Ludicrousness

“ When the cause of our laughter—be it mind, matter, or imaginary circumstance—is merely regarded as something incongruous and amusing, we name it the ludicrous, and a man is called ludicrous as faulty or contemptible. But when the cause of it is viewed as something more than this, as coming from some conscious power or tendency within us—a valuable gift and an element in our mental constitution—we call it humour, a term applied only to human beings and their productions; and a man is called humorous as worthy of commendation. ”

“ In the ludicrous dulness which, by the laws of comedy, folly is often involved in, he sunk into such a mixture of piteous pusillanimity, and a consternation so ruefully ridiculous and inconsolable, that, when he had shook you to a fatigue of laughter, it became a moot point whether you ought not to have pitied him. ”

“ The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. ”

“ The ludicrous is where there is the same contradiction between the object and our expectations, heightened by some deformity or inconvenience, that is, by its being contrary to what is customary or desirable; as the ridiculous, which is the highest degree of the laughable, is that which is contrary not only to custom but to sense and reason, or is a voluntary departure from what we have a right to expect from those who are conscious of absurdity and propriety in words, looks, and actions. ”

“ The usual Artillery of Ridicule is Wit; whereby the Affinity or Coincidence of any Object with others, which are absurd and contemptible, is unexpectedly exhibited;--There is also another, very forcible, Manner in which Ridicule may act; And that is by employing Humour alone; Thus the Foible or Queerness of any Person will be most fully ridicul'd, by naturally dressing yourself, or any other Person in that Foible, and exerting its full Strength and Vigour.
The Politeness of a Subject is the Freedom of that Subject from all Indelicacy, Aukardness, and Roughness. ”

“ It is no easy matter to define the point at which the anxiety to become modest may be distinguished from the dread of becoming ridiculous. But surely, at the outset, this dread and this anxiety are one and the same thing. A complete investigation into the illusions of vanity, and into the ridicule that clings to them, would cast a strange light upon the whole theory of laughter. ”

“ That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way you have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter—shame, anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears—stupid laughter, too. ”

“ In that of the ludicrous proper, it might be urged, we have to do with the intellectual principle: it is only when the sphere is enlarged to include all that is laughable, and so the region of the ridiculous, that the principle of lowered dignity comes in.77 Theorists may insist on such distinctions, but it seems to me that they cannot be maintained as hard and fast boundaries. As has been shown above, laughable things do not all affect us in quite the same way. A spice of malice comes into much of the laughter that greets the spectacle, say of a bit of successful trickery ”

“ And beneath all the light wit which circulates, beneath all the laughter, which often has a false ring, each retains his or her particular worry, or distress of mind, at times so acute that it becomes perfect agony. ”

“ But if his nature were not so disposed, no exertions on his part or ours could make him enjoy it. The ludicrous is dependent upon feelings or circumstances, but not upon the will. It is peculiarly involuntary as those know who have tried to smother a laugh. ”

“ But his laughter has an echo that is grim.
When they're offered to the world in merry guise,
Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will—
For he who'd make his fellow creatures wise
Should always gild the philosophic pill! ”

“ The ludicrous, or comic, is the unexpected loosening or relaxing this stress below its usual pitch of intensity, by such an abrupt transposition of the order of our ideas, as taking the mind unawares, throws it off its guard, startles it into a lively sense of pleasure, and leaves no time nor inclination for painful reflections. ”

“ Upon this actual weakness of mind, and suicidal melancholy, combined with native humour and the biting irony into which his view of the world has sharpened it, is added the feigned form of insanity, the antic disposition wilfully put on, the dishevelled habiliments of person and conversation. ”

“ The rigid, the ready—made, the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing and the living, absentmindedness 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 appealed to this idea to give us light at the outset, when starting upon the analysis of the ludicrous. We have seen it shining at every decisive turning in our road. With its help, we shall now enter upon a more important investigation, one that will, we hope, be more instructive. ”

“ Therefore everything ludicrous is either a flash of wit or a foolish action, according as the procedure has been from the discrepancy of the objects to the identity of the concept, or the converse; the former always intentional, the latter always unintentional, and from without. To seem to reverse the starting-point, and to conceal wit with the mask of folly, is the art of the jester and the clown. ”

“ The essence of the laughable then is the incongruous, the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another. The first and most obvious cause of laughter is to be found in the simple succession of events, as in the sudden shifting of a disguise, or some unlooked-for accident, without any absurdity of character or situation. The accidental contradiction between our expectations and the event can hardly be said, however, to amount to 8the ludicrous: it is merely laughable. ”

