'Humour Is Reason Itself'

The saddest man I know wishes more than anything to be thought of as a comedian, a jokester, the reliably funny guy at the party. The sadness derives from his inability to say or do anything even modestly amusing. People will laugh aloud at something he says out of pity and an awkward sense of politeness. You can tell he’s trying to be funny because he always laughs at his own failed witticisms. He would never understand what Jules Renard writes in his journal on February 23, 1910, just three months before his death: 

“Humour: modesty and wit combined. It is the everyday clothing of the mind. I have formed a high opinion, moral and literary, of humour.”

 

Let’s define our terms when we say someone has “a good sense of humor.” The man I described above reminds me of the little boy who says “underwear” or “poopy” at the dinner table and waits for the grownups to crack up -- "Ain't he cute?" -- so let’s rule out compulsive giggling and joke-telling, and dirty words with nothing behind them but a pre-pubescent’s desire for attention. Max Beerbohm in his great essay “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920) identifies incongruity as “the mainspring of laughter.” Comedians have a tough job because we know in advance they want to make us laugh. Humor thrives on unexpectedness. Most of the funniest people I’ve known are soft-spoken, poker-faced and not clownishly desperate for laughs. Often they are introverted, mordant-minded or even depressed. A sense of humor is more than a social grace; it is a way of looking at the world, and may not always provoke raucous laughter. Renard goes on in the same journal entry:

 

“In short, humour is Reason itself. Man regulated and corrected. No definition of it ever satisfied me. Besides, everything is contained inside humor.”

 

Renard  suggests that a well-exercised sense of humor is a symptom of sanity. By implication, the earnest and humorless are nuts. Beerbohm wrote his essay after reading Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900), a work which begins unpromisingly: “What does laughter mean?” A post-mortem on laughter is comparable to a light-hearted look at prostate surgery. Beerbohm 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 might call hip coolness. Laughter can be risky, especially in regard to pomposity and unearned self-regard, and nothing beats mockery for effectiveness in combatting earnestness.

 

Boswell in his Life recounts his great friend’s laughter: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’” Some seem embarrassed to laugh, and do so only when socially sanctioned by their betters. How human it is that grief and laughter both elicit tears.

 

[The Renard passages are drawn from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]