Explicit or hidden ridicule caused by certain flaws in the person being laughed at is the only type of laughter studied thus far. Although it is the most widespread and frequent form, appearing both in everyday life and in fiction, it is not the only one that exists; and before drawing any conclusions about the nature of laughter and the comic, we should study all types if possible. It is also quite clear that we laugh not only because some flaws in the people around us are revealed, but for other reasons as well that still remain to be determined. We have already listed the types of laughter suggested by Yurenev – a list that, though noteworthy and rich, is not systematic enough for research purposes, as it makes no attempt at classification.
Ridiculing laughter, which occurs very frequently, is in quantitative terms the main type of human laughter; all others happen much less often. From the point of view of formal logic, one can come to the speculative conclusion that there are two major domains or types of laughter: one involves ridicule, and the other does not. This division corresponds to a classification that hinges on the presence or absence of a particular characteristic, and it will prove to be essentially correct in form and content. This same distinction can be found in aesthetics. Lessing, in his ‘Hamburgische Dramaturgie,’ writes: ‘Laughter and ridicule are quite different things’ (1954, 149). As no clear-cut distinction is made, a number of borderline cases need to be examined.
I have stressed that laughter is possible only when the flaws that are ridiculed do not become vices and cause aversion. It is all a matter of degree, and it may happen, for example, that the flaws are so insignificant that they do not make us laugh but smile instead. This kind of flaw can be found in a person whom we love and value and who attacts us. When generally appreciated and approved, a minor flaw does not cause disapproval; instead, it can further strengthen our affection. We forgive these people their flaws – the psychological foundation of benign laughter – which must now be examined.
Sarcasm and malicious joy are inherent in ridiculing laughter. By contrast, we are dealing here with gentle and inoffensive humour. According to Vulis (1966, 19), ‘the term “humour” is indispensable when the author is on the side of the object of laughter.’ Definitions of humour have been given on occasion in various studies of aesthetics; it has been understood broadly as the ability to perceive and create the comic. However, this is not the case. ‘“The comical” and “humour,”’ Hartmann (1958, 604) writes, ‘are certainly closely interconnected, but they by no means coincide, and they are nominally not parallel either.’ Humour is a certain state of mind that occurs in our relations with people when we happen to notice their positive inner nature behind their minor external flaws. A sort of gracious good nature causes this type of humour.
Benign laughter can take on the most varied shades and forms. One example is a ‘friendly cartoon’ – that is, a well-meant, funny drawing of a person. However, those who are represented this way are not always pleased. Iosif Ighin1 tells a very interesting story:
Cartoons made most of the actors smile and joke, and it was only Aunt Katya (this is what the people from Leningrad called E.P. Korchagina-Aleksan-drovskaya2) who wiped her tears with a handkerchief.
‘How could this be,’ I thought. ‘Has she taken offence?’
But she touched me on the sleeve and, sobbed […]:
‘You see, my dear: people know us, actors, while we are on the stage, while we are living. They need to be reminded of us with drawings and photos […] Please draw us, sweetheart. Certainly, it would be better if they were not cartoons. But what else can you do if you cannot draw properly?’ (1965, 22)
Here the ‘friendly’ cartoon borders on caricature, and there is certainly no real warmth in it, though the author had the best intentions. In this sense, this example is not typical, since in the majority of cases a feeling of cordial warmth accompanies benign laughter. Pushkin, Dickens, Chekhov, and to some extent Tolstoy were the greatest masters of benign humour and knew how to use it in an artistic way in their literary works. The material will not be classified along the lines of literary history; rather I will give several examples.
