More Thoughts On Laughter

                                                                          Laughing Hyena

Laughing Weed

                                                                      

                                                                      ON LAUGHTER

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Derision Bespeaks Sinfulness

The Christian religion cannot get away from the idea that there is something sinful and shameful about laughing. Maybe because Christianity came to replace old pagan religions in which laughter and bodily sexual excess often went hand in hand. Sex is bad, then so is laughter. The Russian poet Zhukovsky once wrote, “With us [Orthodox Christian Russians] laughter is viewed as a sin, and, consequently, anyone who likes to joke and scoff must be a great sinner” (letter of January 4, 1845).

 

God’s Sense of Humor

“A divine sense of humor sounds sacrilegious to us, as though it would distract from perfection. But the cosmos is as comical as it is awesome, the product of a fantastical imagination. Whatever else the Creator may be, He/She is not dull, drab or ponderous. Consider the hippo, the orchid, the volcano, the purple-bottomed baboon, the shooting star and duck-billed platypus. Noah’s Ark alone is a comic opera of incredible inventiveness.”

Sydney J. Harris

 

The Paroxysms of Laughter

The folklorist Vladimir Propp said that primitive peoples danced before hunts, wars, sowing, with the aim of putting paroxysmal movements to work to influence supernatural spirits or Nature herself. “Dance is nothing other than a paroxysmal effort.” Shamans also go into paroxysmal seizures in aid of moving the supernatural to work for them. Laughter is paroxysmal as well, and this is why it is often considered to have magical power.

 

Laughter and the Hideous

In Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts a sixteen-year-old girl with a special problem writes a letter: “When I was a little girl, it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boyfriends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.”

 

“The reader who doesn’t laugh at this, even as the heart weeps, is not on West’s wavelength. The pathos is rubbed in by the punchline, the abrupt switch from the horror of the condition to girlish vanities. That kind of friction between thoughts or emotions that don’t quite belong with each other often ignites laughter, and West was a master of the technique.”

Walter Goodman in New York Times Book Review

 

Sure as hell, though, in our Time of The New Goody-Good, they’ll be banning and burning Miss Lonelyhearts.

 

Did God put us on earth to sit with clenched sphincters? No. Then why in our modern age are there so many sphincter clenchers?

 

Definition of Homo sapiens: the creature that can weep in the face of the pitiable, while laughing uproariously at the same time.

 

“In the Gospel there is neither laughter nor carnal love, and one drop of one or the other reduces all the pages of that wonderful book to ashes.”

Vas. Vas. Rozanov, Solitaria

 

Lines of Demarcation

In human conduct, and especially in humans observing rituals, what is the line of demarcation between sincere conviction and pretending? None can be established. Do even the most pious and fervent Christians really believe that in the Eucharist they are eating and drinking the real body and blood of Christ? The truth that this is so is pounded into their heads as children, but, notwithstanding all the pounding, does not at least one small part of them only pretend to believe? Take this one step further, to the preposterous myth about the existence of heaven and hell. Does anyone really, truly, totally believe that myth? No.

 

Intense Nervous Stress Often Occasions Laughter

Two examples from Shakespeare. In his grossly brutal play Titus Andronicus, the hero, whose hand has been cut off, laughs. Asked why, he replies, “Why, I have not another tear to shed.” In Macbeth, the hero’s wife, Lady Macbeth, right in the middle of conniving at murder, thinks of framing the grooms, and gets in a pun: “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal [with blood], for it must seem their guilt” [my emphasis].

Sully, “Essay on Laughter”

 

You ever try to tickle yourself? It won’t work. Tickle me here, tickle me, dear, tickle me, love, in me lonesome ribs.

 

Like scratching your nose with your elbow. This is what they’re asking us to do, in The Time of the Great Plague. Try it. See? It can’t be done.

 

Laughter Through Tears, Tears Through Laughter

“It is scarcely possible to point out any difference between the tear-stained face of a person after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a bitter fit of crying.”

Darwin

 

Dog Laugh

Dogs smile with their eyes but they laugh with their tails. A tail is an awkward thing to laugh with, as you can see by the way they bend themselves half double in extreme hilarity, trying to shift that rear-end exuberance forward into the main scene of action.

Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter

 

Sardonic Laughter

French archeologist Salomon Reinach writes that this term originates in the practice, in Ancient Sardinia, of immolating the aged and infirm, and laughing ritually in the process. Before being put to death the old people would laugh ritually as well, as a way of laughing themselves into a new birth in a different world. Laughter in conjunction with violent death is attested elsewhere as well: “The Sardinians laughed while sacrificing their old people; the Troglodytes laughed while washing their dead.”

Reinach, “Le rire rituel,” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles,

 6 (1910-1911) p. 585-602

 

But elsewhere Reinach also insists that the adjective “sardonic” derives from an adverb that describes a way of laughing with your teeth stuck out (“rire en montrant les dents”).

