'To Give Pleasure is a Fine Thing'

“One of the most laughable scenes I ever saw in my life was the complete overturning of a very large table, with all the dinner upon it. . . . What of character is there in seeing a roasted turkey sprawling on the floor? or ducks lying in different parts of the room, covered with trembling fragments of  jelly?”

 

In his essay “On Wit” (Selections from Sydney Smith, ed. Ernest Rhys, 1913), Smith (1771-1845) is refuting the notion that humor must be character-based. He argues instead that surprise and incongruity are at the heart of what makes us laugh. In the passage above, Smith takes a scene almost universally acknowledged as amusing. Why are we, two centuries later, likely to find his account of it funny? The entire scene is incongruous – dinner on the floor -- especially so soon after Thanksgiving. Word choice. “Sprawling,” a word normally reserved for clumsy or sleepy humans, is a surprise. And the comically precise use of “trembling” to modify jelly.

 

Smith has a remarkably modern sense of humor. He laughs at things we laugh at and yet he was born the same year as Walter Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth, neither of whom is renowned for a raucous sense of the absurd. Humor is often time- and place-specific. It tends not to travel well. Swift and Sterne can raise a laugh (so does Shakespeare), but usually a private, qualified laugh. It’s not that they are unfunny. Rather, humor mutates across centuries. The small things, matters of nuance and emphasis, make a difference.

 

In 1980, Guy Davenport reviewed Alan Bell’s biography Sydney Smith (collected in Every Force Evolves a Form, North Point Press, 1987). Smith co-founded the Edinburgh Review where, Davenport writes, “his delicious sense of humor was whetted into an instrument that still holds up as one of the sharpest tongues in the history of wit. British humor is at its best with the ridiculous, and Smith was a master of glorious nonsense.”

 

As an example, Davenport cites the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, being badgered by supporters of an expedition to the Arctic. Jeffrey shocked one of them by damning the North Pole. When this was reported to Smith, he replied: “Never mind Jeffrey. Why, I have heard him speak disrespectfully of the Equator.” Unusually, Smith’s wit was coupled with genuine good nature, compassion and friendliness. Humorists can be nasty lot in their personal lives – depressed, quick-tempered, self-pitying, bullying. Davenport lauds Smith’s “robust mixture of practical Christianity, fun, and brave plain-speaking.”

 

The writers Smith most often reminds me of – the resemblance is not exact – are Charles Lamb and Max Beerbohm. Their humor is seldom heavy-handed or freighted with satirical intent. Presumably, all held political beliefs, but who cares? Certainly, they didn’t. All had something more important on their minds. Smith writes later in the essay cited above: “[W]it is dangerous, eloquence is dangerous, a talent for observation is dangerous, every thing is dangerous that has efficacy and vigour for its characteristics; nothing is safe but mediocrity.” In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, Joseph Epstein writes to his friend Frederic Raphael praising the stories of the wonderful Francis Wyndham – an English writer hardly well-known, especially in the U.S.:

 

“Wyndham is, I suspect by deliberation, a minor writer. He wrote well, but was modest in his ambition, not very productive, content to give small but real pleasure to his readers – and, I assume, to himself. Nothing wrong with any of this. To give pleasure is a fine thing, n’est-ce pas? Some of the writers dearest to me – Max Beerbohm, Sydney Smith – are minor writers.”