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THE CAUSE OF LAUGHTER.

This Subject is best reached from the point of reflecting that, of all the animals, man alone appears to be capable of laughter. If, as so many naturalists now claim, man has ascended by successive evolutions of varieties from a lower animal type, we ought to be able to find some germs of the laughing propensity among our ancestors. The first witness we summon on this question is the anatomist, because the physical expression that accompanies an act of laughter depends upon the connection of the respiratory nerves with the diaphragm below and the orbicular and straight muscles of the mouth above. But these muscles are not perfectly developed in the animals. When dogs are fondly gambolling about you, there is "a slight eversion of the lips," which is a rudimentary hint of man's facial expression in an act of mirth. The dog has been the associate of human moods in all countries, and for thousands of years; yet, although we are told that "the little dog laughed to see the sport," he has not yet made up his mouth for any thing more emphatic than a simper.

Some kinds of monkeys have established a facial expression, accompanied with a laughing noise, which is so like the human that we might charge them with being entertained at the practical jokes which they pass upon each other, or over some obscurer sense of sylvan incongruity. We can see, at least, that Nature was preparing in them the nervous connections which men employ to transmit their pleasurable emotions; as the flexible plants which dangle by the streams and chasms of the Andes are woven by his after-thought to span the intervals, and the good cheer of humanity passes to and fro.

The respiratory nerves radiate from their centre in the medulla oblongata, the place to which the brain must transmit the first shock of the surprise which ends in smiling and laughing. Thence it is transmitted to the heart and diaphragm, quickening the action of the one, and setting the other in motion, at the same instant climbing to engage the facial nerves in sympathy; then the orbicular muscles retract, forcing the cheek up towards the eye, and tightening the muscles which surround the eyelid.

All our passions appear to claim the respiratory nerves for outward expression. They are a signal corps which communicate by hoisting the blush, the smile; by letting fall the tear, by the exhalation of a sigh, by the explosions of laughter. The life-breaths of joy and grief tend primitively to the lungs, and they voice the mother-tongue of all emotions.

I have often wondered how animals can avoid being struck with the differences which exist among themselves, so much more salient and intrusive than among the races of men, in shape, gestures, tones, and habits. What a wide range of Nature's curious freakery a forest has, or a district of country like those plains and thickets of Africa, where the natives dig their great pit and organize a monster drive! Into it falls every thing which cannot escape to either side. The giraffe, elephant, gnu, antelope, hartbeest, zebra, jackal,--think of the commingling of strange discrepancies thus suddenly collected! Were it not for the panic which prevails, and the accidents to life and limb, one would suppose that they ought to be aware of Nature's whims in themselves, and to narrowly escape inventing amusement. But curiosity and aversion probably exhaust the speculative possibilities of animals in this direction.

It is true, we occasionally hear of happy families, like that of the prairie-dog who has an owl and a rattlesnake to share his housekeeping, which they do with zest; for they have established a taste for the young of the prairie-dog, and they hire his tenement only with an eye to business.

When a great freshet takes possession of a country, and evicts the tenants of every hole, thicket, and burrow, there is an indiscriminate stampede of the animals for the driest and safest places: hares, rattlesnakes, mice, cats, and the carnivora cling together to the tops of trees, or wait in terror on the highest hills. So a prairie fire startles all the wild creatures with its sweep into a promiscuous race towards some spot that cannot be tenanted by flame. There they might observe the strange traits which shun each other in ordinary times or seek each other only when hunger demands its toll. While the fright and the dread of death are beginning to pass off are these creatures insensibly attracted to notice each other? Probably only as a curious deer observes a man. The danger has not established any sympathy between them. And they separate without any better opinion of each other, nor approach to geniality. Even men who are strangers, and in general dissociated by the distinctions of society, will be thrown together by some stress of the moment, part with a mutual feeling of relief, and resume their predilections. Yet man only is endowed with the magnanimity to welcome the emergencies which abolish superficial differences. They can be invaded by a circumstance which comprises them under an idea different from those which keep them asunder; and this new congruity can make the forced society congenial. It is Nature's witty rendering of the text that declares all men of one blood. The effect is grave, and under some conditions it may reach an heroic stature, but the root of wit is the nourisher; and only those creatures who are capable of annihilating capricious distinctions by a feeling of common humanness are capable of enjoying the union of heterogeneous ideas.

