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Comic Virtues and Vices Inward goes the way, full of mystery. Novalis Vicious laughter poses a weighty objection to the Normative thesis, and indeed would be unanswerable if one took it to assert that laughter is always benign and the jester always superior. This version of the thesis must be wrong, since decidedly inferior people laugh. Moreover , the fact that rival groups may trade off laughter against each other must lead us to reject the idea of a universal set of comic norms. If laughter signals were always reliable, we could never have such con›icts. Since we do, laughter signals provide us with too many signals on how to live, and some of these must be wrong. Yet if we abandon a hard version of the Normative thesis that attributes inerrancy to laughter, we might still defend a soft version in which most laughter offers us valuable lessons on how to live, and I do so in this section. The Rose-Wreath Crown Wherever we hear laughter, our attention immediately perks up. We automatically look to the wit, ‹xing our gaze on him in an unembarrassed way. He possesses the gift of joy, and we look on in the hope of sharing it, or in the secret fear that we are his butt. Our regard for him tells us to attend to laughter signals. How could we esteem the messenger unless we prized the message? What are the special qualities of the wit that mark him for our attention ? More than anything, we admire the wit’s mental quickness. The original meaning of wit was intellectual agility; cleverness in repartee 60 5 came later. The same is true in French and German: esprit and Witz (or Geistreich). Our language tells us that there is a connection between wit and mental creativity.1 In all primitive societies, folktales celebrate the trickster, whose mental agility permits him to surmount those whose superiority rests on a merely physical advantage. In the very ‹rst laughter in Western literature a clumsy arti‹cer is mocked for his want of grace, but later takes revenge through a trick. In Book 1 of the Iliad, the lame Hephaistos crafts a set of serving cups and brings them, full of wine, to the gods on Olympus. The bandy-legged god trips, spills the wine over himself, and retires in confusion , to the peals of laughter from the other gods (Iliad 1.595–99). But Hephaistos’s physical failings are compensated by a superior technical ability. The god of ‹re and crafts fashions a metal net and with it traps his wife, Aphrodite, in the arms of her lover, Ares. The two cannot escape, and all the other gods troop in to see the guilty pair. And when they catch sight of Hephaistos’s clever device a ‹t of uncontrollable laughter seizes the happy gods (Odyssey 8.266–328). We always prize the wit’s intelligence and value the unrehearsed sally over the remembered joke. For spontaneous wit, few exceeded Sydney Smith. Smith was an Anglican cleric who one day found himself attacked by a freethinker. “If I had a son who was an idiot,” said the freethinker, “I’d make him a parson.” “Very probably,” responded Smith, “but I see that your father was of a different mind.”2 In our time there is a story, said not to be apocryphal, of a lady who faced a doctoral examination in Paris, and whom a mischievous professor asked, “Mademoiselle, qu’estce que c’est l’amour?” Without missing a beat she answered, “The Amur is the river that separates Russia and China.” For which, the story goes, she was immediately granted her degree. Apart from his intelligence, the wit’s insouciance elicits our admiration . The grim and fearful cannot laugh, but the man of humor is courageous . He rides to battle gaily, with a jest on his lips. Where others are tense and nervous, he is detached and sardonic. Of all people, we wish most to be like him. By contrast, the grim agelast is conscious of his inferiority . Like Alfred de Musset’s enfant du siècle, like the Generation X’er, he knows that others have lived life to the fullest but that he can never do so. He is a glowering Gladstone matched against a sardonic Disraeli , an earnest Carter before an ebullient Reagan. We can never like him, nor can the gods either. The wit shows just the right degree of self-assertion and...

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