 

Buck-toothed laughing. Har.

 

Boisterous Laughter Blended with Grieving

Description of behavior at Irish wakes in the early twentieth century: “A hand of cards would be dealt to the deceased, a tobacco pipe put in his mouth, and during the dancing of a jig or hornpipe the corpse would be brought out onto the floor and danced around the room. The horseplay sometimes was so fast and furious that the body would be thrown to the floor.”

Journal of American Folklore, 83 (1970), p. 483

 

Emerge Laughing

A single person in the history of humanity, Zarathustra, is said to have emerged laughing from the womb. Har, har, har.

 

What Is Spontaneous Laughter, What Are Spontaneous Tears?

If you make yourself laugh or cry on purpose, when nothing’s really funny or sad, does that make for a different sort of laughing, or weeping? Not really. Many cultures employ wailing women for funerals; they are to set the tone for manifestations of grief on the part of the mourners. So you may say that these hired wailers are not wailing spontaneously—they are acting out the grief. Maybe so, at the beginning, but quite likely once they get into the spirit of it they may begin wailing serious wails, crying genuine tears. Same goes for fake, forced laughter; you do it long enough and quite often it becomes genuine. So where to draw the line between fakery and the genuine in human behavior? It cannot be drawn, since we blend our real selves with our pretend selves so seamlessly.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]

On Literary Fiction: Notes on NIKOLAI GOGOL

There’s Gogol, and Then Again, There’s Gogol

Among others, Ivan Turgenev could not believe that The Inspector General, the greatest play in Russian literature and “one of the most subversive comedies ever to appear on stage,” was written by the same man who wrote the bloated and ingenuous sentences of the essays in Arabesques—and, later, the moralizing and preachy epistles, coruscating with derangement, in Selected Passages from Letters to Friends.

Of course, it was not the same man. The Gogol writing fiction was a genius, and that glorious fiction welled up from some genius of a neuron deep in his brain. The Gogol writing nonfiction was a sententious fool. As Karlinsky writes, “nonfictional Gogol is hard going: verbose, rhetorical, convoluted, and all too often beside the point.”

Gogol lived and wrote in the nineteenth century, but the most prominent theme of his fiction is a twentieth century theme: the illusory nature of all human identity. The man who wrote Gogol’s fiction is a twentieth century writer.

The writer Gogol and the painter Ivanov. Quite possibly these two rather unhinged artists—who were very close, who saw each other nearly every day during the time that Gogol lived in Rome—spoke together of things they never discussed with anyone else. Maybe homosexuality?

In an earlier variant of his famous painting, “Christ Appearing Before the People”—which variant is on exhibit today at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg—Ivanov painted two nude figures side by side, having just been baptized and emerging from the River Jordan. One had the head of Josif Vielgorsky, the young man whom Gogol nursed on his death bed in Rome. The other was Gogol himself. In that same painting the figure of a gloomy penitent located right next to Christ is another portrait of Gogol.

“Gogol has raised a personal peculiarity, his inability to fall in love with a woman—as any imbecile can—to a state of consciousness, similar to those of the Stylites. From this he has concluded that he is a ‘chosen vessel’ and to avoid ending up in Sodom, he aims to land in the calendar of saints.”

from a historical novel by Olga Forsh, The Contemporaries (on the life of Gogol)

Gogol sometimes wrote of the bizarre state of his psyche. He once compared his condition to that of a person trapped in a lethargic dream, who watches as he is being buried alive and cannot so much as lift a finger to show that he is not dead.

Typical Grandiloquence of Gogol’s Letters

“Purer than the Alpine snows and more effulgent than the sky must be my soul, and only then will I find the strength to begin my mighty feats and grandiose endeavors in art, only then will be resolved the riddle of my very existence.”

Letter to Zhukovksy, June 26, 1842

Late in Gogol’s life the sober, ascetic, tight-assed mode was in the ascendancy. He took aim at his beautiful multicolored kites—embodiments of inspired light irony and celestial humor—he shot them out of the azure-blue skies of his life and art.

 Gogol never recovered from the success of his play, The Inspector General, a play in which he discovered accidentally the puissant power of laughter. It was as if he himself were on stage in the final dumb scene of the play, paralyzed, frightened out of his wits by what he, the author had done.

 Andrei Sinyavsky, In Gogol’s Shadow

In the best of his fictional works Gogol does not write the words; the words write Gogol. Just as in the braggart Khlestakov’s wild rodomontade (The Inspector General) the words take over from the man and create themselves. Khlestakov’s speeches make for the quintessence of the creative process. Gogol himself composed by passing the conductor’s baton to some force deep within his subconscious brain, and then that force created mighty wonders far above and beyond his puny carnal existence as a writer or man. 

