'Distress With Which We Cannot Sympathise'

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How could I be amused by another person’s misfortune? Easy, I thought but didn’t say. Our newly jobless friend had been earning an enormous annual salary, more than I made in my three or four best years. But that wasn’t what triggered my laughter. Rather, it was his spendthrift ways. He’s the sort of guy who will penny-pinch and complain about the small, essential expenses and spend extravagantly on wine and resort vacations. He’s always griping about money. My laughter was karmic. I laughed because I sensed he was getting his just comeuppance. Happy ending? he quickly got another lucrative job. 

In his lecture “On Wit and Humour” (1818), William Hazlitt roots laughter in incongruity, “the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.” The unexpected makes us laugh. The simplest, flattest most commonplace statement or action can spur laughter if we are not anticipating it. My big-spender acquaintance overnight became unemployed. That’s funny. Hazlitt writes:

 

“[A] rich source of the ludicrous is distress with which we cannot sympathise from its absurdity or insignificance. Women laugh at their lovers. We laugh at a damned author, in spite of our teeth, and though he may be our friend. ‘There is something in the misfortunes of our best friends that pleases us.’”

 

Hazlitt is quoting a universal truth formulated by Francois de La Rochefoucauld in his Réflexions ou Maximes Morales (1665). Laughter is more than jolliness or good humor. It can be subversive of politeness, respectability, even conventional morality. Dr. Johnson writes on May 26, 1759 in The Idler: “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Laughter can explode like a bomb of bad manners. “Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression,” Johnson writes. “The jest which is expected is already destroyed.” Hazlitt was a brilliant prose stylist, one of the finest in English, but not a particularly funny guy.