What mutual impression do a dog and a duck make? He runs around with frolic transpiring in his tail, and barks to announce a wish to fraternize; or perhaps it is a short and nervous bark, and indicates unsettled views about ducks. Meantime, the duck waddles off with an inane quack, so remote from a bark that it must convince any well-informed dog of the hopelessness of proposing either business or pleasure to such a doting and toothless pate. He certainly must have overheard the conversation of his betters, when the Shallows, Slenders, and Silences are near. What a prompt retreat human beings make, and what wariness is expended in steering clear of them for the future! Yet I never feel quite sure that the dunces are not amused at the manoeuvre. Is there a human being permitted to live without wit enough to know when he is avoided? Even this duck has a twinkle in that bead of an eye, as it rejoins the other ducks, that seems to convey to us its sense of the absurdness of a creature so caninely exuberant. Or was it a duck which I noticed? I am sure I have often seen creatures who are hopelessly posed or scandalized waddle away from some superior extravagance.

What vague auroral flittings of human perception pass beneath that horrid crest of the gorilla, as he elevates it in astonishment at encountering a creature of matchless symmetry like the wild ass, of picturesqueness like the zebra, of remote rarity like a beautiful woman! As for cockatoos, parrots, and macaws, I am convinced they are an endless source of amusement to the monkey tribe, who pelt them with nuts to make them scream and scold. Monkeys have a great flow of animal spirits: this, with their imitative talent and quick observation, renders them capable of entertaining ludicrous impressions. But one must be very closely related to the anthropoid ape, if not quite recently derived from it, to tell what they are.

There are many well-attested cases of an absolute enjoyment among animals that sometimes rises to the pitch of mirthfulness. One day, Dr. Kane came across a long, icy, inclined shoot, like the artificial coasting-places made by the Russians, down which a long file of white bears went sliding on their hams: at the bottom they jumped up like a crowd of boys, with evident delight, to carry their sleds back to the top of the hill. He says that the signs of pleasure among them were unmistakable.

The Canadian fish-otter loves to do the same thing. He climbs to the top of a snow-ridge in winter, or of a slippery bank in summer, lies on his belly, with the fore feet bent backward, then, pushing with the hind legs, down he goes. So the Russians, with their ice-slides, are only imitating the sport of their own arctic creatures. I suppose that long ago the pleasure derived from an involuntary and accidental slide originated the habit.

Lieutenant Dall says that the beavers in Alaska engage in gymnastics for fun. If they find a smooth, miry bank, they betake themselves to sliding down it. And the Californian gray whale loves to play in the shoals where the surf breaks; keeping a wary outlook, so that it continually escapes being beached. Its pleasure is enhanced by the peril. Seals do the same thing when they find a heavy surf. They turn from side to side with half-extended fins, moved apparently by the heavy ground-swell; at times making a playful spring with bended flukes that throws the body clear out of the water, to come down with a heavy splash: then, giving two or three spouts, they settle again under water, to appear perhaps the next moment rolling over in a listless manner with the heavy swell, plainly full of intense enjoyment.

If the sea-otter of Siberia escapes into the water from its hunters, it expresses joy and derision by marked gestures, one of which is the putting a paw up over the eyes, as if shading them to regard the hunters. It would seem to be a very slight natural variation when the thumb slips to the point of the nose, and the rest of the paw executes that vibratory sarcastic gesture highly approved by boys.

The same sea-otter will mourn itself to a skeleton over the loss of its young. If animals can be capable of grief, as innumerable facts testify, mirth ought to endow them with a finite compensation.

