CHAPTER XI

VANITY AND THE PRINCIPLES OF RIDICULE

        In vanity, conceit, and excessive pride generally superior qualities, virtues, and merits are claimed by the persons affected by such mental states. Such persons act as superiors in regard to other people who have as yet to find out whether such superiority is real, and whether there is any substance to it, or whether it is all but a shadow. The very doubt that arises in the mind of the beholder as to the reality of such claims and, therefore, appropriateness of such behavior predisposes to the possibility of ridicule. The claims of superiority may turn out to be a false idea, a sort of delusion. The person affected by illusory claims shows weakness, defects. He is regarded as living below the normal, thus becoming an object of ridicule.

        Persons that claim superiority must also meet with a response, inasmuch as the superiority is related to a state of inferiority in other people. Now few would care to be subject to a state of inferiority, unless there is sufficient cause and reason. Wherever, therefore, claims of superiority are put forwards there is a possibility for laughter and derision. This is especially true in the case of vanity. The vain person is anxious for the approval and recognition of his superiority by his neighbor. As soon, however, as the neighbor becomes aware of the fact that his recognition is looked for he immediately feels his superiority over the vain person. The tables are thus turned and the subject of vanity becomes an object of ridicule.

        Conceit and pride have an exaggerated ego for their foundation. The self-complacency, the extreme selfishness, and often the disregard of the persons’ wishes, desires, sufferings, and aspirations deprive the vain of all sympathy, and hence they become fit objects of the comic wit who can see through the hollowness of their claims. The vain and conceited are greedy for other people’s opinions and praise. No sooner is this dependence discovered than they become the playthings of their neighbor’s game. The neighbors become conscious that all these proud and vain peacocks display ostentatiously their gorgeous tails for the edification and amusement of their acquaintances. The vain and the conceited become dependent on those whom they regard as inferior and fall below the level of the very people whom they affect to despise―they are humiliated by their would-be inferiors―the game is turned against them.

        As soon as the inferiors refuse to acknowledge themselves as being on a lower level, as soon as they refuse to bow before the alleged superiority, and repudiate all claims of illusive paramount excellence, as soon as the vain person is not recognized and even regarded as supercilious, he who struts about in a self-devised cloak of honor, in a cloud of glory, becomes an object of derision, jest, and ridicule. That is why all ceremonies, solemnities, manners, and mannerisms whether of church, state, office, title, rank, sect, class, or caste become vulnerable as soon as their vain pomposity is exhibited to the view of the people whom they wish to cast under the spell of their superior charms, virtues, and merits. The charm is dispelled by a joke and a laugh. The delusions of grandeur and conceit are dispersed by rays of smiles and laughter.

        The comic effects become more intensified by the fact that, although vanity, conceit, and pride, with their mannerisms and ceremonies, are consciously displayed for the benefit of the external observers so as to obtain their admiration and thus make them feel their inferior position, there is another side to it, namely, the unconsciousness of the attitude taken by the actors in the play. The people, after all, may not be impressed by the superior airs and may regard the whole situation as a form of horse play.

        The vain person is not conscious of his vanity and does not realize that other people see through his motives and understand the pettiness of his condition and dependence of his position on the good will of his neighbor. The selfishness and self-glorification of the conceited and proud man prevent him from understanding his supposed inferiors and exclude him from sympathy with the lives and motives of his fellow men. This lack of understanding and sympathy produces not only an antagonism, but also a lack of comprehension of the feelings and effects of the esteem and respect after which the vain and conceited ardently strive. Hence many of their action appear in the eyes of the outside world as lacking in adjustment to circumstances. Their striking attitudes are regarded as inferior and are met with laughter and ridicule.

        The governing classes in plutocratic societies are specially apt to be affected by the malady of vanity and conceit. The purse-proud parvenu is, therefore, an inexhaustible theme for the comic writer. Aristotle in his Rhetoric gives an excellent description of the rich upstart, a psychological description which furnishes the reason why the rich man is exposed to ridicule.

