2

Glory

Blood, sport and triumph

When the kid who always bests you on sports day wets himself and has to go home.

When your barroom pool nemesis attempts to jump the white over another ball, and the cue slips.

When the person who grows the biggest pumpkins on the allotments is discovered buying them in Tesco.

When your perfect neighbor’s perfectly groomed dog rolls in fox poo and jumps on the front seat of their car.

When your work rival, who always brags about his great taste in music, puts his iPod on shuffle at the Christmas party, and his self-recorded power ballad comes on.

Roller derby is a full-contact sport, played on roller skates by all-female amateur teams. It started in America in the 1930s, when roller skating was all the rage, and quickly took off as sports entertainment—part genuine contest, part staged. In the 2000s, it was rediscovered as a genuine sport, stripped of its staged elements and given a DIY, punk, riot grrrl makeover. Today there are over a thousand leagues worldwide. Some of the camp sports-entertainment elements have been retained. There is plenty of prematch showboating. There are spangly, colorful leotards and leggings, and loud music and disco lights. There are face paints and pseudonyms, swagger and sass. One London team, the Rockin’ Rollers, features a Pauline Foul’er, a Barbarolla and one Wiley Minogue.

It is also extremely dangerous. It involves two teams of five players skating improbably fast around an elliptical track, shoving one another out of the way to let their team’s “jammer” overtake the pack. It is illegal to hit above the shoulders or below mid-thigh. But even legal hits can be pretty brutal. It is not uncommon for skaters to trip and fall sprawling onto the track or fly into the crowd. Pileups are common, as are blood, bruises and concussions.

On the night I went, “my” team was losing when the star of the opposing team fell. The crowd whistled and clapped as she was stretchered off the track, her injury an emblem of valor rather than weakness. Clutching my warm beer in a plastic cup, I joined the cheering, wanting to encourage and hail her bravery. But I’m not going to lie. Among all this camaraderie, I felt quicken in me a little pulse of expectancy, the sudden uplift of anticipation: her pain would undoubtedly mean our gain.

VILE BODIES

When my cousin accidentally swallowed a globule of her dentist’s snot.

When my flatmate opened the fridge, noticed a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice standing there, took a gulp—and realized it was beaten egg yolks.

When a friend-of-a-friend’s tongue swelled up and she had to go to hospital and have it injected and “squeezed like a giant zit.”

In the Farrelly Brothers’ 1998 comedy There’s Something About Mary, Ted (Ben Stiller) goes to pick up Mary, his beautiful date (Cameron Diaz), on prom night, and once there he visits the bathroom. Rushing to do up his trousers, he manages to get his scrotum trapped in three separate places in his zipper.

Mary’s stepdad eventually barges into the bathroom, and is aghast. Her mom comes in next and can barely look. A policeman, responding to reports of a screaming woman, pokes his head through the window, incredulous. A firefighter arrives, and radios his crew to come see, and to bring a camera. Finally, we actually get to see the injury—pearly pink, glandular bulges through the zip’s sharp metal teeth. It is impossible not to recoil and squeal. “There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching,” wrote Susan Sontag, and “there is the pleasure of flinching.”

People love sharing anecdotes about horrifying physical predicaments—the more outrageous, the more awe and revulsion they provoke, the better. There is giddy surprise in bodies misbehaving, as discussed in the previous chapter. But also, surely, alongside this surprise is a little twinge of superiority. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes remains influential in how we think about this link between other people’s laughable failures and our own sudden rise in status. “Laughter,” he wrote, “is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others.” Even our own past “infirmities,” compared to our present accomplishments, can provide this feeling of giddy domination, “for men laugh at the follies of themselves past.”

One of the reasons Schadenfreude can seem so nasty is that this feeling of power at the expense of someone else’s physical pain and clumsiness may tempt us to enjoy ever more ghoulish sights. We may shudder to think of videos of hostages being beheaded in Iraq becoming just one more piece of clickbait. But the desire to see death is an old one, and runs deep. The New York street photographer Weegee documented thousands of crime scenes in the 1930s and 1940s. Alongside the blood-spattered bodies, these images often also capture rubbernecking passersby and gawking loiterers daring themselves to peek. In 1727, John Byron, navy officer and grandfather of the poet, described in his diary strolling into town and coming across a crowd of people gathered around the sewer at Fleet Ditch, “all looking at a poor fellow that had fallen in last night or this morning, and lay dead.” In The Republic, written in the fourth century BC, Plato describes the young nobleman Leontius wrestling with himself over his desire to gawp at the corpses of freshly executed criminals strewn outside the city walls.