Lady Barker, in her book called "Station Life in New Zealand," describes a favorite cockatoo, whose amusement consisted in imitating a hawk. "He reserves this fine piece of acting until his mistress is feeding the poultry; then, when all the hens and chickens, turkeys and pigeons are in the quiet enjoyment of their breakfast or supper, the peculiar shrill cry of a hawk is heard overhead, and the bird is seen circling in the air, uttering a scream occasionally. The fowls never find out that it is a hoax, but run to shelter, cackling in the greatest alarm; hens clucking loudly for their chicks, turkeys crouching under the bushes, the pigeons taking refuge in their house. As soon as the ground is quite clear, the bird changes his wild note for peals of laughter from a high tree, and finally, alighting on the top of a hen-coop filled with trembling chickens, remarks, in a suffocated voice, 'You'll be the death of me.'"

If we are disposed to think that such accounts of originality are only cases of accidental coincidence, what shall we say to the following story, which comes to us from an authority upon which we may rely:--

A long-tailed paroquet, which had been a pet of an English barrack in India, where it had picked up all kinds of oaths and slang, passed into the possession of a lady in England, who, one day, receiving a visitor endowed with a very decided squint, took her into the room where the bird was kept. No sooner did the bird see this lady than it cried, "Twig her eye! What a beauty!"

How many human beings get immortality discounted for themselves upon a capital of sprightliness hardly more extensive than this parrot's!

There is also a well-authenticated story of a parrot belonging to an English carpenter, who undertook to make it say a long word in several syllables, that had no particular meaning. All at once the parrot declined to use any of his usual phrases, and remained entirely mute for a year, at the end of which time he suddenly pronounced the word, and then talked as before. The story is parallel to the Roman one, of the parrot which heard for the first time the note of a trumpet, became silent for several months, and then suddenly began to imitate the note. It is remarkable that no rehearsals or prelusions of the difficulty to be overcome were ever heard in either case.

The naturalist has lately found a monkey of the Gibbon family, which has a voice that is divided into distinct notes that correspond to our scale and run an octave or more, clear, musical, and firm. What an invaluable prize this would be for M. Offenbach and his opera bouffe! for the creature has all the flexibility and briskness, all the parody of human nature, and all the lubricity which this style of art requires, with the caudal emphasis appended; and great economy would be gained in exempting more expensive human performers from moral degradation. We would all pay our money for such an exhibition, rejoiced to see the drama recovering from its decay.

But, as yet, no cosey couples of clever apes have been discovered in paroxysms of laughter over the last sylvan equivoque; nor have elephants been seen silently shaking at a joke too ponderous for their trunks to carry. Everybody has observed how ducks will gather into a corner of the farm-yard and stand still, and apparently breathless, as if listening to a jocose tale fished out of their Decameron of a gutter, then break into hearty quacking, which reminds one of the wheezing of snips of fellows over their muddy jest. But probably the ducks are only holding a caucus on the question of food, to nominate the next pool to be dredged, and make it unanimous.

But when we consider that the higher animals can compare objects and make selections, exercise a memory and have association of ideas concerning each other and the outer world, we come near to that human quality which is the ground of the function of laughter. These mental traits are the buried roots of the consciousness which blossoms into smiles in the sun of wit and humor. For the power to combine or to contrast two or more objects, to remember one absent object by another present one, to experience a feeling that two objects are associated, leads to the highest manifestations of wit. In the delicate structures of men and women, which are bequests to them descending through the whole inviolate entail of Nature, refined by it and amplified till they entertain keenly the pathos of life, all mental traits accumulate into the faculty of imagination, upon which every thing that is laughable depends.

