The Morality of Laughter

4. Objections to the Normative Thesis: The Paradox of Satire • Excessive Laughter The Hobbesian Paradox • Vicious Laughter

Objections to the Normative Thesis Nothing’s more fatuous than a fatuous smile. Catullus, Carmina xxxix Let us turn from the Positive to the Normative thesis, from the claim that laughter signals the wit’s sense of superiority to a butt to the claim that this is a true superiority. We begin, as the Scholastics did, by examining objections to the Normative claim: videtur quod non. It seems not the case that laughter always signals a real superiority, however much the wit might think himself superior. This might happen in one of four ways. First, the satirist’s contempt for the butt might banish laughter. The satirist might be bitter and even unhappy. If so, how is he superior? I label this objection the Paradox of Satire. Second, laughter might be excessive and over-deter us from harmless behavior. Third, the Hobbesian Paradox suggests that laughter might signal inferiority because a true aristocrat will disdain to laugh. Lastly, laughter might signal inferiority and not superiority if it is more virtuous to abstain from ridicule. Of these, the ‹rst three objections seem weak, and I answer them here. But the last objection is more substantial, and its answer must wait until we examine the content of laughter norms more closely in succeeding chapters. The Paradox of Satire Without playfulness, superiority fails to raise a laugh. Laughter may be biting and satire might even be bitter, but a bitter author does not smile 49 4 himself, nor does the reader if he shares the author’s bitterness. The difference between playful and bitter satire may be observed in the shift from the third to the fourth of Gulliver’s voyages. The third voyage is Swift at his most amusing, mocking the pedants of the Royal Society. Yet the satire is weaker here than in the fourth voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, one of the most caustic attacks on human pretensions ever written, which shocks the reader without amusing him. The more intense the satire, the fewer laughs it raises. The Paradox of Satire is that it asks the reader to share its rancor; and if it succeeds the satire fails. When it comes to other people’s vices, most of us are thick-skinned; but the satirist is a man without a skin. He senses faults before anyone else, and wears a perpetual frown. Most of us encounter grossness, cowardice , and obsequiousness two or three times a day and never give it a second thought. These are the obscene graf‹ti of life, seen so often that we have become accustomed to them. The satirist’s gift is the ability to point out that which we already know, and to provoke a moral or aesthetic response. He does not discover new vices, but uncovers old ones to which we have become inured. He provides no new information, but only reminds us that we already know enough to be shocked, had we not resigned ourselves to a contented indifference. Bitter satire is Juvenalian. “Was there, at any time,” Juvenal asks, a “richer harvest of evil” than in the cruel Rome of Domitian? (Satire 1.87). A city where “every street is just full of stern-faced sodomites. How can you lash corruption when you are the most notorious furrow among our Socratic fairies?” (Satire 2.8–10). In their imitations of Juvenal’s Third Satire, Boileau and Johnson feigned a mild dislike of Paris and London. Juvenal’s denunciation of Rome is altogether different: “The man holds nothing sacred; nothing is safe from his organ, not the lady of the house, nor the virgin daughter, nor even her still unbearded ‹ancé” (Satire 3.109–11). And it gets worse—Satire 6, Roman Wives, and Satire 9, Woes of a Gigolo, are brutal. Juvenal’s blunt denunciation of vice is “shot full of horrible truths,”* said Boileau, and the savage indignation sti›es our laughter. By contrast, Horatian satire is witty, ironic, and detached. “Horace still charms with graceful negligence,” said Pope, “and without method talks us into sense” (Essay on Criticism 653–54). While Juvenal never speaks of the morality of laughter 50 *“Tout pleins d’affreuses vérités.” Boileau, L’art poétique II.159. himself, Horace often does so, generally in a self-deprecating tone. Though he mingles with the great, he presents himself as wholly without in›uence. In the Voyage to Brundisium, he describes...