“ There are other plays in the collection, however, that are apparently harmless; comedies that will cause you to laugh heartily, ’tis true, but in the middle of the laugh you stop as if some one slapped you in the face. You begin to see, in place of the harmless joke, an insidious dig at something you hold sacred, or, if it is something you think is inspiring and patriotic, right in the midst of the thing that carries you away for a few moments on the wings of your lofty dreams and inspirations some monster of mockery will intrude his ugly face, and again the doubt, “Is it ridicule?” ”

“ Take a madman, whatever the object of his madness—you will find that obscure and fixed idea which obsesses him seems to him the most natural thing in the world, and that, on the contrary, the real things which contradict this idea seem to him ridiculous and odious follies. ”

“ A more refined variety of the perception of the laughable occurs when we look on Nature or fate as discomfiting man, playing tricks on him or outwitting him. So far as this idea of irony comes into our view of things, any misfortune, especially if it involves disappointment of hopes and frustration of efforts, may excite a note of laughter which has an “over-tone” of triumphant mockery. ”

“ Of course this will scarcely apply in those cases in which, by abstraction, we overlook the creative action of the mind, and regard its humorous productions as ludicrous. Nor does it hold good where from long exercise of ingenuity a habit has been formed and amusing fancies spring up, as it were naturally, and so involuntarily that, for the moment, we see them only as ludicrous. This view changes almost instantaneously, and beneath it we often find the best humour. ”

“ If we examine carefully the circumstances which awaken the ludicrous, we shall probably come to conclude that they often contain something which puzzles our understanding. An act which seems ridiculous would not appear so if we could entirely account for it, for instance, if it were done to win a bet. There seems to be in the ludicrous not merely some error in the taste brought before us, but something which we can scarcely believe to be the case. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing of a healthy, wholesome, vigorous, vital, individual, personal kind; but some pitiful pretence of wit or humor, having for its vague or indefinite object ideal or general, abstract, impersonal, or, so to speak, invisible intangible subjects, wanting all the vivacious pungent stimulus that belongs to real individual absurdity, and the direct ridicule of it, judiciously and dexterously applied; the only efficient—I had almost said legitimate—object of a rational creature's amusement. ”

“ If we reflect a moment, we shall find that even in the present day, on our own stage, the infallible and inexhaustible source of the ludicrous is the same ungovernable impulses of sensuality in collision with higher duties; or cowardice, childish vanity, loquacity, gulosity, laziness, &c. ”

“ Of course a mass of absurdities would grow up around the central germ and a multitude of horrors sprout forth. While the common throng would unquestioningly receive all these ridiculous and revolting particulars, they could not but provoke doubt, satire, flat rejection, from the bolder and keener wits. ”

“ For humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh! ”

“ But there is a keen eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is pungent. ”

“ Comedy, both ancient and modern, is full of trickery and dupery. A whole play may be one big piece of fooling, ending for the most part in a merry scene in which the deluded victim or victims come to their senses again. The spectator, who is in the secret, enjoys sympathetically the laughter of the plot-maker. ”

“ What strides he is constantly taking to the ridiculous, and not always from the sublime! How strong! how weak! How wise! how foolish! Consistent only in folly, and steady in the purpose of being foolish. ”

“ But then observe this: if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility ”

“ But while this characteristic clue to absurdity helps on the ridicule, it also softens and harmonises its excesses; and the ludicrous is here blended with a certain beauty and decorum, from this very truth of habit and sentiment, or from the principle of similitude in dissimilitude. The devotion to nonsense, and enthusiasm about trifles, is highly affecting as a moral lesson: it is one of the striking weaknesses and greatest happinesses of our nature. ”

“ The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? ”

“ However this may be, there can be little doubt that man in all ages of which we have any knowledge has possessed that faculty which perceives ridiculous incongruities in the relative positions of certain objects, and in the actions and sayings of individuals, which we term the “sense of the ludicrous.” ”

“ But the ideal game is provocative of that best kind of laughter--laughter at the undeserved misfortunes of others, seasoned by the knowledge that at any moment a similar misfortune may happen to oneself. ”

“ The more intellectual varieties of the ludicrous disclose the same deep-seated characteristic. The incongruous, the absurd, the tricks of ambiguous speech, these are things which offend us as serious mortals bent on having consistency of ideas and clearness of utterance in our social world. ”

“ Force one to laugh, and then take laughing ill?
II. Secondly, If it be a Fault in those reverend Divines, mention’d in the foregoing Article, to use Irony, Drollery, Ridicule, and Satire, in any Case; or if the Fault lies in an exorbitant Use thereof, or in any particular Species of Drollery; as, for example, such Drollery as is to be found in the polemical Writings and Sermons of Dr. South; it is fit some Remedy should be employ’d for the Cure of this Evil. ”

“ The very elements conspired and the constitution of man reinforced them. A cold, a headache, a bereavement, a storm, a fog, an earthquake, a cataclysm in fallibly intervened. The whole business was beyond a 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. ”