CHAPTER XV 

THE MECHANICAL AND THE STUPID 

        Bergson, in his remarkable essay on laughter, claims that the ridiculous is present wherever the automatic, the absent-minded, the rigid, or the mechanical is detected in the flexible, ever adjusting spirit of the living; in other words, the ridiculous is the finding or revelation of the rigid, automatic mechanism that takes up its abode in the living soul. He studies the work of many comic writers, he analyzes jokes and witticisms and tries in all of them to find the mechanical behind life activity. Bergson lays down the law: “The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportions as that body reminds one of a mere machine.” “Something mechanical encrusted upon the living.” “The body taking precedence of the soul. Matter seeking to outdo the mind, the letter aiming at ousting the spirit.” “The laughable is something mechanical in something living.” According to Bergson, “comedy combines events so as to introduce mechanism into the outer forms of life.” “What is essentially laughable is what is done automatically.” “Absentmindedness is always comical.” “Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.” “Inside the person we must distinctly perceive, as though through a glass, a set-up mechanism. The originality of a comic artist is thus expressed in the special kind of life he imparts to a mere puppet.”

        It is true that mechanism in life is a factor in the ludicrous, but it is not true when we assert the universal proposition that the ludicrous is nothing but the mechanical in life. Bergson got hold of only one of the factors of the ludicrous. It is true that the detection of the mechanical, of routine in life is a source of ridicule, it is, however, only one of the many streams from which ridicule is drawn, but it is not the only one.

        Moreover, the stream has not been traced to its source. The mechanical in life is ludicrous not as mere mechanical, but because it is in relation to an inferior form of existence. The mechanical, the routine is ludicrous, because it is associated with deformities, meanness, triviality, debasement, frivolity, and inferiority. Bergson lays down the law: “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.” True, but do we not laugh ever time when a person gives us the impression of being an animal, a brute, an ass?

        We do not certainly think of mechanism when we compare a person to a cow, an ass, or a mule. The mechanical in life may be granted to be ludicrous, but it is by no means true that in every joke, pun, humor, and wit we are to look for the rigid, the mechanical. We laugh whenever we can detect the inferior under the cloak of the superior, whenever we can show the low, the mean, the base under the guise of the superior. We laugh when we can discern the fool’s cap under the crown of the monarch, when we can see the ass’s head on a Bottom’s body, conditions hidden from us in the case of persons who happen to fascinate us by their superficial manners of dignity. We Laugh, not only at the man of routine, but laugh all the more when we can discern in the respectable, dignified, moral, and religious man the scoundrel, the knave, and the rouge. We laugh whenever we discover the illusory under the veil of reality. We laugh whenever a low form of life attempts to impress us by superior airs. We laugh at meanness, mediocrity, vanity, and conceit.

        Perhaps we may now further advance in our search for the nature of the ludicrous. We have pointed out that the finding of the inferior under the guise of the superior, discerning the low form under the veil of the higher is the essence of the ludicrous. Defects, deviations from the normal, from the ordinary standard accepted in the given community—low states, mean conditions of life paraded as merits and virtues, vanity, and conceit in the garb of respectability and dignity, all are good subjects for ridicule. The high form is shown to be illusory, deceptive. The person ridiculed is unconscious of his defects and shortcomings, and thinks that his low form is really a high one. All his actions, sayings, and mental activity flow from that source of unconsciousness, the unawareness of his low condition. In fact, he even regards his low state as the very best and the highest. Failures are taken by him as successes, and demerits are regarded as virtues.

       In its more developed forms the naïve, unconscious state rises to extreme vanity and conceit. He cannot see himself as others see him. He is cursed with the delusion of parading the inferior as the superior, he takes the low as the high, the mean as the dignified. Is not the ludicrous a form of mental blindness?

       There is no need to go far to look for this mental defect. Like dirt, it is ever present, we must constantly purify and clean ourselves from it. The ridiculous is something that takes direct possession of the soul and strikes at the very kernel of the human personality. Ridicule purifies the soul encrusted with moral dirt.

        What defects acts so as to paralyze a person into unconsciousness of his own defects and failures? Is it not a defect of intelligence, a want of the reasoning powers? And still the defect, though mental, and affecting the reasoning capacities, must not be of the nature of a mental malady. For otherwise our pity would be aroused and we would regard it rather as a misfortune which would be more tragic than comic. The mental defect must be of such a character as can be corrected, or as something that may be rectified by the person. In short, the subject of ridicule is foolishness, stupidity, ignorance.

