Charles Penrose
The Laughing Policeman (1922) [1]
"A fool lifteth up his voice with laughter; but a wise man doth scarce smile a little."
(Ecclesiasticus, 21:20)
I.
As I made clear in a post published back in June 2014, if there's one thing I hate to see it's people clapping like trained seals hoping for a fish to be thrown their way: click here.
Similarly, if there's one thing I hate to hear, it's the disagreeable sound of people laughing; loudly, publicly, and shamelessly. Unfortunately, this meant my career as a stand-up comedian was extremely short-lived.
II.
A friend who trained as a psychotherapist, once tried to convince me I was suffering from gelotophobia. But I never quite accepted this explanation rooted in a pathological fear of appearing ridiculous to others.
For it was more that I found the sight and sound of human beings laughing slightly obscene; not so much an audible expression of joy, but an indicator of our own fallen condition as a species. That's probably why the following remark by Nietzsche immediately struck a chord with me:
"I fear that the animals consider man as a being of their own kind which has, in a fatal fashion, lost its sound animal reason - as the mad animal, the laughing animal ... [2]
And it's why the following passage from one of Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son, also delights and is worth quoting at length:
"Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish, that you may often be seen to smile, but never
heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the
characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the
mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being
merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as
audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: they please the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accident, that always excite laughter, and that is what people of sense and breeding should show themselves above. [...] Laughter is easily restrained by a very little reflection; but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to absurdity. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical
disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I
am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever
heard me laugh." [3]
Interested as I am in a reformation of manners, it seems to me that emotional restraint is indeed a crucial characteristic of polite behaviour. In other words, etiquette, as a form of discipline and breeding, is no laughing matter and you can't be both gentleman and clown.
Notes
[1] Charles Penrose (1873-1952) was an English music hall performer and, later, a radio comedian, best known for his comic song 'The Laughing Policeman' (1922), which sold over a million copies and was still popular even when I was child in the 1970s - much to my irritation. Readers unfamiliar with the song - or those who might wish to refamiliarise themselves - can click here.
[2] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 224.
[3] Lord Chesterfield, Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, (1774), Letter XXXII, dated March 9 O. S. 1748. Click here to read online as a Project Gutenberg ebook.
For an interesting discussion of 'Chesterfield and the Anti-Laughter Tradition', see Virgil B. Heltzel's essay of this title in Modern Philology,
Vol. 26, No. 1 (Aug., 1928), pp. 73-90. Click here to access on JSTOR.
As Heltzel reminds us, many ancient Greek philosophers - including Plato - aligned themselves against excessive displays of emotion and raucous laughter. For the key thing when it comes to decorum is learning how to curb your enthusiasm.
For a contrasting view to the one expressed here - in which I encourage readers to learn to laugh at everything - see the post dated 9 Feb 2019: click here.
For an earlier post on the reformation of manners, click here.
Another opaque, revelatory and in its way (and not necessarily in a good way) painfully perverse moment in the by turns brilliant and baffling kaleidoscope of shameless/ ashamed contradictoriness that is the self-styled blog-weapon called TTA! I am once again entertained, irritated and exasperated all at once, which I guess is the Big Idea in the end.
ReplyDeleteWhy is 'shameless' laughter (or indeed shameless anything) to be deplored? Would shameful laughter/anything be preferable? Perhaps the blogger would prefer public showings of Laurel and Hardy's vintage films to be played out in theatres of repressive/self-conscious silence? There's no doubt that public laughter can be dangerous, but it can also be therapeutic, delicious and un-self-consciously joyous.
The use of religious language to speak of our 'fallen' condition is also thumb-outstickingly telling in this domain. It has a priestly odour for sure.
When style is turned into solemnity, it becomes absurd and fascistic (or absurd because fascistic, as in 'Life is Beautiful'). All the great artists I admire, from David Lynch and Bill Forsyth in film, to Leonard Cohen, Mary Margaret O'Hara, The Smiths and Altered Images in music, and Thedore Roethke, e e cummings and Mark Strand in poetry had a hilarious and contagious sense of their own ridiculousness that accentuated their style and indeed helped make it possible. And where would any of them be without their audiences?
As for Nietzsche, and as I've repeatedly written about, trying to 'take him seriously' enough to extract a moral or a message from his work is a fool's errand. Becoming a kind of hermetic 'style disciple' here is mainly a recipe for making oneself look silly. Since he contradicted himself wilfully at every turn ('What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment' as he also rhetorically queried), and like Shakespeare, he can really only be read as a supreme ironist/equivocator (irony understood as an aesthetic condition in which every utterance is shot through with its undoing - the profound meaning of Nietzschean 'Umwertung' ).
He also wrote profoundly if grandiosely (resonating with the Kierkegaardian insight that laughter may be a reaction-formation to original tears) that 'Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter' and how 'In laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss.' Laughter dissolves us, undoes our inflated indivudality, and is thus a kind of delight in death.
(i) I like the idea of something being both opaque and revelatory; can something also be transparently hidden?
Delete(ii) I don't like shameless people, or those who are brazen and barefaced; culture is all about makeup and masks.
(iii) I did include a link to an earlier post in which I encourage people to laugh, so understand quite well why you value it.
(iv) I used the term fallen with reference not to man's fall from innocent obedience to God, but from animal instinctivity.
(v) PS - it's Chesterfield, not Chesterton.
PS Chesterton's preposterously lordly hyper-rationality ('since I had full use of my reason' etc.) surely mainly marks him out as an insufferable bore who needed to get out (and fall down) more.
ReplyDeleteOn the whole, I think I prefer shameless (spontaneous, unselfconscious, open-hearted) people to the shame-filled, cagey and guarded kind.
ReplyDeleteI think using a phrase like the 'fallen condition' of human beings in inseparable from the Fall in most people's minds, is it not? (Why would one suppose a non-human animal would have care about the plight of humans in this way in any event?)
Of couese, one can laugh alone, but making people laugh I would generally regard as inseparable from love and being with others. Laughter tends to be a relational pleasure (unless one wants to risk looking a bit like Joaquin Phoenix's Joker in a mirthless world of one's own).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUPJckUSdzo&t=91s