Picture to yourself a familiar scene—the interior of a theatre crowded with people. On the stage the persons of the play move to and fro, speaking their lines. Presently a slight change is made in the current of the dialogue, and, presto! the spectators who have been so quietly listening and watching become weirdly agitated. Their features are distorted in strange grimaces, they throw back their heads, and give utterance to abrupt, explosive, unmelodious noises. Even their bodies take part in the amazing commotion.

Something “funny” has just been said by one of the actors, and those who have heard it are responding by an outburst of “laughter.”

Recall likewise the equally familiar picture of a huge circus tent with its bewildering array of equipment for the performance of feats of strength and daring, surrounded by tier upon tier of seats filled with expectant holiday-makers. The entertainment is about to begin; from an entrance come the blaring strains of a brass band, and a long, gaily bedecked procession circles slowly before the gaping throng. At the end of the procession are half a dozen men of uncouth gait and bizarre appearance, their faces whitened and spotted, queer conical caps on their heads, and wearing enormous, shapeless garments as white and spotted as their faces.

These men say nothing—they simply go through all sorts of foolish antics. But at the mere sight of them the same uproar of discordant sounds fills the air, the spectators, like those of the theatre and with even greater vehemence, uniting in a very bedlam of guffaws.

Pass, finally, to the open street, alive with men and women hurrying to their work. Some one has carelessly dropped on the sidewalk the slippery skin of a fruit. The first man to step on it feels his legs give way beneath him, strives frantically to keep his balance, waves his arms about, and ends by plumping to the ground with a heavy thud. At once he is beset by the “smiles” and “chuckles” of those who have witnessed his fall; and, hurt and annoyed, he scrambles to his feet, gives himself a hasty brush, and disappears as rapidly as possible.

Now, just what is this singular phenomenon of laughter, so readily induced and from such a variety of causes? What is there in the words of an actor, the antics of a clown, or the misfortune of another person, to provoke, under the circumstances mentioned, the peculiar reaction of bodily and facial contortion and inarticulate vocal utterance that, regarded dispassionately, seems almost repulsive? What useful purpose can be served by such behaviour, such an obvious departure from the well-ordered ways of the reasoning life? In a word, why do we laugh?

It is a question far more easily asked than answered, as every one has discovered who has really pondered it. The answer that immediately comes to mind—“We laugh because we are amused”—not only is hopelessly inadequate, but to a large extent is incorrect. It can readily be shown that people sometimes laugh in situations where their mental state is anything but that of amusement. In one well-authenticated instance a frontiersman, on returning to his home and finding it in ruins, with his wife and children mutilated corpses, began to laugh and continued laughing until he died from the rupture of a blood-vessel. In another case, cited among the responses to a questionnaire on laughter issued by that well-known American psychologist, President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, a number of young people from nineteen to twenty-four years of age were sitting together when the death of a friend was announced. “They looked at each other for a second, and then all began to laugh, and it was some time before they could become serious.”

A young woman, replying to the same questionnaire, confessed that she often laughed when hearing people speak of the death of their friends, “not because it is funny or pleases her, but because she cannot help it.” Another young woman reported that on hearing of the death of a former school-mate she felt deeply grieved, yet “laughed as heartily as she had ever done in her life,” and, in spite of every effort to control herself, “had to break out into a laugh repeatedly.” A third “must always laugh when she hears of a death, and has had to leave the church at a funeral because she must giggle.”

Even the shock of a severe physical pain is known to provoke occasionally, not tears but laughter. “A young man,” says C. G. Lange, “whom I was treating with a powerful caustic for an ulceration of the tongue, invariably, at the moment when the pain was at its highest, was attacked by a violent outburst of laughter.”