        Anyone, without any great penetration, may distinguish the disposition consequent on wealth; for (its possessors) are insolent and overbearing, from being tainted in a certain way by the getting of their wealth. For they are affected as though they possessed every good; since wealth is a sort of standard of the worth of other things; whence everything seems to be purchasable by it. And they are affectedly delicate and purse-proud; they are thus delicate on account of their luxurious lives, and the display they make of their prosperity. They are purse-proud and violate the rules of good breeding, from the circumstances that every one is wont to dwell upon that which is beloved and admired by him, and because they think that others are emulous of that, of which they are themselves. But at the same time they are thus affected reasonably enough; for many are they who need the aid of men of property. Whence, too, that remark of Simonides addressed to the wife of Hiero respecting the wealthy and wise; for when she asked him, "whether it were better to have been born wealthy or wise," he replied "wealthy; for," he said, "he used to see the wise hanging on at the doors of the wealthy." And (it is a characteristic of the rich) that they esteem themselves worthy of being in office; for they consider themselves possessed of that on account of which they are entitled to be in office. And, in a word, the disposition of the rich is that of a fool amid of prosperity.

        The unconsciousness of their shallowness, vacancy, and frivolity makes the vain and conceited person specially weak in the eyes of their neighbors. Faults and defects are unconsciously displayed for the amusement of the world. What makes their condition all the lower and hence more ludicrous is the fact that the very defects are paraded as virtues of which the possessors are so conceitedly proud. The weakness and the inferiority become all the more prominent as the vain person remains under the illusion that the neighbor takes his weakness for strength and his defects for excelling virtues. This illusion of his belief in his own strength, and the delusion that his neighbor is under the same illusion, make the position of the vain and conceited person all the more ludicrous. One cannot help agreeing with Schopenhauer:

        The only genuine superiority is that of the mind and character; all other kinds are fictitious, affected, false; and it is good to make them feel that it is so, when they try to show off before the superiority that is true.

        And still, while vanity, conceit, and false pride form the material of many a comical situation, and many a comic writer has utilized these failings of human nature as subjects for his work, these states are by no means the only factors that call down ridicule upon their possessors. They are the streams that come from the source of all human ridicule – the inner inferiority of what is regarded as superior and excellent, and the recognition of the unreality of what is believed as an excelling form of reality. However, the case may be, it remains true that play with realities of life, now regarding the realities as illusions, now detecting the illusions regarded as realities and making merry over them and rising superior to them, will ever remain the subject of the comic. To laugh at the infirmities of human nature, to prick social, moral, religious, and family bubbles and see them explode will ever remain the joy and the essence of the ludicrous. The comic in all ages and in all societies, as well as in all stages of human development, will always consist in the play with apparently contrasting, contradictory combinations of the superior and the inferior, the real and the unreal, the actual and the illusory.

        This brings out another important element in the play of the ridiculous. We do not laugh at material, inanimate objects, inasmuch as we cannot find there any superiority or inferiority. We rarely laugh at landscapes or scenery or at material objects in general. Wherever we find such laughter always discover that we presuppose some agency behind the ludicrous. We may laugh at some illusions made for us by somebody or by some tricks of sleight of hand, but they all represent the work or presence of some human activity. We may laugh at some animal and its tricks. This brought about by our imagining the presence of some human agency.

        We may laugh at animals transformed by artificial human taste and the deformities brought in them under the belief of a greater improvement and enhancement of the beautiful. We may laugh at animals when we imagine something working in them similar to the human spirit. This is done only in so far as we humanize them and demand of the brute creation a certain standard. We laugh at the tricks of a pig, of a horse, of an elephant, or of a monkey, because we can easily imagine them to come near the individuality of man.