LAST YEARS OF NIKOLAI GOGOL, excerpt from novel by U.R. Bowie, "GOGOL'S HEAD"

Biographical Ten

Final Flight of the Buffleheaded Goo-Goo Bird

(1846-1852)

The preacher in Gogol was now in total control, the sanctimonious religious fanatic. Well-meaning friends, those like Aksakov, who cherished the great fiction he had written, tried to rein him in. But it was far too late. He went on travelling around Europe, foot firmly implanted on the neck of his own best creativity, nursing his mad plan for edifying all of mankind. He stayed with Vasily Zhukovsky and his family repeatedly, in various parts of Germany. The great poet spent a lot of time with Gogol over the years; he must have had some insights into Gogol’s character. But Zhukovsky never wrote a memoir of Gogol. Other than a few scattered notes in reminiscences Gogol’s other “friends” never did either: Pletnyov, Vjazemsky, Sheviryov, Khomyakov, Pogodin, Smirnova, the Vielgorskies. The main exception is Aksakov.

Why were they so reluctant to write about the man who was generally recognized for years as Pushkin’s successor, the greatest creative writer that the land of Rus had to offer? Probably because he mystified them. They could not reconcile the man with the great works because the two were not reconcilable. The Gogol they saw in their presence was a man of highly limited vision.

“While he was endowed with a superhuman power of creative imagination (in which in the world’s literature he has had equals but certainly no superior), his understanding was strikingly inadequate to his genius. His ideas were those of his provincial home, of his simple, childish mother, modified only by an equally primitive romantic cult of beauty and of art, imbibed during the first years of his literary career” (D.S. Mirsky).

Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, which Gogol termed his “only sane book,” was published in January, 1847, and it turned out to be a thoroughly insane book. There is an air of derangement about the text from the start, beginning in the preface, in which Gogol mentions that God has brought him back from the brink of death, and he now deems it necessary to enlighten each and all about certain matters sacred to God. This is followed by a Will and Testament, beginning with instructions not to bury his body until it showed clear signs of decomposition, inasmuch as there had been times when he went into a condition of comatose numbness, when his heart stopped beating and no pulse could be detected.

GOGOL READS FROM HIS WORKS, excerpt from U.R. Bowie novel, "GOGOL'S HEAD"

Head Detail from Andreev Statue of  Nikolai Gogol, Nikitsky Boulevard, Moscow

During the second half of the decade of the 1830s Gogol began doing what he did so well for the rest of his life: reading his works aloud to enthralled private audiences. One of his early performances took place in May, 1835, at the Moscow home of Pogodin, where he read an early draft of his comedy, The Marriage. S.T. Aksakov, who was to become one of Gogol’s most fervent admirers, was too ill to attend that event, but he reported on it secondhand.

“Gogol’s reading, or better to say acting out, of his play was so masterful that many people, those well-versed in such matters, are still saying to this day that—notwithstanding the excellent work of the actors on stage—this comedy remains not as complete, not as substantial, and far from being as funny as it is when read by its author . . . . The listeners laughed so hard that several of them almost became ill.” The host of the reading, Pogodin, who later became disillusioned with his “friend” Gogol, was equally full of praise in recalling the evening.

“At my house Gogol once read, to a large throng of listeners, his play “The Marriage.” He came to the part where the prospective groom and the bride are declaring their love—asking inane things like ‘What church did you go to last Sunday? What is your favorite color?’ Three times in a row there is an interval of silence between the questions, and he so masterfully expressed the silence, it so showed on his face and in his eyes that all of the listeners à la lettre went off into rollicking laughter. For a long time they could not restrain themselves, while he maintained that silence as if nothing were going on around him, and just let his eyes wander about the room.”

In January, 1836, Gogol gave another reading, this time of his Inspector General, at Zhukovsky’s residence in St. Petersburg. Among those attending were Pushkin, Count Vielgorsky— father of the young man who Gogol was later to nurse and cherish on his death bed in Rome, Josef Vielgorsky—and Prince P.A. Vyazemsky (1792-1878), poet and critic, a highly educated and cultivated man. Once again, Gogol read brilliantly, with great success. Possibly by this time Pushkin and Zhukovsky, who, in the beginning, had treated young Gogolyok largely as a figure of fun, were beginning to realize their mistake.

Nikosha Gogol Sets Off to Visit Pushkin

                                              NIKOSHA'S VISIT TO PUSHKIN

Despite letters of recommendation he carried with him from the Ukraine, he had no luck finding a job in St. Petersburg. Most notable among those recommending him was his relative, the grandee Troshchinsky, but his influence was considerably reduced when he died in February, 1829, just at the wrong time. Nikosha’s long-suffering but always doting mother, Marya Ivanovna, kept scraping up money to send on to him, while he eked out a humble existence as best he could. Then one day, only three or four months after his arrival in St. Petersburg, he set off to pay a visit on his idol, the most famous poet in the country, Aleksandr Pushkin, who lived in those days right beside the Moika Canal. Although we have no way of being sure, he probably took along with him the manuscript of a narrative poem that he had written back at the Nezhin school. Here, roughly, is how this visit went.

