Lucubration

“ No lunatics!" Those of you, who are able to imagine even if one real lunatic, know what they are cunning and treacherous creatures. And if it is not one lunatic but they are several lunatics? And if several and yet several and many, many times by several? Just such number of lunatics gathered in the cave where they must not be. Therefore, the Hunter only entered there immediately changed into an Incautious Hunter. Outwardly this metamorphosis was not visible. Unless the Incautious Hunter became to step not so with confidence and his expression grew abstracted and dreamy. ”

“ Yet laughter from a ludicrous idea, though involuntary, cannot be called a strictly reflex action. In this case, and in that of laughter from being tickled, the mind must be in a pleasurable condition; a young child, if tickled by a strange man, would scream from fear. The touch must be light, and an idea or event, to be ludicrous, must not be of grave import. The parts of the body which are most easily tickled are those which are not commonly touched, such as the armpits or between the toes, or parts such as the soles of the feet, which are habitually touched by a broad surface ”

“ While we may view the laughable aspect of bodily deformity as an example of the odd or deviation from the common pattern of our experience, we must not forget that it appeals to the more brutal element in laughter. All ugly things had in them for the Greek mind something contemptible or disgraceful. Much of the point of men’s laughter at deformity lies in a recognition of its demeaning effect on the person who is its subject. It is a clear manifestation of the impulse to rejoice in the sight of what is degraded, base, or contemptible. ”

“ The conjuror can easily reach any one of these packets with his tongue, bring it to the front of the mouth, break the skin by pressing it against his teeth, and blow the sand, sugar or chalk out in a perfectly dry condition. This is repeated until all six have been exhausted, when the trick is said to be concluded. If some skeptical investigator wishes to examine the juggler’s mouth, he merely swallows the skins. The sugars or chalks were also swallowed in the first place. Hindu jugglers will frequently swallow far more disagreeable things than skins for the sake of a few rupees. ”

“ Doubtless it may be found, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types of insanity. In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea. But neither insanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are provocative of laughter: they are diseases, and arouse our pity. ”

“ These applications of the evolution theory are certainly interesting and promising. I think the idea of relief from parasites might be worked out further. May it not be that the light touches given by the fingers of the parent, or other member of the ancestral family when hunting for parasites on the surface of the young animal, have, by association with the effects of relief from the troublesome visitors, developed an agreeable feeling-tone? As we have seen, the laughter of tickling has a distinctly mental antecedent ”

“ If a young chimpanzee be tickled—and the armpits are particularly sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children,—a more decided chuckling or laughing sound is uttered; though the laughter is sometimes noiseless. The corners of the mouth are then drawn backwards; and this sometimes causes the lower eyelids to be slightly wrinkled. But this wrinkling, which is so characteristic of our own laughter, is more plainly seen in some other monkeys. The teeth in the upper jaw in the chimpanzee are not exposed when they utter their laughing noise, in which respect they differ from us. ”

“ The tendency to regard such deviations from type as amusing extends, as we know, to our perceptions of animals and of plants. A limping quadruped or a tree with a wen-like excrescence seems to reflect a human deformity and to share in its laughable aspect. Even a lifeless object may sometimes entertain us with its appearance of deformity. A house shored up affects us in the same way as a man on crutches, and the back view of a rickety tilted cart, as it wobbles down a street, may gladden the eye much as the sight of a heavy, ill-balanced human figure attempting to run. ”

“ The usual reply to such questions is, that laughter results from a perception of incongruity. Even were there not, on this reply, the obvious criticism that laughter often occurs from extreme pleasure or from mere vivacity, there would still remain the real problem—How comes a sense of the incongruous to be followed by these peculiar bodily actions? Some have alleged that laughter is due to the pleasure of a relative self-elevation, which we feel on seeing the humiliation of others. ”

“ Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness 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. ”

“ The pain, into which this pleasure rises, which would excite the scream of laughter, has been felt forcibly by every one; when they have been under such circumstances, as have induced them to restrain it by a counter-volition; till at length the increased associate motions produce so much pain as to overcome the counter-volition, and the patient bursts out into indecent laughter, contrary to his will in the common acceptation of that word. ”

“ Screams of delighted mirth came from the younger portion of the audience, and exclamations hardly less flattering from the laughing elders. But ever above the babel terrified shrieks, shrill and clamorous, rose higher and higher, and the juggler frowned with sudden sharp annoyance when he distinguished the fact that an elderly woman was crying out that these were the works of the devil,—that here was Satan, and that she would not bide easy till he was bound, neck and heels together, and cast forth into the river. ”

