'Laugh from the Centre of Things'

One of the qualities I most esteem in a friend, apart from brains and adequate hygiene, is the ready ability to make me laugh. When we ponder friendship we tend to emphasize its heavier aspects: confidence, trust, shared values and interests. But those traits, when combined with a plodding, literal-minded, humorless manner, are heavily compromised if not erased. Not that humor is inconsistent with a generally dark world view. I remember the late Terry Teachout describing himself as an “ebullient pessimist.” The one time we met, over lunch here in Houston, we laughed through our meal. Here is Jules Renard in his journal on April 8, 1896:

 “One must laugh from the centre of things. In other words I do not laugh at politics per se, because there may be some good in it, of which I am ignorant. But I laugh at the politicians I know, at first hand, and at the politics they practice in front of my eyes.”

 

Laughter may be our most potent weapon against not only politicians but do-gooders, self-identified experts of any stripe and yentas in general. Renard goes on:

 

“Rather than frivolity, laughter must be serious and informed, and philosophically awake! You have a right to cry with laughter only when you have already wept. The ridiculous belongs to the moment, and nothing is entirely or permanently ridiculous.”

 

I’m aware that a gift for inducing laughter can, like any human capacity, be used destructively. Extreme comics tend to become nihilists, mocking the worthy with the contemptible. “[French critic Ernest] Renan said," Renard writes, ‘The mockers will never rule.’ Which is true, they laugh at the very idea of ruling.”

 

Bill Coyle in “Table Talk” from The God of This World to His Prophet (2006) describes the unlikely T.S. Eliot/Groucho Marx pas de deux, and in doing so illuminates the complicated nature of a good laugh, or its absence:

 

“It was a meeting of two modern masters

when Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot,

mutual admirers, sat down to dinner,

but brilliant conversation it was not.

 

“Each man, it seems, was too in awe of the other,

Eliot eager to demonstrate that he

knew scores of Groucho’s jokes by heart and Groucho

that he was versed in Eliot’s poetry.

 

“Still, I’d give anything to hear them chatting.

Groucho, with perfect seriousness would say,

‘Who is the third who is always beside you?’

and Eliot, laughing, ‘if I could walk that way . . .’”

[All quoted prose passages are from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]