Evolutionary psychologists have argued that this attraction to scenes of disaster has a purpose: ensuring we understand risks and how to avoid them. This sounds reasonable enough, but its positive spin is only part of the story. Many poets and novelists have described the feelings of mastery and domination that come with the sight of other people suffering. The novelist Charles Maturin, for instance, in his 1820 Gothic fantasy Melmoth the Wanderer, wrote:

I have heard of men who have traveled into countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed for the sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to give… a triumph over those whose sufferings have placed them below us, and no wonder—suffering is always an indication of weakness—we glory in our impenetrability.

For almost two thousand years, much of this feeling of glory was thought to come from the contrast that’s produced when we compare the miseries of the person suffering with our own better luck. One of the oldest surviving depictions of Schadenfreude appears in the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius’s De rerum natura (or The Nature of Things), written at some point between 100 BC and 50 BC. The poem itself is not very promising: there are no vindictive gods, no one accidentally has sex with their mother—it is about physics. But in the second section (“The Dance of Atoms”), Lucretius describes how philosophers, like him, serenely liberated from worldly concerns, enjoy seeing non-philosophers in a twist about money and sex (you might be pleased to know that Lucretius is rumored to have died in a frenzy of lust after accidentally swallowing a love potion). Lucretius compares his smug philosophical pleasure to that of seeing a ship in danger at sea:

How sweet it is to watch from dry land when the storm-winds roil

A mighty ocean’s waters, and see another’s bitter toil—

Not because you relish someone else’s misery—

Rather, it’s sweet to know from what misfortunes you are free.

It is hard to imagine anyone standing on the quayside enjoying the sight of a ship in peril, and yet Lucretius’s image did resonate through the ages, and in cultures more reliant on sea travel than our own. As we have already seen, Hobbes spoke of watching ships being buffeted in a storm: “There must be joy in this sight” he wrote, “else men would never flock to such a spectacle.” Johann Joachim Ewald’s poem The Storm (1755) acknowledges this pleasure in his dramatic depiction of a ship caught in a gale, the sky’s sudden darkness, the howling wind, the sails washed by the water: “The ship is shattered, and I… nothing happened to me, / Because I only watched the storm from shore.” For Edmund Burke, the vast and roiling sea gave a feeling of “delightful horror”; to see others in peril gave the eighteenth-century art theorist Jean-Baptiste Dubos a zest for life, and kept the dreaded ennui at bay. The closest I have ever come is looking at Turner’s 1803 painting Calais Pier, in which the sailors’ gritty determination and wind-whipped clothes made me feel warm and snug, and faintly relieved.

In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a new explanation for this strange attraction to the sight of other people in danger emerged. As a result of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, many came to believe our excitement at scenes of death and destruction were a vestige lingering from our more violent pasts. “If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all,” wrote the psychologist William James in 1890, “the destruction of prey and human rivals must have been among the most important of man’s primitive functions, the fighting and the chasing instincts must have become ingrained,” and so inflicting violence or seeing an enemy mangled or destroyed would have become “intensely pleasurable.” And for James, and others, organized sports were the archetypal modern expression of this ancient violence. “See the ignoble crew that escorts every great pugilist—parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed off upon them… [they] share the rapture without enduring the pains!” Somewhere, in the oldest and most easily confused parts of our brains, we feel they suffer because we have beaten them, their subjugation is our triumph.

TRIUMPH

When, at the critical moment of the Olympics Dressage, another country’s horse poops.

When your favorite figure-skater’s nemesis trips.

When Brazil was knocked out of the World Cup in a shocking defeat, Americans were really pleased and went crazy posting pictures—first of excited, dressed-up, reveling Brazilians, then of disbelieving and tense-looking Brazilians, and finally of weeping Brazilians, with captions such as “So, Brazil had kind of a rough day” or “Want a hug?”

Is it possible to imagine sport without Schadenfreude? The bungled shot that skewers a rival, the fumbled ball that leads us to triumph? Mistakes, as William Carlos Williams, writing about the crowds at a baseball game, well knew, are part of the drama of the game: “the chase / and the escape, the error / the flash of genius.” The players themselves must be gracious, of course (though I have it on good authority that when their opponent hits the ball into the rough, golfers feel a secret clutch of triumph that they’d never, never admit; “golf is a game for hypocrites,” one told me).

