Taking the –ugh Out of Laughter

Skip the BS.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Our accents are lost when we laugh.” —Anonymous

“Laughter is the surest lingua franca.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—11/8/10—“Woe unto you” who feel inclined to laugh, warned Jesus, though we primates had been rolling around on the savannah for 15 million years.

Nevertheless, in 1418, the Second Council of Constance underscored Jesus’s point, stating, “If any cleric or monk speaks jocular words that provoke laughter, let him be anathema.”

In 1508, Castiglione advised the would-be courtier, “to laugh, jest, banter, frolic, and dance,” but only “in a way to show that he is genial and discreet.”

In 1652, John Gaule thought an unexpected burst of laughter a “superstitious omination.”

The opinion that laughter is not a laughing matter is also found in the work of Lord Chesterfield, who advised his son in 1754 not to laugh because it “distorts the countenance.” He then confessed, “I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh.” What a sad, silent legacy to leave a child.

Leading the opposition to these unsmiling nabobs of negativism is David in the Psalms who argues, “A merry heart is the health of the spirit.”

By 1520, some two thousand years later, Martin Luther had included laughter in his agenda to reform the Roman church: “If I’m not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.”

The Romantic writers of the early 19th century generally agreed with John Keats, who opined, “Let me laugh awhile, I’ve mickle time to grieve.”

And, by the middle of the same century, William Makepeace Thackeray was calling laughter “the sunshine in the house.”

In the 20th and 21st centuries, laughter’s nay-sayers increasingly find themselves in a minority. How seriously should one take a W.C. Fields who advised, “Start every day with a smile and get it over with”? Fields, of course, earned his living making people laugh by remaining dour while his audience hunted for an aisle to roll in.

Today, one is much more likely to hear laughter compared to “a social lubricant,” “an orgasm,” “fireworks,” “a spiritual experience,” “audible punctuation,” “civilized music,” “an umbrella,” “armor,” “the shortest distance between two people,” “a tranquilizer,” “stationary jogging,” or “a brief vacation.”

Why the turnabout?

Somehow, we came to our collective senses even as the world was going mad. Leading the way was a phalanx of psychoanalysts and sociologists followed by battalions of novelists, dramatists, and poets who beat back the Church and her right-wing supporters. Of course, witty conservatives as far back as Juvenal and Swift had satirized man’s foibles in an effort to correct them, but the romantic appreciation of laughter for laughter’s sake is a relatively modern phenomenon.

In a recent interview, the novelist Barry Hannah wondered what Christianity would be like if Jesus had laughed just once. Imagine if Christians had had a plump, grinning Buddha to contemplate instead of a man trying to twist his way free of three iron spikes. Who says literature and the visual arts are superfluous? “Jesus laughed”—that’s all it would have taken after turning water to wine or raising Lazarus from the grave. Instead, the apostle wrote, “Jesus wept.”

For my part, I have “wept” for those in many parts of the world disciplined by mocking laughter. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” however, Hans Christian Andersen turns the ancient table by having a child point to and laugh at the naked monarch. Focused clowning has long been used to correct egregious variations from the norm; indeed, it’s so effective that few laughingstocks in life or literature enjoy a second act. Novice candidates for public office are often told by advisors, “If you step in it, laugh, and move on,” because self-deprecating humor is the politician’s best friend.

Except for education, according to Dr. Laurence J. Peter, laughter has done more to reduce prejudice in the world than almost anything else. I recall traveling from Atlanta, Georgia to Ft. Jackson, South Carolina in 1960 with 30 young men like myself who’d enlisted in the Army.

On the way, Blacks and Whites sat on opposite sides of the bus in which scarcely a word crossed the aisle. After we had our heads shaved, and we had bloused baggy fatigues over boots worthy of Mortimer Mouse, there was nothing left to do but go AWOL—or laugh. Most of us chose the latter and bonded in the process. Before basic training was completed, many would have risked their lives for people they would not have spoken to on the streets of Jim Crow’s Atlanta. Laughter, I’m convinced, had a lot to do with it.

An education professor once advised a class I was taking, “3.2 laughs per hour maximizes learning.” At about the same time, I read that children laugh 300 times a day to their parents’ 17. The numbers did not add up; clearly most of the kids’ laughter was coming out of class. Convinced that 3.2 was a lowball figure, I spent 40 years trying to raise the average. Generally, I think, I succeeded, but I met some fierce opposition in the Asian women I taught. Some, I’m convinced, would rather expose a breast in public than a tooth.

One Afghan graduate student told me that at home “public laughter is illegal—the Taliban has forbidden it.” In the two years that I knew her, I never saw her smile even when she had passed her oral examinations or when I tumbled from my bicycle unhurt at her feet. I laughed an invitation to join me but, emotionally, she was incapable of accepting.

My wife can launch me into convulsions, but I can’t get a response from the zygomaticus major much less the orbicularis oculi lateralis when I tickle myself. The reason lies in the social nature of laughter. Laughing in a group is healthy; laughing by yourself waiting for the bus is a suspicious sign of deteriorating mental health. Laughing after the group has stopped marks you as slow of wit. And howling with laughter, when everyone else is chuckling, marks you as a boor. Having said that, I must confess I laugh at inappropriate times. I cannot help it; while my wife is massaging the skull she has bumped for the hundredth time on the kitchen cabinet over the bar, there I am chuckling in a futile attempt to bite my tongue. As the Germans discovered a long time ago, there’s a lot of Freude in the  Schaden of others.

Despite the laughter at my wife’s expense, it was her eye-crinkling laughter as I fell from a sled she was towing behind the car that led us to where we are 47 years later. Indeed, I have never loved her more than when she is doubled over on the couch in a spasm of laughter. The same holds true of my parents, my sisters, our children, and grandchildren, especially if something I said or did led to their convulsions.

Abbott and Costello had a $100,000 Lloyd’s of London insurance policy in case anyone died laughing in their audience but, the other night, as my wife and I watched The Office, it occurred to me that to die laughing would be a good way to go—especially now that laughter means more to me than sex.

Sleep tight, NBC; you have nothing to fear from me or my wife.