'Always Singular, and Never Trite or Vulgar'

“He was never seen to be transported with Mirth, or dejected with Sadness; always Chearful, but rarely Merry, at any sensible Rate, seldom heard to break a Jest; and when he did, he would be apt to blush at the Levity of it: His Gravity was Natural and without Affectation.” 

The absence of a sense of humor usually makes for unhappy company. Some of us associate wit or a taste for comedy – which begins with the gift of not taking oneself or the world too seriously -- with sanity. Hitler and D.H. Lawrence were humorless. So is Noam Chomsky. These are people you would never welcome into your home, even if you knew nothing else about them. After all, tedium can be contagious. The passage above is from a brief, anonymously published life of Sir Thomas Browne. The author fails to understand that funny people often remain poker-faced, even diffident and tight-lipped. A would-be joker who laughs or even smiles too broadly at his own wisecracks is an unlikely comedian. The biographer quoted above continues:

 

“They that knew no more of him than by the Briskness of his Writings, found themselves deceived in their Expectation, when they came in his Company, noting the Gravity and Sobriety of his Aspect and Conservation; so free from Loquacity, or much Talkativeness, that he was something difficult to be engaged in any Discourse; though when he was so, it was always Singular, and never Trite or Vulgar.”

 

Never have I thought of Browne’s prose as brisk but among that word’s older meanings are lively and vivacious. Fast-paced came later. In Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Browne seems to be defending himself against people like his biographer: “Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.” I’m more interested in Browne’s mirth. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines the word straightforwardly as “merriment; jollity; gaiety; laughter,” though in his “Life of Browne” he sees him as primarily sober-minded, as did Sir Edmund Gosse. Hazlitt, Lamb and Coleridge thought otherwise.

 

I remember in 1995 when The Paris Review published an issue titled “Whither Mirth?” It’s a good question but false advertising. The journal was wall-to-wall tiresome, as analyses of humor usually are. Shakespeare apparently liked mirth. He used it fifty-seven times in twenty-seven works (even in Macbeth), including seven times in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Speaking of Lord Dumaine in Act II, Scene 1 of that play, Rosaline says:

 

“His eye begets occasion for his wit;

For every object that the one doth catch

The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,

Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor,

Delivers in such apt and gracious words

That aged ears play truant at his tales

And younger hearings are quite ravished;

So sweet and voluble is his discourse.”

 

That sounds a lot like Browne, one of the great voluptuaries of prose in English. Tell me this passage, from Part II, Section 9 of Religio Medici was written by a humorless man:

 

“I was never yet once, and commend their resolutions who never marry twice, not that I disallow of second marriage; as neither in all cases of Polygamy, which considering some times and the unequall number of both sexes may bee also necessary. The whole world was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman: man is the whole world and the breath of God, woman the rib and crooked piece of man. I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition . . .”

 

Browne and his wife had ten children, four of whom survived their parents. Browne died on this date, October 19, in 1682 at age seventy-seven.