        When we come to examine closely the sources of ridicule we find that possibly nothing so much answers the purpose of the comic as the dull of wit and the stupid. The boor, the yokel, the silly, the weakminded will ever form the theme of comedy and anecdote. It is the fool who is ridiculed. Whoever acts the superior being unconscious of his real inferiority or thinks that others cannot see it, while it is patent to everybody that he is below the average social standards of intellect, he is a fool and he is laughed at for his stupidity.

        An ignorant fellow who tries to pass off as a learned professor or as a great scholar, even if he is conscious of his ignorance, but is unconscious of the fact that others can see through him, is a fit subject for ridicule. He is stupid and a fool.

        The ludicrous side becomes even more enhanced if he is convinced that he is really a learned man and acts and talks accordingly, thus being doubly ignorant, ignorant of his own conditions and ignorant of the attitude that others have toward him. He is doubly foolish and the laughter at him is irresistible.

       In cases where the cause of the ridicule is not clearly shown a little examination reveals the fact that it is the fool and human folly generally that excite the merriment and ridicule of people, they are the constant topic of the joker, the punster, the wit, and even the earnest prophet, psalmist, and Christ. The central character of comedy is the fool, and the subject of the comic is human folly. Human folly, under all its disguises and in all the endless forms of vanity, conceit, arrogance, false pride, false overestimation of self and things, institutions, manners, beliefs, and ideals all defects and faults of the human soul that come under the categories of silliness, pig-headedness, asinity, are the subject of the comic and the ludicrous.

        Cervantes lays his finger on the cause of the ludicrous by telling us plainly the source whence flow all the comic manifestations of that Divine Comedy in which is penned the immortal type of Don Quixote: 

        This gentleman (Don Quixote) gave himself up to the reading of tales of chivalry. Among them all none pleased him so much as those love speeches and challenges, where in several places he found written: “The reason of the unreasonable treatment of my reason in such wise, that with reason I complain of your beauty,” and also when he read: “The high heaven of your divinity which divinely fortifies you with the stars making you meritorious of the merit merited by your greatness.” With this kind of language the poor gentleman lost his wits. In short, he so bewildered himself in this kind of study that his brain was dried up in such a manner that he came to lose his wits. 

        Aristophanes, in ridiculing Socrates, makes him occupy himself with silly questions such as: 

        The other day Socrates asked his disciple how many feet of its own feet a flea could jump. The disciple solved the problem in the cleverest way. He melted some wax; then took the flea and dipped its feet into the wax. When this was cold, the flea had slippers on; these he undid, and measured the stance. 

       The scrupulous exactness of this silly investigation reminds one of similar clever investigations carried out in many modern scientific laboratories, physical and psychological. 

        How many a noteworthy thing [Heine writes] can be adduced on ancient asses as opposed to the modern. How intelligent were the former and, ah! how stupid are the latter. How reasonably for instance spoke the ass of Balaam . . . . The modern asses are great asses. The antique assess—who had reached such a pitch of refinement—would turn in their graves could they hear how people talk about their descendants. Once “Ass” was an honorable title, signifying as much as “Court Counselor,” “Baron,” “Doctor of Philosophy.” 

        In ridiculing the stupidity of German ideas Heine writes: 

        My washerwoman complains that the Reverend Mr. S. has been putting “ideas” into the head of her daughter, which have made her foolish and unreasonable. The coachman Patterson grumbles out on every occasion, “That’s an idea! that’s an idea!” Yesterday he was regularly vexed when I inquired what sort of a thing he imagined an idea to be. And vexedly did he growl “an idea is an idea! an idea is any d—d nonsense that a man gets into his head.” It is in this sense that the word is used, as a title of a book, by the Court Counselor Heeren in Göttingen. 

        Heine tells us that the sources of his ridicule are the fool and human folly: 

        I really became cheerful when I reflect that all these fools whom I see here can be used in my writings; they are cash down, ready money. I feel like a diamond in cotton. The Lord hath blessed me, the fool crop has turned out uncommonly well this year, and like a good landlord I consume only a few at a time, and lay up the best for the future. Like a rich, plump merchant who rubbing his hands with genial joy wanders here and there amid chests, bales, boxes, and casks, even so do I wander around my people. Ye are all my own! Ye are all equally dear to me and I love ye, as ye yourselves love your own gold, and that is more than a little. Oh! How I laughed from my heart when I lately heard that one of my people had asserted with concern that he knew not how I could live, or what means I had—and yet he himself is such a first rate fool that I could live from him alone as on a capital. 