        Again, an animal in an unnatural position or when put under some unusual conditions making it look clumsy, awkward, and below the ease and freedom of adjustment characteristic of the species will be regarded as ridiculous. Thus a dog drinking beer and becoming unsteady and frisky, pigs eating decayed grapes and becoming intoxicated and wobbly on their legs remind one of the maladjustments of a drunkard and are objects of laughter. People may have a fit of uproarious laughter on seeing a pig with a tin can on his snout. The tin can on the hog’s snout, the squealing, the helpless running about, the contortions of his whole body, all that makes the crowd roar with laughter. What is funny to the crowd is the condition of the hog, his inferior state of adjustment, his helplessness, his inability to get rid of the tin can. Such a helpless state is regarded as ludicrous because of the association, though vague and subconscious, with the ludicrousness of man under similar circumstances. Clumsiness, awkwardness, and helplessness in harmless struggle are ludicrous in man, and by transference are ludicrous in animals.

        We may remind the reader of the ludicrousness of the man and the woman in the nursery tale which represents them with sausages sticking to their noses. In the comic the factor of personification plays an important part. Things and objects are laughed at in proportion as they are personified and found inferior to the average accepted animal and more especially human standard. We may formulate the law of transference: When objects, situations, and persons appear ridiculous, any other similar objects, situations, and persons appear ridiculous by association. Like waves in a liquid, laughter travels and spreads by the process of transference. An animal dressed up in man’s clothing appears to many people an object of laughter; a hog in a night cap is an object of ridicule. The reason is that when we see a pig dressed we think of a man reduced to the inferior place of the pig. We get a mental picture of a hog-man. A man seen on the street in a night cap is regarded as placed in an inferior position because of the unusual sight and association of the night cap with weakness, sleep, and helplessness, but a hog under such circumstances is laughed at because we think of man being ludicrous with a night cap on. The ludicrous effect is intensified as the hog emphasizes the inferiority of the situation.

        Jacobs, the English humorist, brings about ludicrous effects in a story of a captain who drank away his clothes and who had to appear before his crew and the people on deck in the garments of a woman. Even the great Shakespeare does not hesitate to utilize a similar situation to amuse his public. In his "Merry Wives of Windsor" Shakespeare puts Falstaff in a ludicrous position in having him escape the wrath of the husbands by dressing him in the garments of the old woman. We can well see the reason why such a situation appears ludicrous from the crowd of spectators. For, besides the fact that the use and custom are against being dressed in feminine attire, the awkwardness and clumsiness of the fit and the way the dress is handled by a man unused to it add considerably to the ludicrous effect.

        Above all, however, a woman is associated in the popular mind with weakness and inferiority, and a man in woman’s dress awakens associations of weakness and effeminacy. A man in a woman’s dress calls up the image of a woman, and by association the image of woman forms the compound of man-woman, and effeminate man. The inferior situation of the person becomes an object of ridicule. Thus we find that the law of personification and the principle of transference play an important rôle in the creations of the comic. The ludicrous is essentially human, and by principle of transference play is carried into ever higher and more complex spheres and relations. At the basis, however, of all the ludicrous we find present relations of inferiority. A series of examples in which the inferiority of bad habits or of defective intelligence, misapprehension, ignorance, or moral baseness is pointed out will best illustrate our point:

        "Well, Pat, my lad," said the kindly doctor, "you must drink this stuff. I’m afraid it’s a case of kill or cure with you know, my lad."

        "Well, I don’t care if it kills me, so long as it cures me in the end," said Pat. "Gimme the bottle."

        "What you need, madam, is oxygen. Once every afternoon for your inhalations. They will cost you $4.00 each."

        "I know that other doctor didn’t understand my case," declared the fashionable patient. "He told me all I needed was plain fresh air."

        An Irishman was once serving in a regiment in India. Not liking the climate, Pat tried to evolve a trick by which he could get home. Accordingly he went to the doctor and complained that his eyesight was bad. The doctor looked at him for a while and then said:

        "How can you prove to me that your eyesight is bad?"

        Pat looked about the room and at last said: "Well, Doctor, you see that nail on the wall?"