One has only to think also of the laughter caused by tickling to realise that it is not always true to say that we laugh because we are amused. And when it is true, this answer, instead of solving the problem of laughter, merely raises it in another form, since it then becomes necessary to explain why we are amused by the sayings and happenings at which we laugh. Most students of laughter have indeed felt that the important thing to do is to determine the nature of the laughable, a task itself of considerable difficulty and leading to the most diverse conclusions in the numerous explanatory formulas which have been advanced from time to time, but which, when closely scrutinised, are chiefly noteworthy for their incompleteness.

To mention only a few of the theories of the comic finding place in psychological works, it is affirmed by some authorities that the essence of the laughable is that it induces a sudden sense of superiority in the person moved to laughter. This is the “sudden glory” theory of Thomas Hobbes, and in support of it is cited more especially the familiar fact that nobody likes to be laughed at. It also finds support in the undoubted feeling of contempt which so often accompanies the laughter provoked by the buffooneries of a mountebank, the dialogue and action of a farce comedy, and the so-called “comic pictures” now to be found in such lamentable profusion in many of our newspapers. In some slight degree, too, there may be a “sudden glory” in the laughter at the awkwardness and groundless fears of a child, or at his naÏve remarks, and in the laughter occasioned by mischances to other people. But certainly there is much that is laughable—notably the kindly banter between friends—that cannot reasonably be said to engender any feeling of superiority. And, more than this, we are all of us, every day of our lives, witnessing things that do suddenly arouse in us a lively feeling of superiority, but without moving us to laughter—moving us, rather, to pity and perhaps tears.

Even as amended by the psychologist Bain, the “sudden glory” theory remains inadequate. Bain defines “the occasion of the ludicrous” as “the degradation of some person or interest possessing dignity in circumstances that excite no other strong emotion.” This is a decided improvement, because it clearly recognises that the laughable must be devoid of elements awakening counteracting emotions. But it is open to the criticism that laughter is frequently excited by objects and occurrences in which, unless the imagination be severely wrenched, it is impossible to assume that ideas of degradation are dominant or even operant.

When, for example, we laugh at the spectacle of a child half hidden in his grandfather’s hat, what do we think of as degraded? Is it the child, the hat, or the absent grandfather? In such an instance can the idea of degradation properly be said to enter at all? So, likewise, it is difficult to conceive the presence of any idea either of degradation or superiority in the ringing laughter of a child at his puppy’s gambols or at the frisking of his kitten. And how explain on such a principle the laughter at non-malicious witticism?

Appreciating the inapplicability of the Hobbesian doctrine in any form as explanatory of all sources of laughter, other investigators have emphasised the principle of contrast and incongruity, but to scarcely more satisfactory effect. “Laughter,” says Herbert Spencer, “naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small—when there is what we call a descending incongruity.” The manifest insufficiency of this theory is avoided in the more extensive one, to which Darwin inclines, defining the laughable as that which is queer, unusual, disagreeing with or contrary to our mental habits or the normal order of affairs. Assuredly there is almost always an element of queerness in the things at which we laugh. Yet it is also certain that the queer does not always make us laugh. As Camille MÉlinaud has pointed out:

“There are things contrary to the normal order that have nothing ludicrous about them; and if the view were true that queerness is the laughable element, those things that are strangest and most unusual should be the ones most certain by their very nature to excite laughter. But we do not laugh at the dancing horses, the jumping pigs, the musicians playing on bottles, of the circus, all of which are most contradictory of what we are accustomed to. If we laugh at the circus, it is at the accessory jokes and incidents in the detail. A conjurer’s tricks, seemingly contradictory as they are of all our experiences and notions, do not make us laugh. We laugh at his jokes and his funny ways of proceeding, but we wonder at his tricks.” (Popular Science Monthly, vol. liii, p. 398.)

MÉlinaud’s own view, oddly enough, is about as unconvincing as any that has ever been formulated, for, while laying stress on the principle of incongruity, he insists that laughter comes only when the laugher, “by a rapid process of thought,” submits the object of his mirth to a reflective analysis and arrives at the laugh-provoking conclusion that what seems absurd is really quite natural from the point of view of the person or thing laughed at. Then, and not until then, do we feel amused. On such a theory one might well wonder that children ever find it possible to laugh, and that laughter is so prevalent among adults who are not accustomed to any very high degree of logical thinking.

