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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LAUGHTER Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D. © 1913, 1919, 1923 |
CHAPTER XII
THE COMIC IN LITERATURE
Shakespeare in his comedies uses inferior, humiliating, clumsy, and awkward situations to throw ridicule on the characters which he wishes to make comic: Thus in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" Shakespeare makes Falstaff relate to Master Brook the adventures passed through with Mistress Ford.
Fal. The peaking Cornute her husband, Master Brook, dwelling in a continual 'larum of jealousy, comes in the instant of our encounter, after we had embraced, kissed, protested and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy; and at his heels a rabble of his companions; thither provoked and instigated by his distemper, and, forsooth, to search his house for his wife's love. Ford. What, while you were there? Fal. While I was there. Ford. And did he search for you, and did not find you? Fal. You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford's approach; and, in her inventions and Ford's wife's distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket. Ford. A buck-basket! Fal. By the Lord, a buck-basket―rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, sacks, foul stockings, greasy napkins; " that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound of villainous smell ever offended nostril. |
The ridiculous situation in which Falstaff is put by the humiliation and discomfiture of his adventure with Mistress Ford is all the more enhanced by his relating all that to Mr. Brook, who is no other than Mr. Ford, the lady's husband in disguise. Falstaff unconsciously tells of his humiliating and, hence, ridiculous situation to the very man whom he would least have cared to meet.
Fal. Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have suffered. Being thus crammed in the basket, a couple of Ford's knaves, his hands, were called forth by their mistress to carry me in the name of the foul clothes to Datchet-lane: they took me on their shoulders; met the jealous knave their master in the door, who asked them once or twice what they had in their basket: I quaked for fear, lest the lunatic-knave would have searched it; but fate, ordaining he should be cuckold, held his hand. Well: on went he for a search, and away went I for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, Master Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths; first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten bellwether; next, to be compassed, like a good bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that,―a man of my kidney,―think of that,―that am as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw; it was a miracle to 'scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing , hot in that surge like a horse-shoe; think of that,―hissing hot,―think of that, Master Brook. |
Of his next adventure with Mrs. Ford, Falstaff tells Mr. Brook:
"I went to her, Master Brook, as you see, like a poor old man: but I came from her, Master Brook, like a poor old woman. That same knave Ford, her husband, hath the finest mad devil of jealousy in him, Master Brook, that ever governed frenzy. I will tell you.―he beat me grievously, in the shape of a woman, for in the shape of man, Master Brook, I fear not Goliath with a weaver's beam." |
Shakespeare tells us here why to dress like a woman is comic, because it is inferior, it means to be unmanly, cowardly, to be inferior to the high dignity of manhood. The beating of an old woman by a strong man appears to have been quite comical in the time of Shakespeare. It was the expression of the superior way of triumph over an old witch. The lack of sympathy, the brutality of that age may be illustrated by the following anecdote taken from a book on old English jokes:
A witch being at the stake to be burnt, she saw her son there and, being very dry, desired him to give her drink. "No, Mother," says the son, "'twill do you wrong; far the dryer you be, you'll burn all the better."
In the enchanting fairy-comedy, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare represents the elf king Oberon as putting Titania, the fairy queen, in an inferior and hence ludicrous condition by throwing a charm on her and having her fall in love with the vulgar clown-weaver, Bottom, on whom the merry Puck claps an ass's hoad. Bottom sings his asinine song:
The ousel
cock so black of hue, |
Tita. [Awaking] What Angel wakes me from my flowery, bed?
Bot. [Sings]
The finch,
the sparrow, and the lark, |
for, indeed, who would set his wit to so foolish a bird? who would give a bird the lie, though he cry "cuckoo" never so ?
Tita. I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.
Crowned with a chaplet of flowers Bottom's asinine head reposes on the graceful bosom of the fairy queen. Here Shakespeare avails himself of the still lower form of degradation by making the delicate and exquisite fairy queen fall in love with a hairy ass, a vulgar, low fellow and brute, thus depriving her of all appreciation of the good, true, and the beautiful. In fact, he makes her all the lower and all the more ridiculous by putting the little fairy queen in the position of taking the low, the inferior, the vulgar as the superior, excellent, and refined. Nothing can be more ridiculous than matching a fairy and an ass, nothing can be more ludicrous than vulgar taste in a fairy. As the Bible puts it: "As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman without taste and discretion." The contrast emphasizes difference of superior and inferior.
When Homer in his masterly strokes of genius pictures the ludicrous, clumsy, awkward, and ungainly form of the cyclop, Polyphemus, he gives the outlines of the monster in a few humorous lines:
A form
enormous! far unlike the race |
Ulysses conceives the idea of making the cyclop drunk with wine:
Such was the
wine; to quench whose fervent stream
Scarce twenty
measures from the living stream To cool one cup sufficed.
Ulysses then persuades the monster to taste of the wine:
"Cyclop; since
human flesh has been thy feast, Now drain this goblet, potent to digest!"
He heard, he
took, and pouring down his throat, Delighted, swill'd the large luxurious
draught. "More! give me more!" (he cried); "the boon be thine,
Whoe'er thou art
that bear'st celestial wine! Declare thy name; not mortal is this juice,
But this
descended from the bless'd abodes,
A rill of
nectar, streaming from the gods" He said, and
greedy grasped the heady bowl, Thrice drained, and poured the deluge on his
soul.
