Laughing Hyena
ON LAUGHTER
d
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?]
No comments:
Post a Comment