The explanation of benign laughter helps us understand and define its opposite, bitter laughter. In benign laughter, the minor flaws of the people we love only emphasize their positive and attractive qualities. We willingly forgive such flaws. With bitter laughter, flaws, even if they are non-existent, imaginary, or only ascribed to the person, become exaggerated and magnified, giving rise to ill feelings and spite. This laughter usually characterizes people who do not believe in noble impulses, who believe that everything is false and hypocritical. It is the laughter of misanthropes who do not understand or believe that good deeds can flow out of genuinely good motives. From their point of view, noble or highly sensitive people are fools or sentimental idealists who deserve nothing but ridicule. Unlike all the other types studied so far, this laughter is neither directly nor indirectly associated with the comic, nor does it cause sympathy.
For example, women who are deceived and disappointed or who consider themselves unlucky, though they are sometimes not victims of misfortune, frequently laugh in this way. This type of laughter is seemingly tragic, sometimes tragi-comic, and even though not generated by the comic it can appear ridiculous and can be ridiculed easily on the same grounds that human flaws generally can be. This is the laughter that Chekhov derided in his one-act farce The Bear. The heroine, a widow who mourns the loss of her husband, has locked herself in her apartment and hates and despises the whole world, men in particular. The comic consists in the fact that all this misanthropy is put on, there are no true feelings behind it. A creditor bursts into her apartment, which leads to a conflict, and they engage in an argument on faithfulness in love:
MRS POPOV: Well I like that! Then who is true and faithful in love to your way of thinking? Not men by any chance?
SMIRNOV: Yes, madam. Men.
MRS POPOV: Men! [Gives a bitter laugh.] Men true and faithful in love! (1968, 58–9)
The stage direction ‘bitter laughter’ occurs once again in the play. The visitor already likes the hostess and tells her so:
SMIRNOV: I … like you.
MRS POPOV [with a bitter laugh]: He likes me! He dares say he likes me! [Points to the door.] I won’t detain you. (63)
The conflict ends with a long kiss and a marriage proposal.
Chekhov mocked this type of laughter, which happens to be rather painful in real life. It is never infectious; it is part of the subjectivity of those who laugh; it rubs salt in their moral wounds. It can be subjected to comical interpretation but remains outside the domain of the comic. Psychologically, bitter laughter is close to cynical laughter in that both are generated by spiteful feelings. But they are still essentially quite different, as bitter laughter is connected to the imaginary flaws people may have, while cynical laughter is caused by Schadenfreude – that is, by pleasure in others’ misfortunes.
We saw that owing to absent-mindedness (lack of either attention or ability to adjust to a situation and get one’s bearings), or, sometimes to chance, minor misfortunes happen that cause laughter. The distinction between minor misfortunes that cause laughter and major misfortunes that do not cannot be determined logically; it can only be felt intuitively through moral judgment. Whether they happen to be major or minor, another person’s misfortunes can cause cynical laughter in a cold person who is unable to empathize with what the other is experiencing. Ridiculing laughter usually contains a note of bitterness, but only a hint of it. Cynical laughter, however, is different. People laugh at the sick and the old who cannot stand up or who walk with difficulty. They laugh when a blind person walks into a lamp post, when people hurt themselves and suffer pain, and when a serious misfortune (such as disappointment in love) befalls someone. These individuals can laugh at unexpected reactions to acute physical pain, etc. This bitterness reaches its peak when a person is made to suffer and then laughed at. We have seen some instances in folktales of jesters, where cynicism is dampened by a fictional character’s understanding that all the events are not perceived as real life. In addition, the bitter joker in a folktale plays jokes on a priest or a landowner who, from a popular point of view, deserves no pity whatsoever. It is worse when this type of laughter is used in film, as sometimes happens in American cinema. For example, in the comedy Some Like It Hot, a gang of criminals bursts into a garage; they make all the workers stand against the wall and mow them down with machine guns. This is considered to be funny, but has nothing in common with art.