With this faculty man makes shift to relieve the moments when existence, with its incessant toil and merciless persistency of routine, threatens to become insupportable. One day is not exactly like another, if hearty laughter loosens its handcuffs and lets the prisoner stretch his frame and have a little run. Every laugh reddens the blood, which goes then more blithely to dissipate the fogs of a moody brain. Multitudes of our American brains are badly drained in consequence of a settling of the wastage of house-grubbing and street-work into moral morasses which generate many a chimera. So there is something positively heroic in the hilarity which braves, light-armed as it is, our brood of viperous cares, and attacks their den. One flash of a smile shears off Medusa's head with impunity.

Thus, to begin at the lowest degree of this subject, the simply ludicrous has its origin in the surprise caused by something which interrupts or modifies an ordinary procedure: the latter is thus joined for a moment to an idea not belonging to it. Why do we laugh when a person tumbles upstairs? or when some respectable female struggles with an umbrella which has shamelessly turned its bare ribs upon her and sails jauntily with her down the street, or flounders in the gutter, an inebriated wreck of usefulness? Because an erect position is the normal one for man, and a protecting umbrella the helpmeet for woman. If it were not so, we should laugh to see the most revered person succeed in controlling her gingham dome, and stemming the tide as easily as the whale which furnished it with bones. There is nothing essentially ludicrous in seeing a man chase an animal: on the contrary, if you are trying to head off your favorite pig and persuade it to taste again your bounty, it is one of the saddest spectacles in existence. But when a man is in full hue and cry after his own hat we laugh, because a hat is inseparable from a head in idea, but becomes separated in fact. A hatter's shop is full of the larvae of this idea, but they would never hatch there into hats. The conjunction of a head to each is needed to make a perfect notion of a hat.

If we could be sure of preserving our own scalps, we should like to have been near enough to watch the expression of the first Indian who ever killed a man wearing a wig. For the wig is a sudden violation of the logic of scalping, and the astonished Indian would have raised a laugh as he raised the artificial hair.

General Sherman's body-servant was a German who went with him through the war, but could never realize the idea that the war at last was over. One day the General, having travelled from the South to Chicago, was on the point of leaving, and ordered this man to pack a valise. The one he selected was so enormous that the General remonstrated, and examined what could be within. It was filled with hotel towels that had been looted from Atlanta clear through, in company with table-spoons of the Milledgeville Hotel; the German plundering on every route as if we were still marching through Georgia. This incongruous behavior has all the effect of a ludicrous incident.

Whatever accidental infirmity deposits us in positions incongruous with our ordinary state generates a ludicrous impression. When the obese lover, encased in corsets and tightly-strapped pantaloons, fell plump upon his knees before a lady to make his declaration, she was embarrassed, and besought him to arise; but he, fast anchored in the stiffest of costumes, whimpered out, "I can't, madam," and she had to ring for a servant. That is simply ludicrous. But suppose I should say that his suit had been rejected,--it would be an execrable remark, but still would modify the ludicrous impression, and raise it into a higher region of the pleasurable by making the first step of a pun towards the peculiar element of wit.

If a pun is good, the pleasure is sometimes purely mental and scarcely gets beyond a smile; for it constrains two different ideas into an accidental relation with one word, and the clever feat surprises us. We are not looking for it, as our life is plain-spoken, does not twist its intention nor its language, and passes for what it is. A friend, really wanting to know if Foote the comedian had ever been in Cork, in good faith asked him. "No," said he; "but I have seen a good many drawings of it." So the new conundrum finds us unprepared: "Which goes the quicker,--a full minute or a spare moment?" That pleases the mind, but it does not make us laugh as when Abraham Lincoln, in his attack of small-pox, said, "Now I am willing to see the office-seekers, for at last I have something I can give 'em all." We laugh because the play upon the word "give" betrays and yet relieves the moral annoyance of that class of beggars.

Punning can enhance its quality by lurking in the quotation of well-known and esteemed lines; as when a man who is importuned to subscribe to something, on the score of the virtue there is in giving, should quote the tender George Herbert,--

"Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like seasoned timber, never gives."

