'The Prejudice Against Humor?'

“What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic? Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not.” 

I don’t have the professional standing to do anything about it but would like to see the American Psychiatric Association, when next revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include pathological humorlessness among its entries. The nature of the syndrome, its etiology and potential treatments are alarmingly under-researched despite the rapid spread of the disorder among the populace. I would also propose that clinicians devote intense scrutiny to the symbiotic relation between humorlessness and politics, another poorly researched malady.

 

The diagnostician quoted at the top is Dr. H.L. Mencken, who was fond of referring to one of our less distinguished presidents as Dr. Harding. The passage is from a section of Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918) titled “The Burden of Humor.” Mencken is best discovered when the reader is young, before one notices his periodic anti-Semitism and unhealthy preoccupation with Friedrich Nietzsche. Much of his prose carries an electric charge and he is reliably funny. He tends to be least interesting when he is least amusing.

 

“No,” Mencken continues, “there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense, humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume that there is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness?”

 

Mencken’s answer to his question is another one of his problems, especially for more mature readers. Like Thoreau, another American writer who could craft interesting prose, he dismisses the masses as cretinous drones: “the average man is far too stupid to make a joke.” Another name for Mencken’s failing here is snobbery. Mencken doesn’t always make it easy for a reader. His humor and vitality are bracing, until he says something that bypasses humor on the way to outrageousness. Of the average man, Mencken writes, “[I]t is not often that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone frivolity in a sage.”

 

Mencken here reminds me of another prolific journalist-turned-author who had a problem with Jews, G.K. Chesterton. In “On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity” (Heretics, 1905), the Englishman notes that the opposite of “funny” is not “serious” but “not funny”:

 

“[M]en are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes in the world--being married; being hanged.”

 

Mencken died on this date, January 29, in 1956 at age seventy-five. “Lincoln, had there been no Civil War,” he writes, “might have survived in history chiefly as the father of the American smutty story—the only original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature.”