`A Joyous Surrender'

My oldest son telephoned Thursday afternoon wanting help preparing for his interview (in one hour) with Greil Marcus, the premier writer on rock music, Bob Dylan and the sloppily overflowing cornucopia of American culture. This was a follow-up interview, a matter of plugging the holes remaining in the profile Joshua was writing for his campus newspaper. Josh has been taking a class with Marcus at the New School, and before that had read several of his books, so star-struck hero worship was threatening to compromise journalistic thoroughness and objectivity.

For 15 minutes we hashed over interview strategy. I asked Josh if he could describe Marcus’ laugh – a detail I’ve often found useful when writing a profile. I’ve never met Marcus but I’ve read most of his books, and I would have guessed his laughter was heartfelt but prim, and certainly not raucous and full-bodied. Josh confirmed this: “It’s pretty quiet. It’s like he’s laughing at an inside joke.”

That’s what I would describe as the “intellectual laugh,” and by that I mean no criticism. In Watt, Samuel Beckett used the same phrase but in a disapproving sense:

“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 intellectual laugh can be, as Beckett says, the “hollow laugh.” But it can also be an reflection of temperament and upbringing. For some people, loud, helpless, Falstaffian laughter is a social lapse, like farting at a funeral. I’ve known people with a well-developed sense of humor who hardly titter. Their laughs are events of the interior. That’s foreign to me but I respect it, and distinguish it from people who hardly laugh or don’t laugh at all because they are humorless twits.

I happened to have reread Max Beerbohm’s “Laughter,” from And Even Now, on Wednesday. Beerbohm wrote it in 1920 after reading Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, a work which begins disastrously if you’re seriously trying to understand laughter: “What does laughter mean?” A clinical approach to laughter is comparable to a light-hearted approach to prostate surgery. Beerbohm, among the funniest of writers, confesses that Bergson, like Schopenhauer and William James, leaves him baffled. He instead endorses his own mature capacity for laughter, in contrast to his buttoned-up, youthful demeanor – what today we would call cool or hipness. Laughter can be risky, especially in regard to pomposity and unearned self-regard. Beerbohm writes:

“There is no dignity in laughter, there is much of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism…And you will have observed with me in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, whereas old men or men of middle age mostly smile; and also that those young men do often laugh loud and long among themselves, while we others -- the gayest and best of us in the most favourable circumstances -- seldom achieve more than our habitual act of smiling. Does the sound of that laughter jar on us? Do we liken it to the crackling of thorns under a pot? Let us do so.There is no cheerier sound. But let us not assume it to be the laughter of fools because we sit quiet. It is absurd to disapprove of what one envies, or to wish a good thing were no more because it has passed out of our possession.”

To get back to Bergson’s quote: The meaning of laughter is deceptively complicated, and it’s easy to draw false conclusions based on someone’s laughing style. For instance, I think T.S. Eliot was often very funny (“Do I dare to eat a peach?), and had a healthy sense of humor. The correspondence with Groucho Marx was his idea. Bill Coyle, in “Table Talk,” from The God of This World to His Prophet, describes the unlikely Eliot-Marx pas de deux, and in doing so illuminates the complicated nature of a good laugh, or its absence:

“It was a meeting of two modern masters
when Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot,
mutual admirers, sat down to dinner,
but brilliant conversation it was not.

“Each man, it seems, was too in awe of the other,
Eliot eager to demonstrate that he
knew scores of Groucho’s jokes by heart and Groucho
that he was versed in Eliot’s poetry.

“Still, I’d give anything to hear them chatting.
Groucho, with perfect seriousness would say,
`Who is the third who is always beside you?’
and Eliot, laughing, `if I could walk that way…’”