        "Yes," replied the doctor.

        "Well, then," said Pat, "I can’t."

        The British Medical Journal selects a few of the most amusing blunders made by applicants for life insurance:

        Mother died in infancy.

        Father went to bed feeling well and next morning woke up dead.

        Applicant has never been fatally sick.

        Father died suddenly; nothing serious.

        Grandmother died from gunshot caused by an arrow shot by an Indian.

        Mother’s last illness was chronic rheumatism, but she was cured before death.

        Said the gentleman who had been reading birth and death statistics: "Do you know, James, that every time I breathe a man dies?"

        "Then," said James, "why don’t you chew cloves?"

        "I don’t like your heart action," the doctor said, applying the stethoscope again. "You have had some trouble with angina pectoris."

        "You’re partly right," said the young man, sheepishly, "only that wasn’t her name."

        "Is the man dangerously wounded?" asked the police sergeant.

        "Two of the wounds are mortal," replied the Irish surgeon, "but the third can be cured, provided the man keeps strictly quiet at least six weeks."

        An Irish traveler who loved tenderly his wife and his children once declared with enthusiasm that the best thing about going away from my home was getting back again!

        "Oi congratulate yez, Moik; it’s a father I hear yez do be."

        "Sure, an’ it’s two fathers Oi’m afther bein’. It’s twins, b-gorry."

        The following verses bring out well the relation of inferiority present in ridicule:

        "When Mr. Casey died he left all he had to the orphan asylum."

        "Indeed! That was nice of him. What did he leave?"

        "His twelve children."

        An Irishman gave his advice to an English friend:

        "Wherever you see a head, hit it!"

        A peasant, undersized but wrathful, and with his shillelagh grasped threateningly in his hand, was going about the fair asking, "Who struck Buckley? Show me the man who struck Buckley?" But when a stalwart and dangerous looking man stepped forward saying, "'Twas I," the little peasant looked and said more quietly, "Well, afther all perhaps Buckley desarved it."

        "Phwat koind of a wreck wor it, Pat?" queried Larry after a railway accident.

        "Th’conductor said it wor tilliscope," replied Pat.

        "A tilliscope?" said Larry. "Bedad, Oi guess that’s phoy Oi seen so many stars."

        "Why do thim false eyes be made of glass now?" asked Mike.

        "Sure, an’ how else could they say throo’ ‘em, ye thickhead?" answered Pat.

        "Phat a blessing it is," said Pat, "that night never comes on till late in the day, when a man is all toired out, and he could not work any more, at all, even if it was morning!"

        An astronomer was trying to explain to an Irishman that the earth is round but Pat would not believe it. After some discussion the astronomer said, "Now where does the sun rise?"

        "In the east," said Pat.

        "And where does it set?"

        "Sure, in the west."

        "Then how does the sun manage to get back to the east?"

        Pat scratched his head for a few seconds and looked perplexed. At last his face lighted up, and he shouted triumphantly: "Sure, sir, it slips back in the dark."

        "I don’t know that you’re the man whose name is on this check," said the bank cashier. "You’ll have to be identified before I can give you the money."

        "Oidentifoyed, is it?" replied Pat. "Sure, thin, cast yer eye on this bit of fotygar, an’ ye’ll see that it’s meself entoirely."

        "Oi’d like a job wid ye, sor," said an Irishman to a foreman in a factory.

        "Well, I don’t know. There isn’t much doing just at present. I don’t think I could keep you busy," said the foreman.

        "Indade, sor," answered Pat, in a reassuring tone, "it’ull take very little to kape me busy."

        "'Tis a fine pitcher you have of the old man, it is," said an Irishwoman to her neighbor, who had just been left a widow.

        "Isn’t it?" replied the widow. "It is thot natural yez can almost hear him swear."

