and all the good they do any moocher, is to get him into a house or pub with a good excuse. When he's once in, he can beg good enough ”

“ The point, or the gag, of a two-act is very much like that of the monologue. In so far as construction is concerned—by this I mean laugh-wave construction—they are identical. Study "The Art of Flirtation," and you will see how little laughs precede big laughs and follow after, mounting into still bigger laughs that rise into roars of laughter.
1. Introducing a Point
If you were telling a joke to a friend you would be sure to tell him in your very first sentence all the things he would need in order to understand the point of the joke, wouldn't you? ”

“ Grose, Vulg. Tongue (3rd Ed.) , s.v.
1834. H. Ainsworth, Rookwood, Bk. III., ch. v. In the mean time, tip me a gage of fogus, Jerry.
4. (American) .—A man. For synonyms, see Cove.
1859. Matsell, Vocabulum, or Rogues Lexicon. Deck the gage, see the man.
Gagers, subs. (American) .—The eyes. For synonyms, see Glims.
1859. Matsell, Vocabulum, s.v.
Gagga, subs. (old) .—See quot.
1796. Grose, Vulg. Tongue (3rd Ed) . Cheats who by sham pretences and wonderful stories of their sufferings impose on the credulity of good people.
Gagger, subs. (theatrical) .—A player who deals in gags (q.v.) ”

“ Although it was very silly, this joke became so much the fashion that in the whole class we talked of nothing but moles and little niggers; and when we quarrelled we said to each other: ‘Do you take me for a mole, or for a little nigger?’
“However, as it was chiefly in our class (the white one) that this joke had been made, and as some of us were in the midst of our devotions preparing for the approaching first communion, we reproached ourselves very much for this joke. ”

“ Yet as a joke it had still to be taken, though one couldn’t help feeling that the joke had made the situation serious, had produced on the part of each a consciousness, an awkwardness, a positive dread of the last accident of all, the only one with any freshness left, the accident that would bring them face to face. ”

“ The sudden glee which starts the laugh starts also movements of arm, leg and trunk, so that arms flap wing-like, or meet in the joyous clap, and the whole body jumps. In older people matters may not be carried so far, though there are examples of the large shakings of laughter, notably that of Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh, whose great laugh was one “not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel”; and it is hard perhaps for any man taken by the “stab” of a good joke to keep his arms down and his body vertical. ”

“ After this event, the silence certainly continued still, but not the embarrassment, for, during the rest of the entertainment, we were all convulsed with suppressed laughter, and although of course good breeding and the rules of etiquette prevented its explosion, the conviction that we mutually understood the joke made us feel its relish the more keenly. ”

“ The sight of his pale set face, and his sombre eyes—they were like the eyes of a dog in pain, when the hand he loves best has struck him—stung her to fresh taunts, and there came a day when he answered her back in the same way, and all but struck her. Ah! a woman’s tongue can do rare mischief! ”

“ I assure you, Sir Paul, I laugh at nobody’s jest but my own, or a lady’s, I assure you, Sir Paul.
BRISK. How? how, my lord? what, affront my wit! Let me perish, do I never say anything worthy to be laughed at?
LORD FROTH. Oh, foy, don’t misapprehend me; I don’t say so, for I often smile at your conceptions. But there is nothing more unbecoming a man of quality than to laugh; ’tis such a vulgar expression of the passion; everybody can laugh. Then especially to laugh at the jest of an inferior person, or when anybody else of the same quality does not laugh with one—ridiculous! ”

“ Sir,—I feel myself bound in justice to you and your invaluable laughter, as well as to others who may be suffering, as I have been, with a weakly farce, to inform you of its extraordinary results in my case. My bantling was given up by all the faculty, when you were happily shown into the boxes. One laugh removed all sibillatory indications; a second application of your invaluable cachinnation elicited slight applause; whilst a third, in the form of a guffaw, rendered it perfectly successful. ”