Wrapping his too-thin winter coat tightly around his person, his long nose leading the way, young Nikosha set out resolutely to meet his idol, somehow convinced in his own mind that the great man would receive and welcome a young nobody from nowhere. Short of stature, unprepossessing, with long blonde hair hanging down over both temples, he walked with that strange herky-jerky gait, composing literary passages in his mind.

Yes, the tall man I just passed, he has enormous moustaches dyed white by the winter frost, or powdered, perhaps, by that relentless dyer of mustaches and heads, He who, ever unbidden, arrives in due time in the world of us all, to sprinkle perforce all earthly denizens with the dying white of agedness. How’s that? Is it all right? No. It will take some work, that passage. I’ll rewrite it at my desk tonight.

The herky-jerky gait became ever more hesitant as the unprepossessing figure approached the Moika, where Pushkin’s apartment was located. Various voices were arguing among themselves now in his head.

--What if he doesn’t want to see me, Pyotr Ivanovich?

--He’ll want to see you, Pyotr Ivanovich. A great pee-eet пиит (poet) will be overjoyed to meet a man with the potential to be another great пиит.

--You think so?

--I know so. As sure as I know that he’s a great пиит.

--All I know is one thing, Pyotr Ivanovich: я не трус, но я боюсь (I’m no coward, but I’m afraid).

--It was me that said that first, Pyotr Ivanovich. About being not a coward who is afraid.

--No, it was me that said that first, Pyotr Ivanovich.

--No, me… There’s the building, right up ahead, Pyotr Ivanovich.

--So it is. Tell you what, Pyotr Ivanovich. See that confectionary shop over there? Chances are we could get a little snort on those premises. What say we drop in?

--What say we do, Pyotr Ivanovich.

So they did. They went through the doors of the shop, the two Pyotr Ivanoviches, they sat down at a small table and each ordered himself a shot of liqueur. They raised high the ryumochki (dram glasses), clinked them the one against the other, proposed a toast (“to our literary future”) and downed the liquid in one gulp. Then they got up to go.

--Maybe, Pyotr Ivanovich, it would do us no harm to have just one more snort.

--You’re right, Pyotr Ivanovich; I’ll buy that.

Once again they raised high the ryumochki, clinked them the one against the other, proposed a toast (“to us and our literary future”) and downed the liquid in one gulp. Then they got up again to go.

--Could be (said Pyotr Ivanovich to Pyotr Ivanovich, taking him by the arm) one more snort would not be amiss.

--You’re right, Pyotr Ivanovich.

Once again they etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera, etc. They threw a ruble coin on the table, took each other by the arm, and, staggering, made their way out of the confectionary shop and back out onto the street. Holding each other up, the one supporting the other, the two Pyotr Ivanoviches reached the imposing door of that imposing apartment in that imposing building on the Moika. At this point they shrunk back out of their double selves and became one person again: a small, humble person in a threadbare coat (шинель), with a bald spot beneath his shapka (winter hat). That small humble person raised a shaking index finger and rang the doorbell. Then, shivering in the cold, he waited.

Finally the door swung open and there before him stood a huge giant of a lackey dressed in gold-brocaded livery. The lackey looked down his nose at the nothing of a nobody standing before him, then sniffed out the most supercilious of questions that could ever be asked within the limits of one word: Da?

--Tell me, please (said the nothing of a nobody, in a voice so faint as to be almost a squeak instead of a voice), is he, that is, I mean like, is the I mean to say, like, master, at home?

--Indeed at home (bellowed out his answer the lackey in the livery, whose name was, incidentally, Vaska Golopupenko). At home. But presently taking his rest.

--He is, that is to say, I mean, resting, like sleeping? Then he must have been working all night (blurted out the nobody of a nothing).

--Working? Ha! (bellowed once more the giant Vaska Golopupenko). Playing cards.

End of scene, describing the ignominious first attempt of not quite twenty-year-old Nikosha Gogol to make the acquaintance of the greatest poet in the history of Russian literature. But the most amazing thing is not that this nobody of a nothing even dared make such a bold move shortly after his arrival in the capital. The most amazing thing of all is that only a couple of years later this nonentity had become more than an entity, had made the acquaintance of the critic Pletnyov, of the great poet and tutor to the tsarevich, Zhukovsky, and then yes, of Pushkin too. Only two years later Nikosha Gogol-Yanovsky was already Nikolai Gogol! How could he have pulled this off? Did the Lord God really have his back?

             Winter Image of the Dnieper River, Flowing Into the Black Sea
                                                       Taken from Space