        The principle of blending may be pointed out here. This consists in the procedure of blending the superior and the inferior into such an inextricable mesh that the two cannot be separated. Instead of sharply contrasting the light and shade of the superior and of the inferior the two are so united that they appear to form a whole. The base and the mean are interconnected with the good and the excellent. As a matter of fact, the superior and the inferior are not entirely blended. Now the one, now the other appears to view and suddenly disappears. There is rapid kaleidoscopic change of the great and the little, of the low and the high. The law of interchange is really operative here, but in such way that there is rapid change from the high to the low and from the base to the good, so that the whole movement appears to the mental eye as one continuous whole in which the constituent elements are intimately blended. The base is expressed in terms of the pure and the noble, while the lofty and the good are debased and degraded. The whole, in order to appear ludicrous, must give the immediate impression of inferiority. In fact, in order to convey the ludicrous aspect of the whole, the suggestion of inferiority must be evident and overwhelming. The following negro sermon (by W.H. Levinson) may be taken as a fair example of the workings of the law of blending in the domain of the ludicrous:

        The good intentions, the religious feelings, the enthusiasm and moral earnestness are all interwoven with the most inapt and inappropriate illustrations, while the whole sermon is put in a ludicrous light by the marked negro dialect. The sermon presents a blend of the good and the base expressed in a mean, ignoble form.

        In his story "A Piece of Red Calico" Stockton presents the ludicrous character of a man who tries to match a piece of red calico for his wife. Such an insignificant affair in the eyes of an ordinary mortal is found to be accompanied with petty, insurmountable difficulties which begin to pile as the poor man keeps on chasing after his piece of calico and is finally glad to get away with anything he can obtain. Starting out with some trivial trifle the apparent insignificance grows in extensity and intensity, expands in magnitude and dimension and finally collapses like an overblown bubble. This is the principle of accumulation, in fact, we may term the mechanism of this form of the jocose as the bubble of absurdity.

        As another example of the bubble of absurdity and folly used for the manifestation of the inner character of the ludicrous may be taken the story "Our Fire-Screen" by the same writer. The lady of the house makes a pretty fire screen and the cabinetmaker constructs a fashionable frame in the Eastlake style. This frame, though stylish, is out of harmony with the rest of the furniture. Two uncomfortable chairs of the Eastlake fashion are brought to fit the frame. This in its turn is out of harmony with the other furniture. The result is that all the other furniture is sold to the brother-in-law, Tom, who keeps on laughing at the fashionable taste and who buys up the modern comfortable furniture as soon as the Eastlake medieval furniture, inlaid with tiles, is being installed. The furniture in its turn does not harmonize with the modern house. The house is rebuilt in the old style. Then the landscape has to be altered to fit the house. Home becomes more and more uncomfortable as it is getting more and more Eastlake and stylish. Finally the climax comes when Tom suggests that in order to bring about more complete harmony the modern dress should be discarded in favor of an Eastlake suit with pegs and with tiles in the back. This last joke pointing out the absurdity of the whole situation is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Tom’s modern house with the same old furniture is bought by the fashionable couple who now thoroughly enjoy their own discarded furniture. The full-blown bubble of folly has collapsed.

        In Lucian again we meet with the same method of ridicule. Thus in "The True History" or in his "Trips to the Moon," he rails and scoff at the histories and traditions of his time by piling preposterous nonsense on stupid absurdities. In his introduction to "The True Histories," he says:

        I do not blame (writers) for their falsehoods, seeing that the custom has been sometimes authorized, even by the pretenders to philosophy. I only wonder that they should expect to be believed. Being incited by a ridiculous vanity to transmit something to posterity I turned my thoughts towards falsehood. I shall at least tell one thing true, when I tell you that I lie and I mean to speak not a word of truth. Know ye, therefore, that I am going to write about what I never saw myself, nor experienced, nor so much as heard from anybody else, and what is more, of such things as neither are, nor even can be.

