'An Interior Convulsion'

Too late the other night a friend texted me links to several stand-up routines by the late Jackie Mason. I clicked on one and the inevitable followed: I went looking for more and soon descended into a privately curated  comedy show with guest stars Don Rickles, Jonathan Winters and Norm Macdonald (all “late” in the last decade). Each reliably makes me laugh to the point of tears – one of my two tests for judging the success of a comic, with the other being his ability to make me laugh when I’m alone, without the social incentive to do so. Odd that comedy and sorrow make us weep. “Our laughter,” V.S. Pritchett wrote of Saki, “is only a note or two short of a scream of fear,” which suggests comedians and horror movies may have something in common and can trigger related reactions. 

I’d been browsing in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (1906; rev. 1911) again, and here is his entry for laughter:

 

“An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals— these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infectious character of laughter is due to the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.”

 

I don’t question why something makes me laugh, and I’m not referring to the well-known appreciative, socially sanctioned, tight-lipped grunt. I mean a raucous, full-body, snot-flying guffaw. It’s a gift. (The title of W.C. Fields’ funniest film.) Take Bierce’s mock-definition of laughter. Funny? Yes, especially the first sentence, but he goes on too long and you can feel the strain. No tears or snot, just one of those polite, non-convulsive grunts. You know what Polonius said about brevity. Beware of those who tell you, “You shouldn’t be laughing at that.” The impulse to censor laughter, especially the genus Mockery, is an ironclad symptom not only of humorlessness but jackbooted bullying. The urtext on the subject is Max Beerbohm’s “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920):

 

“[T]here is to me something rather dreary in the notion of going anywhere for the specific purpose of being amused. I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me. And in this respect, at any rate, I am not peculiar. In music halls and such places, you may hear loud laughter, but—not see silent laughter, not see strong men weak, helpless, suffering, gradually convalescent, dangerously relapsing. Laughter at its greatest and best is not there.

 

“To such laughter nothing is more propitious than an occasion that demands gravity. To have good reason for not laughing is one of the surest aids. Laughter rejoices in bonds.”