“ Yet it would, I think, be an error to treat this laughter at the outsider as a form of serious ridicule, with its feeling of the corrective superior. It is, even when lightly touched with contempt, savage play, and has for its chief ingredient the love of fun, and that delight in the mere contemplation of what is foreign and odd which the savage shares with his ethnic betters. ”

“ Then, and neither ever knew exactly why, she began to laugh. The first laugh was brief; an oppressive silence [256] followed—then she laughed again; and as he grew redder and redder, she laughed the most deliciously fresh peal of laughter he had ever heard.
“This is dreadful!” she said. “I should never have come alone to the Park! You should never have dared to speak to me. All we need to do now is to eat those peanuts, and you have all the material for a picture of courtship below-stairs! Oh, dear, and the worst part of it all is that I laugh!” ”

“ Singing and joking, we were in no humor for, and, in fact, any sound of mirth or laughter would have struck strangely upon our ears, and would not have been tolerated, any more than whistling, or a wind instrument. ”

“ But it is her mouth—at once her betrayer and her chief charm—that one loves. In among its many curves lies all her wickedness,—the beautiful mouth, so full of mockery, laughter, fun, a certain decision, and tenderness unspeakable. ”

“ In the same way the laughter excited by jokes may be explained. An analysis of a joke shows that it is composed of two parts— the first, in which is presented a subject that acts as a stimulus to action, and the second, in which the story turns suddenly so that the stimulus to action is unexpectedly withdrawn. The subject matter of the joke affects each hearer according to the type of stimuli that commonly excites that individual. ”

“ We laughed derisively and uproariously, all of us. Now animals do not like mockery. To be laughed at makes them angry. And in such fashion our laughter affected Saber-Tooth. He turned with a roar and charged the bluff again. ”

“ We can understand the diversion of so large an amount of savage mirth into these practical channels—teasing, bantering and playing-off jokes upon members of ones tribe, by reflecting that laughter is a social process, and plays, as we shall see presently, a large part in the smooth working, if not also in the very maintenance, of the social fabric.
In order to see the meaning of this teasing laughter, we must note the way in which it is accepted. There is no doubt, to begin with, that savages have by nature a lively dislike to being laughed at. ”

“ Again, why does the correspondent in the Atlas take me up short for saying that ‘we laugh at a person who is rolled in the gutter?’ He observes on this, ‘if it is an accident, the laughter is silly, and not a case in point; if inflicted as a punishment for some petty injustice, we do not laugh, but rub our hands.’ So that we are to laugh in neither case. Is the ridicule merited where the cobbler, in the ‘Election Dinner,’ has smutted the face of his next neighbour? ”

“ Later he goes on to affirm that lines in the hand cannot be treated as mere wrinkles arising from the folding of the skin, unless we are prepared to admit that wrinkled people are more humorous than others, alluding no doubt to the lines in the face caused by laughter, a proposition which does not seem altogether convincing or consequential, unless we also postulate that all humorous men laugh at every joke. ”

“ The brute-like sounds that escape from the human throat in the exercise of laughter, the coarse guffaw, the hoarse chuckle, and the high, cackling tones in which many of the feminine half of the world express their sense of amusement, attest very painfully the animal nature within us. It was Emerson, I believe, who expressed a dislike of all loud laughter ”

“ The devices for exciting laughter are scarcely more than three in number; one the assumed deafness of the Güegüence, the second, a consequence of this, that he misunderstands, or pretends to, the words of the other actors, thus giving rise to amusing quid-pro-quos, and third, the introduction of obscene references. ”

“ There is no use of profane or unclean words, and yet this slangy mode of speech is the little rift within the lute that, by and by, will make all the music of the fine womanly conversation not mute, but drowned in a hubbub of loud sounds and common words. The girl who continually uses slang as naturally elevates her voice as she breathes ”

“ To gawster, in fine, is a sure indication of moral and physical debility. He who gawsters is like a show, which has enormous pictures and clanging cymbals, and gongs, and drums, and an obese showman, in his shirt-sleeves, lying through a speaking-trumpet at the top of his voice, outside, and little more than a three-headed puppy, or a seven-legged lamb (not in vigorous life, as shown upon the canvas, but in glass and spirits of wine) within. ”