Altogether different from any of the foregoing is the more recent theory of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, as presented in a special treatise on laughter, of which an excellent translation by C. Brereton and F. Rothwell has lately been published in this country. Bergson recognises, as not every investigator has done, the essentially spontaneous character of laughter, and he insists with Darwin on postulating queerness as an indispensable element in the laughable. But, as he sees it, the queerness must be of a specific sort in order to excite laughter—must consist, in fine, in an automatic inelasticity, whether of form, action, or thought, which is in sharp contrast to the wonted mobility of life. It is our immediate recognition of this automatism and rigidity that moves us to laughter.

When, Bergson affirms, we laugh at a man who stumbles and falls in the street, our laughter is caused, not by his sudden change of attitude, but by the involuntary element in this change. “Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absent-mindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy—as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum—the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the reason of the man’s fall, and also of the people’s laughter.” So with our laughter at the appearance and horseplay of a clown. We laugh at his painted face because we immediately recognise in it “something mechanical encrusted upon the living,” and we laugh at his antics because of their automatic, machine-like character.

In fact, “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing. We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into the air like a foot-ball. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a cannon-ball and travelling through space.” In laughter caused by puns, jests, and witticisms, the same principles of automatism and inelasticity obtain, though of course in much subtler form. Analyse closely all varieties of the comic and you always get back to the basic idea of “something mechanical in something living.” Or, Bergson concludes, “The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.”

Really to appreciate both the plausibility and the shortcomings of this novel theory of the laughable one must read Professor Bergson’s book. It is there elaborated so ingeniously that one finds it difficult to give instances of the comic to which it cannot in some way be applied. Even the laughter of children at the bobbing up of their jack-in-the-box, the fall of their house of cards, or the tail-chasing gyrations of their kitten, may conceivably be explained on the assumption that what the children laugh at is the automatic character of the bobbing, the falling, and the whirling. On the other hand, these very examples irresistibly suggest that the Bergsonian explanation is, after all, rather strained and far-fetched, and that, in common with its less thorough-going predecessors, it overlooks the elusive something fundamental to the laughable. This impression is deepened when we recall the extent to which automatism, rigidity, inelasticity, prevail in the affairs of men without exciting so much as a smile.

“The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body,” says Professor Bergson, in stating one of his many subsidiary laws of the comic, “are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” Why, then, do we not laugh when we observe the machine-like precision with which a company of soldiers march on parade or execute the evolutions of drill? Surely one could not find a better example of “something mechanical in something living.” And, again, “any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.” The bobbing of the jack-in-the-box meets this formula, and we do laugh at the jack-in-the-box. But it is met equally well by the strangely lifelike movements of such devices as the automatic chess-player and the type-setting machine, yet these do not ordinarily elicit any appreciable manifestation of mirth.

It is, however, when we turn to Bergson’s deductions from his theory of the comic that we are most strongly impelled to question its soundness. Emphasizing as he does the element of automatism in the laughable, he logically enough infers that the function of laughter is to serve as a social corrective. “The rigid, the ready-made, the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing, and the living, absent-mindedness in contrast with attention, in a word, automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would fain correct.” We laugh, that is to say, only at imperfections in our fellow-men, or at things which remind us of imperfections, and the reason we laugh is that, consciously or unconsciously, we wish to call attention to them by way of, in Bergson’s own words, “a kind of social ragging.”

