`The Mirthless Laugh'

A colleague played a Youtube video of a Jay Leno routine he found riotously funny and that I thought was ponderous and never came close to stimulating even the sympathetic-laugh reflex that usually smoothes over such awkward moments – I mean the social laugh, which can be executed only in the company of others, at a party or in a movie theater, and only when nothing funny is going on. Try simulating social laughter when you’re alone. It’s a hollow sound, mildly embarrassing, and probably predictive of a mental disorder.

If I hope to get along with someone, the nature of his or her sense of humor is essential information, more important than mere opinions. Normally this colleague and I are comedically compatible. So, what makes me laugh, and I mean a full-body laugh, not a smug little titter (itself a funny word)? Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Tristram Shandy, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Blazing Saddles, Flann O’Brien, Portnoy’s Complaint, Stanley Elkin, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, Waugh’s Scoop, Thomas Berger, John Candy and Eugene Levy as the Schmenge Brothers, P.G. Wodehouse and so on – but none of these things on every occasion. What do they have in common? I have no idea.

In Le Rire, a predictably unfunny examination of what is funny, Henri Bergson claimed laughter “poses a challenge to philosophical speculation.” What provokes laughter is elusive, yet we recognize it immediately and involuntarily. It has something to do with surprise and release, delight in unexpected juxtapositions, a mingling of high and low, a capacity to appreciate the anarchic and offensive – but not always. Humor thumbs its nose at authority, but compulsive nose-thumbing quickly becomes unfunny. In Watt, his first genuinely funny book, Samuel Beckett anatomizes laughter like this:

“The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! - so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please -- at that which is unhappy.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dianoetic” as “Of or pertaining to thought; employing thought and reasoning; intellectual.” It has nothing to do with L. Ron Hubbard. Of Beckett’s three laughs, the dianoetic is the quietest, the least corporeal, the least like a laugh. But it’s the mirthless laugh that has saved my life and my sanity.

Tuesday afternoon, walking through the stacks in the library, I heard over my footfalls and the buzz of fluorescent lighting a low, feral sound. As I got closer, I realized it was someone snoring. Sprawled in a chair, head back and mouth wide open, deep in American Literature, a young man, probably a student, emitted long, moist choking sounds, like the spit-sucker used by dentists – “down the snout,” indeed. It reminded me of the sound W.C. Fields makes when he’s asleep on the porch in It’s a Gift and a brat drops grapes down his throat. I laughed. The kid, obviously, was unaware of the racket he was making, and seemingly indifferent to it, and that made the scene even funnier. His chin and the corners of his mouth were froth-flecked. He was surrounded by books and his laptop, vulnerable and free of embarrassment. A young woman walked past, unsmiling and clearly disgusted, and that made it funnier still. Here’s the punch line: The books on the table in front of him, all those I could see, were by and about Toni Morrison.