ON LAUGHTER

 

Since humor literature came to be promoted, “selling laughter”¹ has become a profession for men of letters.² Humor is, of course, vented by means of laughter, but laughter does not necessarily indicate a sense of humor. Liu Jizhuang’s Guangyang Notes states, “The donkey’s bray sounds like crying; the horse’s whinny sounds like laughter.”³ Yet the horse is not celebrated as a great humorist—likely because he has a long face. In truth, most people’s laughter is akin to the horse’s whinny and cannot be considered humorous.

Aristotle appears to have been the first person to use humor to distinguish man and beast.⁴ In The History of Animals [sic] he states, “Man is the only animal able to laugh.” The gist of the modern genius W. S. Blunt’s sonnet “Laughter and Death” is that the natural world of birds and beasts has a fitting sound to express every emotion—joy, anger, love, and fear—but lacks only laughter to denote humorousness.⁵ Nevertheless, if we hold that laughter is an expression of humor, then laughter must be regarded as nothing more than a waste product or luxury good, since not all of mankind has a need to laugh. The cries of birds and beasts would be sufficient to convey the average man’s emotions: when angry he roars like a lion; when sad he howls like an ape; when arguing he croaks like a frog; when he encounters his enemy he barks like a dog that’s seen its shadow; and when he spies his lover he starts cooing like a turtledove. How many people who truly possess a sense of humor, we may well ask, need laughter to express it? Moreover, the Creator distributed the ability to laugh evenly throughout humanity—every person’s face can smile and throat emit laughter.⁶ To have this inborn talent but not use it would be a pity indeed. Thus, most people laugh not because they are humorous, but in fact because they have the capacity to laugh and use laughter to cover up their lack of a sense of humor. Thus, laughter gradually lost its former purpose: what originally signified an abundance of humor slowly became a cover for a dearth of humor. Hence, we have the idiot’s dull-witted laugh, the blind man’s naughty and mischievous laugh—as well as the recent vogue of “humor literature.”

A smile is the quickest and most fluid of expressions, spreading from the eyes to the corners of the mouth. “The Eastern Wasteland” section of Dongfang Shuo’s The Classic of the Divine and the Strange records that when Duke Dongwang lost in a game of dice, “Heaven smiled at him.”⁷ Zhang Hua’s annotation that lightning is Heaven smiling was truly inspired. According to Lady Holland’s A Memoir of the Reverend Sidney Smith, Sidney Smith once remarked that “lightning is Heaven’s wit.” The smile could indeed be said to be lightning on the human face: the eyes suddenly light up and the teeth flash through parted lips. Just as lightning cannot be captured and substituted for the sun and moon that hang on high and shine upon all, neither can a smile be turned into a fixed, collective expression. As a promoted product, humor is inescapably artificial. Such a mechanical smile is akin only to the bared teeth of a skull—not nearly as agile as in a living person. In Le rire, Henri Bergson writes that everything laughable arises from something flexible becoming stiff and awkward, from the “mechanical encrusted on the living” (le mécanique plaque sur le vivant).⁸ This is why repetitive, monotonous speech patterns and movements, such as stuttering, clichés, and children’s mimicry of adults provoke laughter. Old people tend to be funnier than young people because they can’t move as nimbly and are full of ossified habits. Humor cannot be promoted for the same reason. The moment it is promoted, the natural turns into affect, and the mercurial transforms into rigidity. Such humor is itself fodder for humor; such laughter is itself laughable. A man with a genuine sense of humor possesses a particular type of understanding. He laughs merrily, smiles calmly, and breathes a breath of fresh air into life’s dreariness. Perhaps only hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles hence will he find a kindred spirit, standing on the opposite bank of time and space, who smiles back. A large crowd of people choosing the same moment to open their mouths and relax their throats in a merry group laugh is the type of chain reaction that can only be generated by some vulgar traveling vaudeville show. If promoting domestic goods results in more bogus brands, humor is even less suited to mass production. Instead of generating humorists, the promotion of humor has multiplied only the number of clowns playing with brush and ink. The clown’s social status, of course, rises dramatically as he muddles his way from the theatrical stage to the literary stage under the banner of humor. Nevertheless, humor’s quality deteriorates when the clown turns it into a bogus brand, and most literary art of this sort must be regarded as little more than “entertainment art.” A clown can make us laugh, to be sure, but he is completely unlike a person with a genuine sense of humor. When a person endowed with a genuine sense of humor laughs, we laugh with him, while a clown feigning humorousness is laughable, and we laugh at him. The clown makes us laugh not because he possesses a sense of humor, but because we ourselves do.

Thus, humor is at most a sensibility. It most certainly cannot be branded as a doctrine, and it is even less well suited to being a profession. We must recall that the original Latin meaning of humor is “fluid.” Put another way, humor, like woman in the eyes of Jia Baoyu, is made of water.⁹ To turn humor into a doctrine or a means of livelihood is to congeal a liquid into a solid, to transform a living thing into an artifact. When someone possessed of a genuine sense of humor starts selling laughter as his means of livelihood—Mark Twain, for instance—his works will no longer be worth reading. Since the end of the eighteenth century, Germans have loved to discourse on humor, but the more they’ve said, the less relevant the discussion has been to its ostensible topic. This is because the Germans are a sausage-making people who mistakenly believe that humor is like ground meat and can be wrapped up into tidy parcels of ready-made spiritual nourishment.¹⁰ Humor lessens life’s seriousness and by no means takes itself seriously. True humor can laugh at itself. It not only has a humorous view of human life, it has a humorous view of humor itself. Promoting humor as a slogan or a standard is a gesture bereft of humor. This is not humor but its earnest avocation, laughter pried from a solemn countenance. Again, we are reminded of the horse’s whinny! It may indeed sound like laughter, but the horse’s face is still without a trace of a smile, and is as long as that of a surviving friend of the deceased at a memorial gathering, or of a master of the advanced sort at the lecture podium.¹¹

Generally speaking, people have one of two motivations for pretending to be something they’re not. Some do so out of respect, such as an uncouth person who respects art and collects antiques in order to pose as a man of culture and refinement. Some do so for profit, like the scoundrel who passes himself off as an upright man by invoking religion and morality. Humor, presumably, is usually appropriated for one of these two purposes. In the long run, however, bogus goods cannot pass as the real thing. Westerners call bright and uplifting laughter “silvery laughter.”¹² Fake humor gives forth the dull clunk of a leaden slug and can only be considered leaden laughter. Then again, it could be that “silvery laughter” means to profit from selling laughter or to laugh for silver, akin to the old saying “in books there are roomfuls of gold.”¹³ I’ll stop here for the time being and leave this sampling for the reference of lexicographers.