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I SECOND ESSAY Mark Twain and the Sick Joke: An Essay on Laughter Sudden Glory is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused by either some act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, in comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. -Hobbes in Book I of The Leviathan With or without Mark Twain bestriding it like a colossus, an essay on laughter must begin with obligatory references to the instinctive life of nature in contrast to human life which is both instinctive and self-conscious. Here in this nexus (this often uneasy but always inescapable meeting ground between partly nature's, partly ours) is, say many experts, the place where the experience of laughter originates. Instead of citing the experts directly, however, 1 shall first consign them to a footnote and, much indebted to their wisdom, undertake some examples of my own.] (1) During a flood animals band together instinctively or reflexively and seek the security of higher ground. If the flood recurs next year those who survived this time will do the same thing again ... and yet again. Theirs is the mechanical will to escape danger. Human beings take to the hills too of course, and go perhaps as the result of having been first alerted by the animals. But because they can remember, plan, predict, and compile weather forecasts, even the least technologically sophisticated of human beings are likely to do one thing more. Sooner or later, they will build earth walls, dikes, dams in order to control the flooding. Theirs is the conscious need to prevent danger. (2) Among mammals in nature mating occurs at certain biologically deter- 54 Mark Twain and the Sick Joke mined periods of the year and has for its purpose the propagation of the species . Any female in season can arouse any healthy male. As human breeders learn to their sorrow, the pedigreed female and the male cur from the garbage dumps will fulfill nature's injunction to increase and multiply quite as well as any other pair. Among human mammals the same biological process involves selection, choice, an act of discrimination. The urge is identical for both groups. But the second enacts the urge in ways that are more deliberate and consciously creative . Elementary. But next I add two complications, the first one farfetched though by no means inconceivable in the modem world, the other a commonplace : (3) Asociety goes on a dam-building binge. In the name of "safety," "progress ," "vision" or whatever, it erects concrete barriers everywhere, including places where none is needed or appropriate. Such a society would clearly be psychopathic, and, by the way, not wholly unlike the one that made a fetish of backyard bomb shelters a few years back. But if we could observe it rather than share in its madness, we might want to say of it that is a laughable society, in no way amusing to itself, yet made ridiculous to us by the intense (and quite mechanical) fear that "The floods are coming, the floods are coming." (4) In literature as in life we encounter the figure of the relentless rake. He is a seducer by rote, to whom any and every woman regardless of age, size, shape or appeal is automatically a challenge. Clinical psychology recognizes the type; and medicine, feminism, sexual harassment statutes, and tragedy can portray him as dangerous to himself and others. But seen from a different perspective -viewed as Sirjohn Falstaff or Faulkner'sjanuariusjones, the satyr of Soldier~ Pay-he is also one to be laughed at. He is the victim less of an unmanageable Oedipus complex than of the laughable truth that "Seduction means to do and say / The same tired things in the same set way." By way of these examples and complications, it is now possible to rejoin the experts. We can see, as they do, how the laughable consists of an unexpected submergence of the conscious into the mechanical, or (working it the other way around) of an intrusion of the purely mechanical performance into what we expected would be a consciously controlled situation. We may say with them, furthermore, that the experience of laughter-strictly a spectator sport-occurs when, to a spectator's astonishment who becomes which. Then the human being who ought to behave with ease, grace, flexibility, adaptability, discrimination etc. is actually seen to behave with the rigidity and tireless regularity of the thing, the machine...

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