Getting beneath the skin of the tickling phenomenon
‘We can cause laughing by tickling the skin,’ wrote Darwin in Emotions (1872). We all know that. Difficulties arise when we probe a little deeper, where tickling hovers uncertainly on the borderline between eroticism, buffoonery and the slow, pleasurable but perhaps innocent process of having the flesh gently disturbed by the tips of another person’s fingers. Tickling is a very complicated matter, insufficiently explored by neurologists, Freudians and students of human behaviour, including novelists and poets.
Erotic forms of tickling are themselves complex. When the Glasgow girl in the song says ‘Stop yer tickling, Jock!’, does she really mean it? In the phrase ‘slap and tickle’, the man does the tickling and the woman the slapping. Or do they? And how does it end? Is this sofa activity terminated by ‘the deep, deep peace of the double bed’, to quote Mrs Patrick Campbell? Not necessarily. The most prolonged and lubricious tickling scene in film occurs in the Laurel and Hardy masterpiece Way Out West, where the saloon-bar siren tickles the hysterically giggling Stan to get from him the deeds of a gold mine, which he has tucked into his underclothes for safety. This remarkable scene, enacted in, on, under and around a spring-twangly double bed, is a remarkable piece of cinema, and it is amazing it got through the Hays Office intact. No doubt Stan was seen as too goofy to suggest sex. But it gives meaning to the phrase ‘tickled to death’.
The age of sexual tickling began in the late Middle Ages and climaxed in the time of Shakespeare. By way of prolegomenon, Chaucer’s most outrageous anecdote, The Miller’s Tale, proclaims ‘This world is now full tickel!’ In Thomas Heywood’s Play of Love (1533), there is a memorable quatrain about a girl:
The paps so small And rounde with all The wast not myckyll But it was tyckyll!
Shakespeare was fascinated by tickling, both the word and the activity. As he says in Twelfth Night, ‘Here comes the trout which must be caught by tickling.’ He was well aware that the method was much more easily employed to get a woman than a fish.
I think the popularity of erotic tickling reflects the elaboration of women’s clothes and plentiful use of starch. It is one of the complaints of Doll Tearsheet against the awful Pistol that he spoils a poor girl’s ruff with his clumsiness.
The Edwardian age was another time of ‘full tickel’. Harry Cust, the outstanding seducer of the day, was an expert tickler. So was Wilfred Scawen Blunt, reported to have slept with more society women than anyone else. He bred Arab horses, and was a notable stud himself. He had learned the refinements of tickling in Cairo whore-houses, where the art reflected centuries of harem practices. But Edwardian tickling and stroking occurred in contexts which were not, strictly speaking, erotic. Perhaps the best prep school of the day was Durnford, kept by Thomas Pellatt. His wife Nell, a beautiful lady with a thrilling voice, used to read to the boys, all 60 of them, every Saturday night for half an hour, reclining on a chaise-longue. One of her choices was Moonfleet, by John Mead Faulkner. One little boy recalled at the age of 80, ‘No book made so deep and lasting an impression. I can still remember the agony of those Saturday evenings, when she would close the book after half an hour — never more — and leave us in torture.’ The story was only part of the tableau of the beautiful Nell. Another little boy was Laurence Irving, who later recalled in his memoirs The Precarious Crust that Nell, while reading, wriggled in delight while ‘privileged pages stroked her neck and tickled her silk-stockinged feet’.
The boys took this for granted because tickling for pleasure was common at this time among children. Some came from what were known as ‘tickling families’, where the habit of prolonged stroking or rubbing, usu ally of backs, was passed on from parents to children. One example was Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965), the writer. In her book A Nursery in the Nineties, she says the tickling habit came through her mother. She and her siblings would tickle or stroke each other for hours, the younger ones being bribed by sweets or even money. I knew a boy whose two big sisters got him to tickle their backs every morning, under their nighties. The activity was perfectly proper, for both were extremely prudish, and he was strictly enjoined only to touch their backs. He was very small, too, and had to be rewarded, he said, with dolly mixtures, aniseed balls and pear drops. Another family of children I know of would sit in a kind of triangular circle on the floor, two girls and a boy, each tickling the back of the one in front of them. The process might take hours, for gentle tickling and stroking is, for some, such an immensely pleasurable activity that they want it to go on for ever.
This is a subject which has not been written about very much, and children who have enjoyed years of tickling by siblings rarely talk about it except to intimates. The reason may be that they recognise, though they might not have done so at the time, that tickling is a form of sex, certainly of sensuality, and there is something to be ashamed of in such practices which might almost be termed incestuous. Babies, for instance, like being tickled, but only if they are sure it is safe. Experiments at Yale University on babies of under a year revealed that they laughed 15 times more often when tickled by their mothers than when tickled by anyone else. A baby, the explanation runs, perceives tickling as a mock attack, a caress in mildly aggressive disguise. The mock attack must be perceived as only pretence, and when it is done by anyone except the mother, the baby cannot be sure. Thus psychologists think that the tension between the tickles is relieved by the laughter which accompanies the squirm of the body. The tickler impersonates the aggressor but is known not to be one. This is why children like it so much, for it enables them to live on two levels, the same sensation induced in them by horror movies and comics of monsters.
It is a sombre fact that you can’t tickle yourself — it just doesn’t work. So, these are my thoughts on a — ha! — ticklish subject. For an expert view, see On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored by the brilliant Adam Phillips.
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