goWe hope to make the circles of your eyes
Flow with distilled laughter. If we fail,
We must impute it to this only chance:
‘Art hath an enemy called Ignorance’. 1
1Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, Induction, 214–17.
INDUCTION
FAUST ENTERS THE study together with his dog, opens the Bible and begins to agonize over the line ‘Im Anfang war das Wort!’ (In the beginning was the Word).2 He decides that Word does not convey a true meaning, abandons it, and seeks a new concept that effects and creates everything. He bypasses Sinn3 and Kraft4 as irrelevant. Then all at once he sees it clearly: Im Anfang war die Tat! (In the beginning was the Deed).
Plini the Elder wondered at what age infants begin to laugh.5 Watching my new-born daughter parting her lips into a pleased and gentle expression for the first time I suggest, irreverently, that the silent beginning of life, is the smile. Any deed comes after the first smile.
But is the Renaissance smile, forever present in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, not significant in Greek and Roman culture? Is smiling, as we understand it, an invention of the Middle Ages,6 emerging in the Renaissance? We can rest assured that the Greek and Roman infants also smiled, even if they grew up without a sense of the cultural significance. Homer gave Odysseus only a ‘grim and angry’7 smile.
Jesus must have smiled as an infant and as a child in Nazareth, but the New Testament lacks references to him smiling or laughing, even as teacher and prophet.8
The former Danish Prime Minister, Jens Otto Krag, quoted Gladstone in his Diary 1971–1972, ‘politics are like a labyrinth, from the ironic intricacies of which it is even more difficult to find the way of escape, than it was to find the way into them’ then added a significant line, ‘it is as accurate as an evil smile’.9 A smile can contain and disguise any emotion, it needs interpretation, laughter reveals the emotion more openly, a quiet evil smile is more deadly than cruel laughter, a hidden smile is always secret and may be a concealed, undetected sardonic laughter.
When did I become aware of the spirit and power of the smile and laughter, the culture of humour? To answer that I return to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1961.
I arrived as Norway Scholar for Michaelmas term at the entrance to Dorothy Wadham’s old home that had become one of the University’s outstanding colleges, then led by the illustrious Warden, Sir Maurice Bowra, and supported by Fellow and Senior Tutor, J.B. Bamborough. Both of these men possessed the gift of humour but it was Bam (as he was called) who had studied its presence in Renaissance literature.
Bam was my tutor. His book The Little World of Man gave an account of Renaissance psychological theory illustrated from contemporary sources. Psychology in the Renaissance was part of the study of medicine, philosophy and theology. It provided material for Renaissance literature, including methods and conventions of characterization.
Iacta alea est. I crossed the Charwell to the Renaissance riverbank. The four humours would open the door and begin to unravel the mystery of laughter. It had taken me more than twenty years to reach the point where I began to disentangle it. I found my way to the Duke’s Room in the Bodleian Library. It led to an unwritten book and now half a century later as I blow the dust off old notes and start again, I am encouraged by the knowledge that in the good old days at Oslo University we recognized the concept of the eternal student (evighetsstudent), of Renaissance man, as something positive, even something to aim for. And, talking about Faust, it took Goethe sixty years to complete it. Faust is written in verse. Goethe creates, by using a range of different verse forms (from blank verse to alexandrines), a fundamental sound symbolism to fit and expand the images. The classical world, old German society, politics, religion, magic and love – the themes of the work are enhanced by the sound implicit in the verse.
Soon after arriving in Oxford I went to Blackwell’s, bought my first book and opened an account. The temptation not just to browse in this famous book-haven, but constantly to buy new books was irresistible. Inevitably, after some time a polite letter from Broad Street would arrive in my pigeon-hole ending with a question (and not an exclamation mark): ‘May we have your cheque now?’ But the letter from the famous academic bookseller also included a moral reminder from Plato:
How then, Socrates, shall we recognize the truly just and generous man? It is he who, being reminded of an obligation, is able gracefully to thank his creditor for prompting him to do his duty.10
I thought of writing a letter of apology for the late payment but then in my bundle of notes I found one from an essay published in 1616, ‘That it is good to be in debt.’ Debt is praised for its diplomatic flexibility and interchange, ‘concord and coniunction’, of the elements. It was too good not to use it in my reply:
The Elements who are linked together by a league of association, and by their symbolizing qualities, doe barter and truck, borrow and lend one to another, as being the Bursse and Royal-Exchange of nature:They are by this traffique and intercourse, the very life and nourishment of all sublunary bodies, and therefore are called Elimenta quasi alimenta.11
I duly posted the letter with my cheque. A few days later I received this reply from Sir Basil Blackwell himself:
Thank you for your cheque and for your quotation from ‘Essayes of Certaine Paradoxes’.
This clearly is a book on which the severest censorship should be imposed!
The four elements had caused laughter, befitting an old book-house on the Broad, still the epistolary time, before the electronic invasion. Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnus plerumque secat res (a good joke often cuts an important deal strongly and sweetly).12
I approach the theme of laughter by looking at the development of humorous characterization in English comedy, starting at the time of Ben Jonson. I begin by looking at his sources and his comedies and trace his influence on seventeenth and eighteenth century comedy and the flight of his humorous characterization into the English novel. I draw parallels between the laughter in Jonson and Bergson.
Laughter is now taken into neuropsychology as ‘humor works on the whole physiology and psychology of an individual, or a group. Laughter activates the entire cortex
