MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT is sad to feel sundered from one's kind. We are assured that laughter can be " infectious," and I certainly recall occasions in my school-days when even the Upper Sixth were shaken from their natural dignity and would choke and turn purple in chapel because a mouse had slid across the floor. There have been moments also when, crossing the park slowly, I have seen children laughing together from some unknown cause, throwing their heads backwards in an ecstasy of merri- ment or rolling in helpless little bundles upon the grass: at such moments I have caught the infection, and have proceeded on my way giggling happily to myself. But there come other moments when my fellow-human beings burst into loud cachinnation and when I sit there uninfected, while a small cold sorrow creeps across my heart. At seven on Thursday evenings in the Home Programme there, is an item entitled, " Talk Yourself Out 'of This," produced by Mr. Frederick Piffard and conducted by Mr. Gilbert Harding. I have never had the strength to listen to this programnie for more than a few minutes, so that I cannot pretend that I have any real knowledge of its purpose or method. It seems, however, to represent some sort of contest or competition wherein certain chosen men and women tell funny stories to each other ; the comparative merit of these stories is judged by the referee according to the volume and duration of the laughter pro- voked in the audience. The story is told with dexterity and speed ; then the laughter follows and some assessment is made of relative approbation. I stand there listening to the resultant guffaws and a bleak loneliness assails me ; I lean my head upon the mantelpiece in despair ; I feel as sundered from the gay living Community of my beloved countrymen as the goat in the salt marshes of the Dead Sea, so carefully depicted by Holman Hunt.
* * * * Even if one admits that the audience thus gathered in the B.B.C. studio have been assembled for the purpose of laughter, and that they are in mere politeness obliged to do their stuff ;- even if one admits the infectious nature of communal laughter and recognises that many people laugh because they enjoy the muscular movements rather than because they are really amused ; even if one makes every allowance for these guffaws, it does seem extraordinary that grown men and women can be able to laugh so loud and so long at stories that to me do not seem comical at all. There was the story about a man who addressed a Chinese washerman in pidgin-English and was answered in a correct educated voice. Had I witnessed such an incident, I should certainly have smiled, perhaps even have laughed, at so sudden a denial of expectation. The Englishman assumed that the Chinaman would only understand pidgin- English and addressed him accordingly ; the Chinaman replied in English of the most perfect grammar, vocabulary and intona- tion. I quite see that such an incident contains the components of surprise and humiliation that are essential to the laughable. It would have been quite an amusing episode had it actually occurred ; but when weighted with the unreality of deliberate invention, it seems to me too -thin a thread to stand the strain. Yet the audience in the B.B.C. studio greeted this empty tale with laughter. There was another story of a more elaborate, and to me more obscure, design. It turned-on the point that Romeo had to stand on the balcony because he had forgotten his tights. That story was even more popular than the Chinaman story, owing, I suppose, to the fact that the absence of trousers is always comical to simple minds. Yet basically the story was too im- probable to bear any relation to life ; and I am not amused by stories that provide no picture of individual character or of life in general.
* * * * I enjoy laughter. I find it an agreeable relaxation and a solvent of tension. But when I am unable to join in the laughter of others I am afflicted, as I have said, with a special form of sad- ness. I have written frequently upon this subject, since it is one that interests me much. Why is it that I, who like my fellow- beings and have no special intellectual vanity, should be so aloof from their merriment? - Is it that they also are not really amused, but simulate all the motions of laughter for fear of being thought lacking in gaiety, from ordinary social politeness, or from an indolent surrender to a mass mood? Obviously, there come moments when we are all obliged, if only from social convention, to ape an amusement that we do not feel. But when I watch such people indulging in their, to me, inane merriment, I do not detect any absence of spontaneity ; if they are young, they may be just surrendering to happiness, performing one of the loveliest of human acts ; but if they be over fifty, their shaking shoulders and streaming eyes must be due to some more definite stimulus to exaltation. They must find the stories about the Chinaman and Romeo laughable stories ; and I lean there with my head on the mantelpiece wholly unable to raise even the ghost of a smile. I am quite sure that my inability in such matters is not due to any intellectual cause ; the things that make me laugh (and I laugh much) are just silly little human things, very often con- nected with evidence of other people's self-importance. The jokes thati find funny have very seldom any intellectual content: they are merely examples of the incongruity of life upon this earth. But Romeo and the Chinaman are not examples of actual incongruity ; they are examples of nothing, and as such, surely, not laughable at all.
It is an error to assume that when sophisticated people fail to smile at a joke that sets unsophisticated people rocking with, laughter, the former are guilty of intellectual arrogance. In all probability their blank irresponsive expressions indicate not con- ceit, but the awful humility of loneliness. When I failed so miserably to laugh at the stories about Romeo and the Chinaman, I was not conscious of the presence in my soul of one millimetre of spiritual pride ; I just felt sundered. The difference is, I believe, not between varying grades of intellectual fastidiousness, but between distinct conceptions of reality. The intellectual, being intensely interested in actual life, is unaffected by the imaginary ; the unintellectual, being often weary of actual life, finds in the imaginary an escape from the boredom of his days. I have said elsewhece that the distinction between the British and the American sense of humour is that, whereas we enjoy render- ing the real fantastic, they enjoy rendering the fantastic real. Max Beerbohm takes the actual background of Oxford and turns it into the Zuleika fantasy: Walt Disney takes a fairy tale and treats it with such brilliant realism that it seems to become part of life. Something of this sort must explain the different appre- ciations of the laughable made by the sophisticated and the un- sophisticated. I am bored by the Chinaman and Romeo because I know that the events narrated never occurred : others think them funny because they provide the intrusion of the fantastic. My sense of humour is set in motion by some alteration in exist- ing proportions or values: others are amused by the intervention of non-existent proportions or values.
* * * * The French, who are the wittiest race on earth, are almost wholly devoid of a sense of humour: to them nonsense is painful rather than pleasurable. The Germans, were they less self- conscious, would have a sense of humour almost exactly akin to our own. I recognise that there exists such a thing as the English sense of humour ; there are moments when I long to possess it. But there are other moments when I thank the Gods of Laughter that they have not endowed me with this particular gambol faculty, that I do not laugh at meaningless stories about China- men, and that I retain the courage not to simulate amusement that I do not feel. Conceit, you think? Not in the very least. Only a highly developed sense of reality.
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