Everybody knows that children are funny, from birth to adolescence. This was felt and conveyed by great authors such as Tolstoy and, in a different way, Chekhov. Tolstoy is not a humorist at all, and his aim is not to make the reader laugh. Nevertheless, he makes his readers smile involuntarily with sympathy and approval. Chekhov depicts various types of children, some of them as tragic, for example, Ivan Zhukov, who was apprenticed to a shoemaker and who writes a letter to his village about all his misfortunes, which he describes in a child’s naive and slightly funny manner. Even so, the letter’s content shakes the reader with its horrifying truth. The short story ‘Kids’ is completely different. It shows children who are playing bingo, and one of the players, Grisha, is sketched as follows: ‘He is a small nine-year-old boy with a completely shaven head, chubby cheeks, and fleshy lips like a negro’s.’ The smallest boy, Alyosha, is described as follows: ‘… a round, chubby, little chap, keeps puffing and blowing and goggling at his cards’ (in ‘Kids,’ Chekhov 1982, 83). Chekhov not only portrays the children’s appearance but also delves into their psychology and characters. In these cases, appearance does not overshadow their nature but exposes it, which causes a smile, not disapproval. This happens even with some of their flaws, as Chekhov describes the children as being far from ideal. Grisha plays solely to win money: ‘Once he has won he scoops the money up greedily, and shoves it straight into his pocket’ (83). His sister Anya does not play for money but to win, and she resents it when somebody else does. The smallest one, Alyosha, likes trouble: ‘He is a quiet type to look at, but inside he is a proper little devil’ (83); he is happy when there is a fight. All of this is hardly ideal from a pedagogical perspective, and Vasya, a high school student, enters the dining room where the children are playing and thinks: ‘What a disgrace! Fancy letting children have money! And fancy allowing them to play games of chance! Really, I don’t know what education is coming to. It’s a downright disgrace!’ (86). But soon he too joins the game, and Chekhov laughs at Vasya in a different way than he does at the other children. This reveals the nature of benign laughter, the mild humour that was one of the author’s great talents.
In view of the above, is it possible to understand why children are so often funny? We have seen that laughter occurs when we look at the external signs of intellectual and mental life that overshadow the apparently flawed inner nature. When we look at children, it is the vividness of the external form that catches our eye. The more colourful the form, the stronger the comic effect it involuntarily causes. Yet external forms do not hide inner being; on the contrary, they expose it. They are the very essence of a child’s nature. Disharmony is not revealed, but the opposite is, and this pleases us.
Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ is another classic example of benign humour. Darling is a young woman who keeps on losing the people she loves, one after another. She seems to have no personality of her own and is completely absorbed by the interests of those she loves. As the wife of a theatre impresario, she assists her husband and reiterates all his opinions. After his death she marries a lumberyard manager; again, she helps her husband and tariffs become the most important thing in her life: ‘Her husband’s ideas were hers’ (1979, 215). The third person she becomes attached to is a veterinarian, and she becomes particularly interested in cattle diseases. When the veterinarian leaves for good, she remains completely alone. Now ‘she had no opinions of any sort’ (217). When he returns to the city years later, she transfers all her love to his nine-year-old son. She helps him prepare his lessons, looks after him, spoils him, and shares the boy’s opinions on the fables he has to learn as well as on the difficulty of Latin grammar.
Is Darling a positive or a negative character, and what type of laughter does she elicit? She may deserve ridicule because of her poor intellectual ability and her total lack of independent views. But while showing her inability to think independently, she displays a strong and tender feminine love, an ability to remain in the background, and unselfishness, to the extent that her negative qualities fade in the light of this constant, unfailing capacity for deep and sincere love. It is remarkable that people did not understand Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ while the author was alive. I.I. Gorbunov-Posadov wrote to him on 24 January 1899 that the ‘The Dear (sic!), is quite a Gogol-like piece’ (Semyonov). This opinion should be rejected in view of what was said above about Gogol. Leo Tolstoy rated this story very highly, and his daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, wrote to Chekhov on 30 March 1892: ‘Your “The Darling” is lovely […] My father read it aloud four times and says that he has grown wiser because of it’ (ibid.). But while he admired this tale, even Tolstoy did not understand the author’s intent. In 1905 he wrote an epilogue to it in which he stated that Chekhov’s ideal was a cultivated and educated woman who works for the benefit of society. It is as though he wanted to laugh at poor Darling, who did not conform to this ideal. Nonetheless, it is evident that the ideal of equality and the character of self-denial in ‘The Darling’ do not contradict each other, and that Chekhov was poeticizing this charming and feminine character with mild humour, as he actually disliked educated women. In his short story ‘Pink Stocking’ he describes a young wife who is writing a long letter, with crooked lines and incorrect spelling and punctuation. Her husband sees it and admonishes her for being illiterate. When she weeps silently, he regrets his criticisms, recalling all the virtues of his devoted, loving, and kind wife, with whom it is so easy and agreeable to live: ‘Along with these thoughts he recalls how learned women are generally difficult, how demanding they are, stern and stubborn […] Forget about them, these smart and educated women! It’s better and more peaceful to live with simple ones’ (in ‘Pink Stocking,’ Chekhov 1979, 24).