This same etiquette rarely constrains the fans. Since its first appearance in the eleventh century, the word sport has been associated with mockery and ridicule (as in: “to make sport of someone”). Our own team’s mistakes may exasperate us, but those of the other side earn our most triumphant contempt. In some sports crowing at unforced errors is exceedingly bad manners. The Wimbledon rules outlaw flash photography, selfie sticks and Schadenfreude: “Never applaud a net cord or double fault.” Never! Of course, sometimes things get out of hand. When British hopeful Heather Watson faced world no. 1 Serena Williams on Centre Court in 2015, the home crowd, unable to restrain themselves a moment longer, let out a strangled cheer of delight at Williams’s unforced faults, forcing her to remonstrate with the umpire. And we all know the kind of parent who, when his nine-year-old’s gymnastics nemesis lands awkwardly from her backflip, clenches his fist and hisses “Yes!”

You might think that a rival’s mistake is especially pleasurable when we stand to win as a result. In fact, many studies of sports fans have shown that our own success is not half so enjoyable as our bitter rival’s failure. Remember the study of the sports fans who smiled more broadly when their rivals missed a penalty than when their team scored? This is certainly not the only time this phenomenon has been observed. During the 2010 World Cup, two Dutch psychologists, Jaap W. Ouwerkerk and Wilco W. van Dijk, both avid football fans, developed a grubby habit. With the Dutch team still in the tournament, the pair watched the games on a Dutch channel, switching over to a foreign broadcaster when the Dutch team did particularly well, for the gratification of hearing another commentator’s praise. As soon as the Dutch team was knocked out, the psychologists started paying close attention to their bitter longtime rivals, the Germans. In the semifinal, Spain scored the winning goal against Germany minutes before the whistle blew. The psychologists excitedly grabbed their remote controls and switched over to the German channel ADR—just so they could sit back and relish the satisfaction of hearing the German commentators forced to describe their own imminent defeat. They were not the only ones. They later discovered that the number of Dutch people watching the match on the German broadcaster had peaked at 352,000 just before the end of the match, when it was clear that the Germans would be defeated; a media analyst dubbed this “Schadenfreude density.”

Why would a rival’s defeat bring such happiness, even if it does not mean we are any more likely to win ourselves? Perhaps we think of the long game, and hope our rival’s confidence will be shaken. Perhaps we will view it as payback for some earlier humiliating defeat of our own. As will be discussed further in Chapter 8, when we humans organize ourselves into rival tribes, the competitiveness that emerges is far stronger than any seen between individuals. One of its effects is that the more identified we are with our own tribe, the more inclined we are to see a rival as a two-dimensional representative of the other side, rather than a fully formed human. This is not a comfortable thought for many reasons—and its influence can be felt in far more serious arenas than sport. But it might go some way to explaining that rather unpleasant and furtive form of Schadenfreude sometimes experienced by sports fans: the involuntary stab of happiness felt when another team’s top player is injured.

When in 2008 the New England Patriots’ star quarterback Tom Brady fell badly after a hit from a player for the Kansas City Chiefs, his scream stunned Gillette Stadium into silence. There was, however, no stunned silence in the bars and living rooms in New York: when Brady fell, reported a New York Times editor who had been watching the NFL game in a Midtown Manhattan bar, “people in the restaurant roared with delight.” And when it turned out that Brady’s injury was a torn ligament, serious enough to force him to sit out the season, Internet chat rooms went mad with excitement.

It wasn’t to everyone’s taste. “Cheering when a player is injured is the epitome of classlessness,” wrote one commentor on the New York Times’ Fifth Down blog. “To actually stand up and cheer when a fellow human being has suffered a painful injury? There is something very wrong there. Don’t give me this BS about honesty and ‘expressing your feelings,’ there are some lines that should not be crossed.” Others were more pragmatic: “to see Brady out of the season will make beating the Pats meaningless… Sport is made great by the best facing the best.”

But the main thing I noticed as I scrolled through these comments is how often people defended their Schadenfreude by saying that the player deserved it. The fans who cheered were rapturous—as James had put it—euphoric at the possibility of their win. But when asked, they defended this pleasure with the most apparently rational of reasons. The Pats deserved it. They deserved it for cheating. They deserved it for some previous underhand tackle. They deserved it for historical grievances. Most of all, they deserved it for being smug.

“You better believe I’d have joined in,” wrote one commentor who took to his keyboard with an exultant air. “I cheered in the comfort of my own vehicle. That smug schmuck and his cheating coach deserve some comeuppance… Yeah, I’m bitter. It’s the story of any Raiders fan’s life.”