        The whole city was of gold and the walls of emerald. The seven gates were all made of one trunk of the cinnamon tree, the pavement, within the walls, of ivory, the temples of beryl, the altars of one large amethyst. Round the city flowed a river of the most precious ointment. The baths instead of water were filled with warm dew. For clothes they wear spider’s web. They have no bodies, but only the appearance of them, insensible to the touch, and without flesh, yet they stand, taste, move, and speak.

        Piling absurdity upon absurdity, he derides the beliefs and traditions current in his time and brings discredit on the credulity of his contemporaries.

        Cervantes, in ridiculing the chivalry of the Middle Ages, makes Don Quixote, the knight-errant, work himself up to a pitch of knightly phrenzy in which he loses his wits so completely as to regard the inferior under the glamo[u]r of the sublime and the superior. He takes a country inn for a castle, the servant girls for princesses, the innkeeper as the lord of the castle. He fights windmills, regarding them as transformed giants, and attacks herds of sheep under the idea that they are enchanted armies. Cervantes keeps on heaping absurd incidents in which the folly of the hero is exposed to the reader. In weaving his web of glory around prosaic things the ridiculous character of the knight of the sorrowful figure of La Mancha stands out in an even clearer light with the accumulation of absurd events and with the thickening of the plot of a supersensuous ideal folly.

        Similarly Voltaire, when ridiculing the shallow optimistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, makes Candide and Professor Pangloss pass through all sorts of painful situations, exposing with ever greater power and emphasis the weakness, the silliness, the stupidity of professional optimism. The vast accumulation of mishaps, misfortunes and suffering in his best of all possible worlds is concluded by Pangloss’ remark:

The full blown bubble of optimism made up of pain, privation and suffering bursts and vanishes.

        We may point out another important principle of the ludicrous, that of interchange. Any interchange of cause and effect of antecedents and consequences associated with the relation of superior and inferior arouses the sense of the ludicrous. Thus Stockton, in his humorous description of the haunted ghost, also in his direction or instructions given to the young American youth as to how to bring up parents, makes us laugh at the interchange of relations of superior and inferior. The superior reduced to the inferior, or the inferior raised playfully to the level of the superior gives rise to the ludicrous. In short, any interchange of places in a series or in different series of events in the contrasting relationship of superior and inferior is the cause of laughter. Falling into a pit dug for others, being caught into a trap laid for one’s neighbor, being entangled in a net intended for your friend or enemy, all that is a source of amusement. Any fooling with others and being fooled in turn cannot help awaken the sense of the ludicrous.

        We have here a double play on fooling, human folly is double exposed to the view of the observer and hence hilarious laughter. The ghost from haunting the living is haunted by the living, the cheat is deceived by his own well-laid schemes, the intriguer is caught in the network of his own intrigues, the "wise" are entangled in the meshes of their own conceit and folly, the joke is turned on the joker; all such play of interchange of relations is sure to raise in us the laughter of ridicule. Any interchange of links in series of events, giving rise to associations of inferiority, arouses laughter. Many comical situations are brought about by this principle of interchange.

        When by association a series of events becomes firmly fixed in the mind, such as manners, customs and beliefs, any change in the sequence of the events, any variation in the order fixed by association of contiguity, a form into which the human mind easily drifts, arouses in the mind the sense of the ludicrous. The philistine regards all variations from his accepted routine of life as something inherently absurd, silly and ridiculous. On the other hand, nothing forms such a good subject for the comic as the narrow-minded, hide-bound, Lilliputian philistine when viewed from the heights of talent and genius. Society and its ideal average, normal mediocrity with its pleasing, mannerly, commonplace platitudes may have its fling of jeering at genius for not conforming to social usage and for breaking away from the well-trodden paths of social ruts. Far more effective and deadly are the stones of ridicule cast by the hand of genius at the Philistine Goliath, strong in his brute social power, but dull of wits. Social laughter is momentary, soon burns itself out and passes away like the fire and smokes of straw, but genius shakes the very skies with it lasting, inextinguishable laughter.

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