        Lack of intelligence, mediocrity, narrow-mindedness, stupidity, have always been the butt of ridicule. Even philosophers have castigated the philistine.

        Schopenhauer’s description of the small, narrow mind of mediocrity, keen for insignificant, inessential, practical points, may be interesting: 

        A philistine is a person with a small “normal” amount of intellect and with no mental needs. . . . A philistine is a person who is seriously occupied with realities which are no realities. . . . The philistine has no desire to gain knowledge for its own sake, he has no experience of true aesthetic pleasure. . . His real pleasures are of a practical and sensual character. . . . If the luxuries of life are heaped upon the philistine he becomes bored, and against boredom he has a great many fancied remedies—balls, theaters, parties, clubs, cards, games, traveling, and so on. . . . The peculiar characteristic of the philistine is a dull, dry kind of gravity akin to that of brutes. 

        Matthew Arnold, in his “Essays,” writes on the subject: 

     “Philistines! Perhaps we have not the words because we have so much of the thing. . . . I think we had much better take the term Philistine itself.” A philistine is a “man who regards the possession of practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself, or something that compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea of reason.” “Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it’s anything but that; the born lover of ideas, the born hater of common places, must feel in this country, that the sky over his head is of brass and iron.” 

    Perhaps the best expression of the ludicrous triviality and banal commonplace of silly, meaningless platitudes is conveyed by the following verse from “Mother Goose”: 

        When Bessie Brooks and Tommy Snooks
        Went out on a Sunday,
        Said Tommy Snooks to Bessie Brooks
        “Tomorrow will be Monday.” 

        The philistine is laughed at as the fool.

        When Falstaff is entrapped for the last time by Mrs. Ford and pinched and burned by the supposed fairies, Mrs. Ford finally, in a burst of laughter, exclaims: 

         Sir John, we have had ill luck; we could never meet. I will never take you for my love again; but I will always count you my dear.
      Fal. I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.
     Ford. Ay, and an ox, too; both the proofs are extant. 

        Shakespeare, in his “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” raises the laugh on Quince in the prologue before the Athenian duke, Theseus, by making the poet carpenter stop on the wrong points and thus convey the reverse meaning of what was intended. The speech is ridiculed by having it turned through wrong stops into nonsense.

        Shakespeare then presents the silly prologue, introduces the characters of the play, and tells the whole stupid plot, full of dull, meaningless alliterations such as:

        Here ridicule consists in making of the actors fools and asses. Thus Pyramus, the lover of Thisbe:

        The wall introduces itself as “one Snout by name.” Through this Snout, the wall, “the wittiest partition that I have ever heard discourse,” the two lovers make love. Queen Hippolita comments:

        When the Lion and Moonshine enter Theseus remarks:

        The Lion introduces himself to the audience:

      Moonshine introduces himself:

        When Pyramus stabs himself he declares:

        On this comical death Theseus comments:

          The whole of this comic play turns on the stupidity of the performers and the silliness of the tragedy which they intend to present and which is thus made into a comedy. The tragedy has become a comedy when shown to be silly and stupid. The intelligence of the performers is below the normal, their mental activity is inferior to that of the average person. Lack of consciousness of that fact on the part of the actors makes the play all the more comic. The comic sounds the depths of human folly.

        We may quote from Daudet’s “Tartarin on the Alps”:

        On ascending Mont Blanc, the cowardly Bompard became frightened out of his wits:

        The great man opened his eyes with some anxiety in them.

        “What are you chattering about?”

        Bompard drew a picture of the thousand terrible deaths which menaced them.

        Tartarin interrupted him—

        “You joker! And the company? Is not Mont Blanc managed by a Company?”

        “What! did you believe all that? Why, it was only a guying. Among people of Tarascon, of course—you know that what we say is—is” 

        When on Mont Blanc the “brave” Tartarin is full of fear and trepidation of death; he makes his confession: 

        “Forgive me; yes yes, forgive me. I have often been unkind to you: I have treated you as a liar—”

        “What does that matter?”

        “Listen to me, friend; I have never killed a lion!”

        “That does not surprise me at all,” replied Bompard, quickly. “But why worry yourself about such a trifle?” 

        What Daudet specially regards as ludicrous is vanity, conceit, deceit, folly, mendacity, simulation, silliness, stupidity and absurdity.