'Only Santayana Can Make Me Laugh Aloud'

We’ve all known people for whom laughter is a childish distraction, a shameful shortcoming produced by an essentially trivial mind. Of all people, George Santayana thinks otherwise: 

“Laughter rings the recess-bell in school hours; and then perhaps some ugly little seeds of learning, sown in us against our will, spring up beautiful, free and unrecognized in the playground of the mind.”

 

The metaphor is precise in my case. I remember a friend and I in grade school often laughing convulsively by making faces and obscene gestures at each other. Trying to keep our little party silent and clandestine merely intensified the laughter. Tears flowed, faces reddened, bodies shook. (Come to think of it, viewed out of context with the audio turned off, a person violently laughing might be mistaken for an epileptic suffering a seizure.) Our sixth-grade teacher was a good one and we both liked her but she was not notably susceptible to the humor of eleven-year-olds. Santayana continues in The Realm of Spirit (1940), the concluding volume of his tetralogy Realms of Being:

 

“Pure laughter is not malicious, not scornful; it is not a triumph of one self over another, but of the spirit over all selves. It is the joyous form of union with our defeats, in which the spirit is victorious. The bubble once pricked, everybody stands on homelier and firmer ground.”

 

Here I disagree with the great Spanish philosopher. As we grow up, we learn that laughter can be weaponized. Even more than criticism or reasoned disagreement, there’s nothing a prig hates more than the subversiveness of mocking laughter. Of laughter among kids, Santayana writes: “In passing, there is exultation at having rung the dirge of something unreal. This pleasure is dear to children, even if a little shrill. They, poor creatures, are being cheated so regularly by their elders, by one another, and by their own fancies, that it is sweet to turn the tables for once and to mock the solemn fools in return.”

 

Few things are funnier than righteously costive seriousness. Take R.L. Barth’s epigram “Don’t You Know Your Poems Are Hurtful?” (Deeply Dug In, 2003), which virtually defines the form pioneered by Martial:

 

“Yes, ma’am, like KA-BAR to the gut,

 Well-tempered wit should thrust and cut

 Before the victim knows what’s what;

 But sometimes, lest the point be missed,

 I give the bloody blade a twist.”

 

That takes care of the virtue-signaling, self-approving crowd. In case the notion of Santayana as a student of humor and even something of a humorist eludes your understanding, I cite John McCormick and his definitive biography, George Santayana (1987):

 

“Some philosophers can bring a smile, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein among them. Some, like Nietzsche, terrify, although not for the reasons he thought he was terrifying. Only Santayana can make me laugh aloud. Insofar as a biographer can determine, he was a happy man and his happiness was contagious . . . He was not elusive but fastidious, one whose distinctions were subtle but wonderfully available, and not only to specialists.”