Stated thus baldly, the underlying defect of such an explanation of laughter becomes plainly apparent.3 What has happened is that its author has read into the phenomenon of laughter a meaning applicable only under special circumstances. If it were true that we laugh only at what is imperfect and therefore ugly, however attenuated in ugliness, it would be impossible to understand the well-nigh universal eagerness for laughter; an eagerness which has led mankind to reward lavishly, even extravagantly, those who make it their business to provide occasions for laughter—the writers of farces and comedies, the fun-making actors and clowns, the producers of “comic pictures.” The egregious falsity of this “deformity” theory, as it may fairly be called, becomes still more manifest when we endeavour to apply it to account for the laughter of childhood, the period of life when laughter is most free and exuberant, but precisely when it is incredible to assume that it is motivated by any corrective impulse, conscious or otherwise.

To tell the truth, the attempt to reach a wholly satisfactory solution of the problem of laughter by striving to define the characteristics of the laughable seems foredoomed to failure. For, after all, the laughable must always remain a more or less uncertain quantity, if only for the reason that, as shown by facts of everyday observation, what makes one person laugh may not be in the least laugh-provoking to another. Yet everybody, or almost everybody, does laugh to some extent, and therefore the proper point of approach would rather seem to be through a study of the act of laughter itself and of its consequences with regard, not to the person or thing or phrase laughed at, but to the person doing the laughing.

Attacking the problem from this altogether different angle, one is soon in a position to discern several facts of real helpfulness in an explanatory way. By no means the least important is the extreme exuberance of laughter in childhood, to which reference has just been made. Once the child has begun to laugh—usually during the fourth or fifth month after birth, although occasional outbursts of a shadowy sort of laughter have been observed before the fourth month—it laughs with a truly amazing spontaneity and frequency. There seems to be nothing which may not become an object of laughter to a child, and, more than this, in direct contradiction to all theories postulating a reflective element at the bottom of every laugh, as often as not the laughter of childhood is conspicuously devoid of such an element.

For example, to cite a few observations from the record of a lady, Miss Milicent Shinn, whose painstaking study of the infancy of her niece Ruth is among the most stimulating of contributions to the modern science of child psychology, it appears that toward the end of the fifth month this little girl “habitually laughed with glee when any one smiled or spoke to her.” And when, two months later, she was taken into the open and allowed to roll about on a quilt, “the wooing of the passing freshness, the play of sun and shadow, the large stir of life in moving and sounding things, all this possessed her and made her ‘laugh and ejaculate with pleasure.’” Also, like almost every child of her age, little Ruth would be moved to hilarious mirth by being given a ride on somebody’s foot, or tossed and jumped about in one’s arms. Laughter, again, followed the successful accomplishment of any intellectual or muscular feat, such as pointing out pictures she had been asked to identify, climbing stairs, or deliberately letting herself fall “so as to come down sitting with a thud.”

The same tendency to excessive, even seemingly causeless laughter in the opening years of life has been noted by other close students of the emotions and their expression. Some have attempted, with the usual futile results, to explain it by an analysis of the things at which the child laughs. Others, more cautiously and more accurately, content themselves with describing it as a means whereby Nature provides a salutary outlet for surplus nervous energy.

It is undoubtedly this. Ask any child who has learned to talk—or, better, ask a grown person who has retained to a marked degree the faculty for hearty laughter—and the chances are you will be told that, while in any given instance the laugher may be far from clear as to why he has laughed, he does know that the involuntary movements of the laughter to which he yielded were preceded by peculiarly compelling sensations, variously expressed in such phrases as, “I had to laugh or burst,” “I had to do something to relieve the strain,” “I felt bubbling over,” “I felt a quiver, a thrill, a creepy feeling passing from my stomach to my mouth.”

That is to say, the evidence from the abounding laughter of childhood—pre-eminently a period of rapid physical growth and of the accumulation of a large store of nervous energy—as also the evidence from the laughter of unusually mirthful adults, who are, as a rule, persons of large build and of corresponding nervous force, suggests irresistibly the conception of laughter as an instinct implanted in us for the performance of an important physiological function. This view finds additional support in the familiar “giggling silliness” of the adolescent period, that strange period of unusual growth and stress, and the one in which are most likely to occur those singular attacks of untimely hilarity at funerals and on other solemn occasions, as mentioned among the responses to President Hall’s questionnaire. No more than the little child or your friend the jolly man does the adolescent always know at what he is laughing. He simply knows that he is impelled to laugh by forces latent in his being and over which he has no control.

