Laughter and Its Discontents
Any
utopian scheme utterly excludes laughter, because laughter is implicitly
anti-utopian and irreverent. “How dare you laugh at my utopian scheme to make
the world a wonderful place, along with all the people in it!”
Har,
har, har. “Okay, here’s what you get for laughing at my utopian dream: you
get death in a concentration camp, along with all the millions and millions of
innocent others I’ve had, reluctantly, to kill, in furtherance of my wonderful
plan.”
Vladimir
Lenin, The Great Ilyich, hero of the Great Socialist Revolution. A man who
believed in utopian schemes. If there’s a hell where sinners burn, he certainly
will burn for all time, wallowing in the flames.
Early Christian Condemnations of Laughter
Tertullian,
Cyprian and John Chrysostom preached against ancient spectacles, especially
against the jesting of the mime and against laughter. Chrysostom declared that
jests and laughter are not from God, but from the devil. Only perpetual
seriousness and sorrow for one’s sins befit the true Christian. The main idea
is that pagans laugh, Christians don’t, and laughter is blasphemous, dangerous.
“Laughter
is no laughing matter.”
Aleksandr
Herzen
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
[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]
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