In this way Mr. Thackeray made one of his best puns. Some one was talking to him of a man of talent, who was prodigiously addicted to beer; saying what a pity it was, for they hardly knew his equal. "Yes," said Thackeray, "take him for half-and-half, we ne'er shall look upon his like again."

So Douglas Jerrold, referring in one of his plays to the English habit of scrawling names and lines with diamonds upon window-panes, makes one of his characters say: "One man goes to foolscap, another to a pane of glass. They may be very different people; but, well considered, I doubt if the motive hasn't the same source." "At least, the same effect," is the reply; "for, as my friend Laman Blanchard sings,--

"''Tis oft the poet's curse To mar his little light with verse.'"

In the same way a classic line which is quoted in mimicry of a modern situation can raise the surprise of a pun. The very best instance, perhaps, of this felicity was the quotation of Dean Swift when a lady's long train swept down a fine fiddle and broke it. He cried out,--

"Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae!"

Sporting with words blew aside a little the powder-smoke of the battle of Shiloh, and etherized the pain of one of our soldiers, whose cheek and chin had been carried away by a shot. "What can we do for you?" asked his comrades. "Boys," said he, with what articulation was left to him, "I should like a drink of water mighty well, if I only had the face to ask for it."

Every language invites this trick of the pun. The Greeks and Romans relished it, but the instances would involve explanations too tedious for popular reading. Perhaps a few may be ventured from the French, who are as delicate in this as in the manufacture of a S?vres cup or a pattern of tapestry.

Punning approaches the character of wit when the identity of sound not only covers two ideas, but also hides an allusion to still another. When Douglass Jerrold by a quick motion accidentally threw himself backward into the water, and was carried into a tavern, he said to the servant, "I suppose these accidents happen frequently off here." "Oh, yes, sir, frequently; but it's not the season yet." "Ah! I suppose it's all owing to a backward spring." "That's it, sir." The play recalls the manner of his ducking, and also involves the servant's idea, as if it depended upon the time of the year. This is witty, because it effects a temporary junction of very opposite ideas, apart from the pun which gives the opportunity.

Let a case in illustration be invented. Suppose a man hears that in the Quissama tribe of Angola any one who cannot pay his debts is at once killed and eaten. He improves this curious fact to say, "That would be a pretty effective way of collecting a debt, if debtors did not always disagree with creditors." This leads us to consider that wit takes place when two or more very distinct objects or perceptions are brought arbitrarily under the sway of one idea which for a moment appears to embrace them. Punning is a constraint of two different ideas to be expressed by one word. Wit is the constraint of different objects to be expressed by one idea. Wit depends for its effect upon ideas alone; and it is reached whenever the mind suddenly forces an idea that is suggested to it to appear, for a moment, like something that belongs to another idea. The latter really resembles the first idea in no point at all: they ought to be kept asunder for want of a natural and organic connection. Yet they are compelled to seem to have this; and, though the illusion can last but for a moment, that is time enough to surprise and delight us with the mental stratagem. Perhaps the second idea, so far from having any natural relation with the first, is violently opposed to it in every sensible way, so that nobody can pretend a possibility that they should communicate. The mind contrives this momentary rendezvous; and a lightning-flash betrays these two heterogeneous things apparently in close communion.

But, although this is the metaphysical basis of all wit, we must notice the distinctions in its quality, according as it draws upon more or less of the imagination, and is more or less interfused with good-nature. It has a range of effects extending from a bitterness which may be ferocious through a cold cynicism, a clear, calm light of the understanding, into moods that are colored by fancy and warmed into geniality by a human heart; and then it becomes a favorite ally of humor to promote its intention of tolerating all our infirmities. Douglas Jerrold gives us examples of the caustic kind; Tom Hood, of its jollity; Charles Lamb, of its clearness; Richter, Sydney Smith, Shakspeare, of its broad humanity.

