Lessons in Laughter: The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor by Bernard Bragg (review)

REVIEW Lessons in Laughter: The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor, by Bernard Bragg, as signed to Eugene Bergman. 1989. Gallaudet University Press. 6 X 9 in. xiii &219 pp. Illus. ISBN 0930323-46-7. Clothbound, $17.95. Lessons in Laughter is really two books in one. Bernard Bragg's signed story, transformed into Eugene Bergman's words in print, give it unity, but the curious reader will find two books here. The first is a notable achievement and will win the book wide readership, for it succeeds superbly at following the lead set by other actorsautobiographies of David Niven and Alec Guinness come to mind. For sheer entertainment I rank this autobiography of an actor with them. The second book Bragg and Bergman have given us is something entirely different; it is a close view-the more successful for being at least partly unintended-of the Deaf community and the features that make its culture unique. It tells the story of a Deafactor, which makes all the difference. The young Niven and the young Guinness had to be daring and resourceful, resilient and tough-skinned, to enter and rise in a closely held profession. But those they encountered on the way, helpful or forbidding, were sharers of their culture, values, beliefs, ways of seeing the world, and above all their language. The young Bragg faced a greater challenge: to enter and rise in a profession long reserved to members of the hearing culture. Its gatekeepers at best talked a language inaudible to the deaf postulant and at worst treated him as a non-being. The story starts early and is not unfamiliar to those acquainted with the literature of deafness. We encounter the matron-martinet who terrorizes the deaf school dorm, the teacher who cheats, secure in the knowledge that deaf pupils will not challenge his actions, the college professor with the "compulsive and disconcerting" laugh, who liked to play God. The inhumanity of man to man is an old story, especially in its hearing-to-deaf version. But this is only part of the story. With deaf parents to begin with, and deaf friends from the time of his entrance into Fanwood School at the age of five, Bernard Bragg's story is only incidentally about encountering the culture of the hearing. His roots are with the Deaf, as the presence of his deaf friends throughout the story makes clear. Winning or losing, in triumph or in despair, it is their presence that gives his story its depth and richness. What makes an actor's autobiography fascinating is first that it paints in background for the figure we have seen on stage or on the @1990 by Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN-0302-1475 Lessons in Laughter large or small screen. It gives us the intimate details: vulgarly handled they sell magazines and tabloids, but in the hands of Niven, Guinness, and literally the hands of Bragg, it delights us by enriching our knowledge of a performer who has gained our admiration again and again. Some of the fascination, of course, comes from name-droppingin a good sense; it is thus such memoirs add to our knowledge about others in the profession, those the narrator has known and the reader admired. A third quality, which any autobiography needs to succeed, is self knowledge and a sense of humor that permits presenting oneself as victim not hero. Yet at the same time an actor must possess inordinate self-confidence and be willing to take outrageous chances to get into places where favorable notice and roles are to be found. Here too this book measures up to the models. Bragg's gate-crashing at the gala in London took a lot of nerve and led to all kinds of acting opportunities, but earlier he had shown that he had the courage to challenge tyrants, no matter how firmly in power, in school and college. Lessons in Laughter does just what this kind of book should do and does it well; it presents a portrait in the round of a figure we have already admired in performance. But this book, almost incidentally, also gives a perceptive reader a glimpse of...