Some theorists deny the existence of benign laughter, for example, Bergson (2005, 3): ‘To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic[al] demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.’3 In other words, laughter is possible only when a person becomes cruel and insensitive to other people’s troubles. This statement is true only for ridiculing laughter linked to the comic of human flaws; it is false for other types. Other authors have stated just the opposite, for example, Leacock:
To me it has always seemed that the very essence of good humor is that it must be without harm and without malice. I admit that there is in all of us a certain vein of the old original demoniacal humor or joy in the misfortune of another which sticks to us like our original sin. It ought not to be funny to see a man, especially a fat and pompous man, slip suddenly on a banana skin. But it is […] for me, as I suppose for most of us … a prime condition of humor that it must be without harm or malice. (1916, 298–300)
Both points of view are mistaken and one-sided. In objecting to Bergson, we can say that benign laughter requiring no ‘anesthesia of the heart’ is still possible, but Leacock errs when he thinks that benign laughter is the only possible and morally justified type of laughter. The belief that laughter is immoral can lead to a negative attitude towards any type of laughter. I have already mentioned that Hegel considered laughter and satire in this way, but he is hardly the only one; even Goethe expressed a similar point of view. In his conversation with Chancellor Muller he said: ‘Only one who has neither conscience nor responsibility can be a humorist’; ‘Wieland, for example, possessed humour because he was skeptical, and skeptics do not take anything really seriously’; ‘The one who regards life really seriously cannot be a humorist’ (Goethe, F.V. Muller, 6.6.1824).
One can respect the great Goethe’s profoundly serious attitude towards both life and duty; nonetheless, the ability to laugh does not preclude either. Pushkin was both serious and decent, and able to laugh as well. Lensky and Olga are playing chess:
Then Lensky moved his pawn, and took,
deep in distraction, his own rook. (1977, 4:xxvi)
The comicality of absent-mindedness has been explained in the relevant chapter, but the case under examination does not conform to the theory that has been proposed. What makes it different? Lensky’s mistake was caused not by petty or low concerns or motives, on the contrary:
Ah, he had loved a love that never
is known today; only a soul
that raves with poetry can ever
be doomed to feel it. (4:xx)
Pushkin here is showing that depth and strength of love is the cause of his absent-mindedness. His view of benign humour especially can be clearly seen when the description of the ball at the Larins’ is compared with the governor’s ball in Gogol’s Dead Souls. Both are described humorously, and both cause laughter, but the laughter is different. ‘Heeltaps, and leaps, and whiskers’ (5:xlii) do not prevent Pushkin from loving the provincial gentry who form the background of the events taking place in the novel; whereas Gogol’s ball at the governor’s exposes all the poverty and meanness of the life of officials and bureaucrats in a provincial town during the reign of Nicholas II. Even Gogol, whose laughter was completely different from Pushkin’s, understood the value of benign laughter: ‘Only one, profoundly kind soul can laugh with benign and bright laughter,’ he writes in his article on staging The Government Inspector (1984, IV:258). In ‘Old-World Landowners,’ Gogol came close to what has been termed benign laughter. Belinsky (1953–56, III:450) writes: ‘You laugh at this good-natured love that was strengthened through the power of habit and later became a habit; but your laughter is joyful and good-natured, and there is nothing annoying or offensive in it.’ Several years after he published his Vorschule der Ästhetik, Richter, a theorist of the comic, wrote a brief article titled ‘The Value of Humour’ in which he said that humour helps us live: ‘After you read and put away a humorous book, you will hate neither the world, nor even yourself’ (1813, 1 . Abteilung, VII. Programm, §9 ‘Art des Humors’).4 This was written by the author of a number of humorous works who was trying to express the joy of life.
All of this characterizes the transitional, intermediate nature of benign laughter. It stands between types of laughter that are caused by flaws and lead to ridicule and those not caused by flaws containing no ridicule.