“ Here we see an analogy between the mental attitude of a savage and that of an older child. Nothing comes out more plainly in the reports on these uncivilised peoples than their fondness for teasing, including practical jokes.
The love of teasing is testified to by more than one writer. A good authority tells us that savages “tease one another much more freely and jokingly (scherzhaft) than Europeans”.165 This fondness for teasing comes out strongly in their mimicries of one another’s defects, a point to be illustrated presently. ”

“ She laughed—her low, sweet, silvery laugh, the like of which I have hardly heard among Earthly women, even of the simpler, more child-like races of the East and South; a laugh still stranger in a world where childhood is seldom bright and womanhood mostly sad and fretful. ”

“ He then falls to drinking out of a large handsome horn; the ladies eat till they are satisfied, and then all drink together, “Vive la Joye et la Jeunesse!” A great deal of mirth and joke goes round, very seldom with any mixture of acrimony or ill-humour. ”

“ The simplest form of this merriment, serving, as in the case of the child, as a bridge from joyous expansion under a new sensuous excitement to an appreciation of the odd, is the common laughter of savages at what is strikingly new to them, and at the same time takes their fancy. ”

“ By Gog's wounds, if we had found him here,
We should, by his flesh, have abated his cheer.
Inc. I perceive, Sturdiness, thou art no fool;
Tell me of fellowship, where wentest thou to school?
Sturd. What, to read or write?
Inc. Nay, to swear and fight:
For I think thou canst neither write, read, nor spell;
But in swearing and fighting thou dost excel.
Sturd. Thou knowest that I am joined with Lust,
And sturdy by nature I am in like case.
What, let the world wag: all cannot be just,
Some must natural inclination embrace.
Lust. All men just? ”

“ Again, all kinds of deformity are not equally provocative of laughter. In general, perhaps, positive additions or extensions, such as a big nose or big ears, are more conducive to merriment than reductions and losses; they seem to seize perception more aggressively. Then there are varieties of the deformed which probably involve special kinds of droll suggestiveness. Certain squints and twistings of the human face divine may move us as expressions of the roguish; a red nose or a shock of red hair may owe its force to its supposed moral symbolism. ”

“ The murmur of voices, the rise and fall of laughter and speech, ceased as though an unseen finger had been pressed upon the lips of everyone in the room. Men rose in their places, women craned their necks. ”

“ The first raises an emotion of laughter that is altogether pleasant: the emotion of laughter raised by the other, is qualified with that of contempt; and the mixed emotion, partly pleasant partly painful, is termed the emotion of ridicule. I avenge myself of the pain a ridiculous object gives me by a laugh of derision. A risible object, on the other hand, gives me no pain: it is altogether pleasant by a certain sort of titillation, which is expressed externally by mirthful laughter. ”

“ He laughs, and laughs, staggers to the sofa, falls on it, rocks and roars till the tears roll down his cheeks. He sways from side to side, unable to control himself—his laughter is so colossal that the infection catches the others; theirs becomes genuine too. ”

“ So also is laughter on the face of well-regulated men termed. But the discordant relaxation of countenance in the case of women is called a giggle, and is meretricious laughter; in the case of men, a guffaw, and is savage and insulting laughter. “A fool raises his voice in laughter,” [512] says the Scripture; but a clever man smiles almost imperceptibly. The clever man in this case he calls wise, inasmuch as he is differently affected from the fool. But, on the other hand, one needs not be gloomy, only grave. For I certainly prefer a man to smile who has a stern countenance than the reverse ”

“ A child may often be noticed oscillating between laughter and fear as some new strange sight bursts upon him. A savage must feel himself secure before he can freely indulge in laughter at all the odd belongings and doings of the white man.
(2) A special variety of the singular or exceptional which {89} is fitted, within certain limits, to excite laughter is deformity, or deviation from the typical form. It is certain that, for the unsophisticated palate of the child and the savage, bodily deformity is a large source of mirth. ”