“ To begin with, we will try to avoid the error of those who in their subtle disquisitions on the comic idea forgot that laughter is a bodily act, and not fear to allude to such unmetaphysical entities as lung and diaphragm, where they seem to be a central fact in the situation. A careful examination of the very peculiar behaviour of our respiratory and other organs when the feeling of the comic seizes us, seems to belong to a scientific investigation of the subject. ”

“ The intellectual element in tickling conies out in its connection with laughter and the sense of the comic, of which it may be said to constitute the physical basis. While we are not here concerned with laughter and the comic sense,—a subject which has lately attracted considerable attention,—it may be instructive to point out that there is more than an analogy between laughter and the phenomena of sexual tumescence and detumescence. ”

“ On the other hand, laughable violations of rule are closely related to the oddities dealt with above. The donkey rolling on his back may be said, for the child’s intelligence, to break the rule of the donkey’s normal behaviour; yet here the laughableness seems to spring immediately out of the fresh stimulating character of the novelty of the spectacle. In order that an action may impress us as disorderly, we must recognise, vaguely at least, that some custom or rule is disobeyed. ”

“ The protracted iteration of laughter in a child is closely analogous to that of his half-unconscious singing to himself. This tendency of movements to perpetuate themselves in a mechanical way probably accounts for the lengthening of the single outburst in the case of a child violently seized with mirth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A duckling a few hours old will scratch the side of his head. It is true he may topple over in the process, through insufficient powers of balance, for the simultaneous performance of poising on one leg and having a good scratch with the other is no easy matter. But let not either our familiarity with such behaviour, nor some observed and laughable failure on the part of the duckling, blind us to the fact that this is a congenital activity, and one of no little complexity, indicating a definite organic nexus. ”

“ 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, and206 the whirling. ”

“ It is supposed by those who affect to know that the seat of the intellectual faculties is the cerebrum situated in the brain-pan. Still, science cannot deny that the stomach is a singularly intelligent organ. Through its processes alone the juggler perceived how well subjection becomes parents, especially a female parent addicted to the use of the frying-pan; realized Euphemia’s strength of character, unusual in so young a person, and conceived a deep respect for her mental and industrial capacities. He appreciated an incongruity in his bantering style and his mocking high-sounding phrases. ”

“ The poacher looked around at the young ruffian. Those muscles in the human face which draw back the upper lip are not the muscles used for laughter. Animals employ them when they snarl. And now the Lizard laughed that way; his upper lip shrank from the edge of his yellow teeth, and he regarded Tric-Trac with oblique and burning eyes. ”

“ When you beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything more than the perception that the object belongs to the class 'funny,' [Pg 452] they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a physical impossibility, and that they always must laugh if they see a funny object. Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous object and annihilating one's tendency to laugh. ”

“ On the surface of these little lakes and round the edges, float the leaves of the Zostera which grow nearest the margin; and attached to these leaves on their under sides, with the mouth and tentacles downwards, rests the Lucernaria on the watch for prey; at times in a state of rest, at others in constant motion. The heads of the tentacles possess great power of adhesion, and I expect you will find the filaments or threads highly developed."
The accompanying plate represents two specimens of Lucernaria auricula attached to a pendent thread of sea-weed. ”

“ For all the art of the juggler, he could show naught of magic more unnatural, more ghastly, than the face of the lime-burner as it appeared through the medium of the heated air arising from the primitive kiln,—protean, distorted by every current of the night’s breath,—although it was of much significance to him, and later he came to know it well to his cost. ”

“ The imagination is sometimes said to be tickled, by a ludicrous idea; and this so-called tickling of the mind is curiously analogous with that of the body. Every one knows how immoderately children laugh and how their whole bodies are convulsed when they are tickled. The anthropoid apes, as we have seen, likewise utter a reiterated sound, corresponding with our laughter, when they are tickled, especially under the armpits. ”

“ We may find in the laughter of the child, within the period of the first three years, pretty clear indications of the development of a rude perception of amusing incongruities in dress and behaviour. The young eye has a keen outlook for the proprieties in the matter of clothes. Ruth, who was in the thirteenth month amused at seeing her new mittens put on, showed amusement about the same date when her pink bonnet was put on her aunt’s head. In this case, the play-significance of the action for the child’s consciousness is apparent. ”

“ Gaika in his answers to my queries remarks, that contempt is commonly shown by his countrymen, the Kafirs, by smiling; and the Rajah Brooke makes the same observation with respect to the Dyaks of Borneo. As laughter is primarily the expression of simple joy, very young children do not, I believe, ever laugh in derision.
The partial closure of the eyelids, as Duchenne [1102] insists, or the turning away of the eyes or of the whole body, are likewise highly expressive of disdain. These actions seem to declare that the despised person is not worth looking at or is disagreeable to behold. ”