Nor is it only as a relief from neural tension that laughter benefits the one who laughs. In the studies of laughter in childhood made by such investigators as Preyer, Sully, and Miss Shinn, one finds frequent allusion to occasions when laughter is obviously a reaction from a state of mental strain, and has a specifically useful effect in easing the mind. There is reason to believe that this is actually one of its constant ends—that it is a device for lightening the burden of mentation by temporary interruption of the thought process.

As all educators are well aware, the first years of life and the adolescent period are not only the years of greatest physical growth, but the years when the severest demands are made on the mind, both by the task of acquiring knowledge and by the perturbations of adolescence. They are the years when the mind, in its immaturity, is most in need of some protective mechanism to enable it automatically and at frequent intervals to take a holiday as it were. Such a mechanism is admirably provided in laughter, which, as every laugher will at once appreciate, when not unduly prolonged leaves behind it a pleasurable feeling of exhilaration and greater mental as well as physical well-being.

We laugh, then, in infancy and adolescence, not primarily because we are “light-hearted” or “amused,” but to satisfy a natural instinct of both physiological and psychological utility. We laugh less in maturity, partly because we have not, as a rule, the same necessity of getting rid of surplus nervous energy, partly because our minds have passed the tender formative age, and partly because widening experience has developed sentiments and ideas tending to inhibit laughter. Nevertheless we do still need to a certain extent the relief which laughter brings; we feel in some degree the old hunger for it, and consequently, often at very slight provocation, we yield, and even cultivate opportunities for yielding, to the impulse which was so conspicuously operant in the years of our youth. As with every instinct, moreover, the laughing process may, and occasionally does, become perverted, as in the laughter of cynicism and contempt, and in the abnormal laughter of the overwrought—itself, however, the modern medical psychologist assures us, a medium of relief from an unbearable strain.

As to the things at which we commonly laugh—the “laughable” whose nature has so perplexed philosophers—all that may safely be said is that their laugh-provoking power depends not so much on an inherent “comicality” as on the circumstances under which they occur to us, and our point of view toward them as determined by previous training and experience. Certainly, for instance, we cannot laugh at a subtle bit of wit until we have had education in the appreciation of the skilful use of language. The instincts of imitation and of sympathy, further, have a share in determining on many an occasion the functioning of the laughing instinct. Time and again we laugh merely because we see other people laughing. Personally I am inclined to think also that much at which we laugh as adults is laughable to us only by reason of subconscious association with similar occurrences which chanced to move us to laughter in our childhood. But on this point nothing positive should be asserted pending psychological investigation which has yet to be made.

Conceding, however, that the laughable is and must always remain elusive, baffling, uncertain, there need be no uncertainty as to our view of laughter itself. To laugh—to laugh spontaneously and heartily—is under nearly every circumstance a good thing both for the body and for the mind. Like sleep, it refreshes; like food, it strengthens. Humanity in truth would be the poorer—and the shorter-lived—were it ever to lose this splendid heritage of the power to laugh.

This is why I have said so much about laughter in the present book. To parents in especial knowledge of its true significance is important. They will not then fall into the mistake, too often made at present, of curbing their children’s instinctive tendency to laugh. Rather, they should deliberately seek to cultivate in them a keen sense of humour, and encourage them in merriment—not because it is a thing pleasing in itself, but because of its positive developmental value. Directly or indirectly to repress this basic instinct is always dangerous, leading to warpings of character, and at times undoubtedly contributing to the causation of that strangest and most misunderstood of human maladies, hysteria, to which we must now give some consideration.