Some one asked Heine, "Have you read B.'s new pamphlet?" "No, dear friend; I only read his great works: the three, four, and five-volumed ones suit me best." "Ah! you jest, and mean something." "Certainly: a great extent of water--a lake, sea, ocean--is a fine thing; but in a teaspoon I cannot stand it."

Heine said of one of his acquaintances, "The man is really cracked; but I will confess that he has lucid intervals when he is only foolish." This was the same person whom Heine had in his mind when he said to a caller, "My head to-day is perfectly barren, and you will find me stupid enough; for a friend has been here, and we exchanged ideas."

The old age of Lamartine exhibited a painful decline of his truly great qualities, and an exaggeration of his foibles. A French paper concluded his obituary with the remark, "He has ceased to survive himself."

These are caustic specimens; but the last one contains a high per cent of pleasure, because we are left uncertain whether it was a serious case of wit. But none of them can scald as Douglas Jerrold did, when, meeting a man who was such an abject toady that if his friend Jones had the influenza he would contrive to get up a cold, Jerrold said to him, "Have you heard the rumor that is flying around town?" "No." "Well, they say that Jones pays the dog-tax for you."

That is bitter. But when one gentleman during a supper of sheep's heads throws down his knife and fork in rapture, and exclaims, "Well, sheep's heads for ever, say I," and Douglas Jerrold remarks, "There's egotism," we have a point tempered in the flame of fun. So, too, when a member of his club, hearing an air mentioned, said, "That always carries me away when I hear it," Jerrold, merely to seize an opportunity, said, "Then can nobody whistle it?" This kind of wit easily rankles, if there be a drop or two of suspicion in our veins; for there is nothing in the tone to announce its discrimination from ill-nature. For instance: Sheridan, soliciting the votes of the shoemakers of Stafford, exclaimed, "May the trade of Stafford be trampled under foot of all the world!" and mortally offended them.

Among the announcements in a French paper, we find that "a young man about to marry wants to meet a man of experience who will dissuade him." So Abraham Lincoln thought he would not marry, because "I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me."

Mr. Beecher affirms that "it is impossible to discriminate between the wit that produces only pleasure of thought and that which produces pleasure of laughter." It does not seem to me so hopeless a task to discriminate between the two kinds of wit. Where reflection predominates, and the act of wit approaches the statement of a truth, so that the surprise does not borrow any tinge from any human sentiment, the pleasure will be inaudible; and, if we produce a smile at all, it will be where the German constructed the idea of a camel,--in the depths of his consciousness; as when Voltaire said of the priests of his time, "Our credulity makes all their knowledge." But when an American poet, whose Pegasus had stepped upon his foot, said, "What a pity it is! my grandfather left to me his gout, and nothing in the cellar to keep it up with," a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind; it is so incongruously human to nurse our own infirmities.

So when Frederic the Great said spitefully to Minister Elliot, on occasion of the Te Deums over the reverses of Hyder Ali in India, "I never knew that Providence was one of your allies," and Elliot replied, "The only one, sire, whom we do not pay," both the remark and the retort involve the mind in a momentary adjustment of its ideas to the new suggestion; and the wit is thus restrained from sallying into laughter. We have to reflect that Elliot's repartee is a hit at all subsidized powers, including Prussia, and also at his own nation for its trick of futile gratitude and ascription of praise. But if any movement of sympathy prevents the act of wit from settling upon the internal organs, and bids it escape by every pore, we feel the dew of laughter on the face; as when Falstaff whimsically apologizes for himself, "Thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do, in the days of villany?"--or when, at a meeting in London to hear a report from some missionaries who had been sent to discover the lost tribes of Israel, the chairman opened the business by saying, "I take a great interest in your researches, gentlemen. The fact is, I have borrowed money from all the Jews now known; and, if you can find a new set, you'll do me a favor."

It is witty when the author of the "Maid of Sker," describing a dinner, makes the mouth water with smiles when he particularizes "a little pig for roasting, too young to object to it, yet with his character formed enough to make his brains delicious."

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