His sense lay
covered with the dozy fume;
While thus my
fraudful speech I reassume
"Thy promised
boon, O Cyclap ! now I claim
And plead my
title, Noman is my name."
The generosity of the monster is then humorously set forth :
The giant then:
"Our promised grace receive,
The hospitable
boon we mean to give:
When all thy
wretched crew have felt my power, Noman shall be the last I will devour."
When Ulysses
with his companions deprive the monster of his eyesight; the cyclop,
With voice
like thunder, and a direful yell |
The cyclops
come,
Inquire the
cause, and crowd the cavern door:
"What hurts
thee, Polyphemus? What strange affright
Thus breaks our
slumbers, and disturbs the night?
Does any mortal,
in the unguarded hour
Of sleep oppress
thee, or by fraud or power?
Or thieves
insidious thy fair flock surprise?" Thus they: the cyclop from his den replies:
"Friends, Noman kills me; Noman, in the hour Of sleep, oppresses me with
fraudful power."
"If Noman hurt
thee, but the hand divine
Inflicts
diseases, it fits to resign:
To Jove or thy
father Neptune pray,"
The brethren
cried, and instant strode away.
Thus does Homer
amuse his hearers with the clumsy, ungainly figure of the brutal, stupid monster
by drawing a picture of the inferior, savage type of man-cyclop to the delight
and ridicule of his Homeric audience.
In "The Tempest"
Shakespeare, under different circumstances, draws a similar scene of the drunken
monster Caliban:
The drunken
sailor Stephano finds the cowering and trembling monster Caliban:
Ste. This is some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. . . . I will give him some relief if it be but for that. . . .He shall taste of my bottle. . . .Come on your ways; open your mouth; here is that which will give language to you, cat: open your mouth; this will shake your shaking, I can tell you, and that soundly: you cannot tell who's your friend: open your chops again. |
Under the influence of drink Caliban gets a ludicrous fit of exaltation, displaying his low, mean type:
Cal.
[Aside] That's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor: I will
kneel to him. . . .I'll
swear, upon that bottle, to be thy true subject; for the liquor is not
earthly. |
We realize once more how Shakespeare, following Homer, has his sport of the ugly, ungainly monstrosity of a Caliban by making him resemble man, and then depriving him of all human qualities. The image of a degraded, low, mean, and drunken man-Caliban is pictured before the eyes of the spectators and stirs up derision and ridicule.
In a similar ludicrous way Swift treats the classic story of Baucis and Philemon, who, for their goodness and piety, have been changed by Jupiter into a linden tree and an oak. The miracle occurs to two wandering saints, the house being changed into a church, of which Philemon is made the parson:
They
scarce had spoke, when fair and soft, |
Thus in his humorous way does Swift ridicule the classic story and the church miracles by interweaving a Miraculous story of saints and holy church with the pagan myth, interrelating the chimney with the church steeple and lofty spire, converting the profane inverted kitchen kettle into the consecrated bell. The saint, the heavy climbing of the wall after the beam and rafter, the church, the bell, and the kettle with its "inclination for below" all become intertwined in the miraculous myth. The whole forms an excellent parody in which the solemn, the majestic, and the sacred are reduced to the low, mean state of the vulgar pot and kettle.
Similarly Heine, in his "Ideas," writes:
I was once asked six times in succession, "Henri, what ' is the French for the faith?" And six times, ever more weepingly, I replied, "It is called, le credit." And after the seventh question, with his cheeks of a red deep cherry rage color, my furious examiner cried, "It is la religion!" and there was a rain of blows and a thunder of laughter from all my schoolmates.
In another place Heine writes:
The Berliner
appeared to listen to me somewhat distractedly―more attractive objects had drawn
his attention―and he finally interrupted me with the words, "Excuse me, if you
please, if I interrupt you, but will you be so kind as to tell me what sort of a
dog that is which runs there?" "That is another puppy."
"Ah, you don't
understand me. I refer to the great white shaggy dog without a tail."
"My dear sir,
that is the dog of the modern Alcibiades."
"But," exclaimed
the Berliner, "where is then the modern Alcibiades himself ?"
"To tell the
plain truth," I replied, "the office is not as yet occupied and we have so far
only his dog."
In the first
sally Heine ridicules religion by associating it with the lower form of business
credit. Religion with its high claims, unworldly views, ideals, and beliefs is
reduced to sordid credit, business, and cash in the second sally Heine ridicules
the politics and statesmen of his day by having them go to the dogs. The
ridicule is all the stronger by bringing in the illustrious classical name of
Alcibiades and then leaving in his place his proverbial tailless dog. Where
there should have been a superior statesman, like Alcibiades, there we only find
a puppy without a tail. In both cases the ridicule consists in showing a low,
mean vulgarity where there should have been superiority and excellence. We laugh
because we find the shadow instead of the substance, the vulgar instead of the
sacred, the tail instead of the body, and where there should have been the man
we only find a cur. The grand ideals of faith are based on commercial credit and
the statesman is represented by a dog.