The problem with humorists is that they have usually been as vulnerable as those they mocked. Dickens used his enormous popularity to propagate his ideals as a social reformer, but his praise for the delights of family life concealed the collapse of his own marriage and an illicit love life he had to keep secret; he remained a prisoner of his unquenchable need for public applause and ‘the vague unhappiness which tracks a life of constant aim and ever impels to some new aim in which it may be lost’. Mark Twain has retained his reputation as the ideal American, but he insisted that his autobiography should remain unpublished for a hundred years because he knew that Americans would not accept what he really thought – which has recently been at last revealed – that American soldiers were ‘uniformed assassins’ and that patriotism was ‘humbug’; he could not speak with absolute frankness, and even though he could turn almost anything into a joke, he had to confess: ‘I have not profoundly dealt in truth.’
Like them and so many others, Lao She found it difficult to establish an ideal relationship between humour and serious reality. Swept away by feelings that overwhelmed his capacity for detachment, he could not resist being thrilled by Mao’s promise to revitalise China, and he offered his help, until he realised he would lose all his freedom and have to say only what the leader demanded. The deep desire to be of use to his country struggled against the humorist’s scepticism. He wanted both to criticise and defend his country. ‘If I reveal the faults of the [Chinese], it is because I love them . . . Their misfortunes are also my own . . . their intelligence is equalled only by their stupidity.’
All his art rejected superficial generalisations about national characteristics, and he hated the way ‘the savage was identified by the colour of his skin and the civilised by the waviness of his hair.’ But humour could not entirely eliminate the resentment he felt against English people’s ‘narrow patriotism which is the origin of all their crimes’. That resentment provoked a contrary patriotism in him. He concluded that ‘the people of a strong country are people and those of a weak country are dogs’. Until China became a strong power, its citizens would always be treated like dogs. Throughout his life, he repeatedly found himself torn between maintaining a smiling detachment and getting passionately involved on issues that he could not make fun of.
His self-mockery originated in something deeper than modesty. Far from being proud of his books, he was highly critical of them and pointed out their weaknesses with apparently total detachment. ‘If I have any gifts, they are certainly not for intellectual reflection. I can write a warm letter to a friend, but am quite unable to make an intelligent proposition.’ Writing about women frightened him too, and as for love, ‘I am condemned to being superficial, unable to make any heart beat faster.’ Though occasionally conceding that he might have some talent, he could find no trace of genius. ‘The art of literature is really not easy,’ he lamented, ‘and I say this partly from disgust at my own mediocrity, and partly from a desire to give myself some courage.’ He thought of himself as no more than a rickshaw puller: ‘Is that not laying one’s life down for others?’ He hated himself for not being able to be a hero, but he was not willing to be an imitation hero, to play the game others played. He ended up becoming nostalgic about the old Confucian traditions, forgetting how he had made fun of the absurd results to which they could lead. He could not formulate a message for the next generation, simply telling it to try to do better than he had.
In one of his plays, Teahouse, a character commits suicide because he had lost everything that mattered to him and he no longer had faith in any of the solutions of government or society. In another play, The Problem of Face, another character is so humiliated that he chooses to commit suicide, ‘and move to another world where his shame could be washed away’ and ‘where he could have cool, clean, happy freedom’. Not long afterwards, tragically, Lao She, aged sixty-nine, was arrested by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution for having the wrong opinions, beaten and publicly humiliated. When he was allowed to go home he found it looted, and his papers, paintings and possessions strewn all over the courtyard. He did not enter the house, but walked away to the nearby canal and drowned himself. The list of humorists who have committed suicide is terrifyingly long. But before concluding that humour is therefore ultimately a form of despair, I must add that it is not certain that Lao She did commit suicide. He may have been murdered by the Red Guards. We cannot be certain.
Humour may often seem to be just another form of opium for the people, a pain-killer for suffering and cynicism, a harmless riposte to disappointment, or a return to childhood. If that is all it is, it would not be surprising that it has made so little headway against the stupidities it denounces or the suffering it consoles. The Egyptians, for example, have been famous for their joviality since at least 2200 B.C., when the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor declared that ‘in the eyes of the gods, the strong and the weak are a joke’; the Romans issued decrees against Egyptian lawyers notorious for making too many wisecracks at their expense; in the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun found the Egyptians ‘unusually mirthful and irreverent’; and most recently the star of the classical Egyptian cinema Kamal El-Shenawy (1922–2011) nominated the joke as ‘the devastating weapon which the Egyptians used against invaders and occupiers’. But however much the Egyptians made fun of their rulers, and even though jokes remain indispensable conversation starters for them, humour has not been enough to dislodge any tyrant. They may have mocked President Mubarak by giving him the nickname La Vache qui rit to express their contempt for him as a grinning peasant buffoon, and they may have laughed at the story that when President Nasser was searching for a vice president, his only criterion was that he wanted someone more stupid than himself, and so he chose Sadat, who also wanted a vice president more stupid than himself and so chose Mubarak, but Mubarak did not choose a vice president when he became president, and that was because he could not find anyone in the whole of Egypt more stupid than himself. But Mubarak survived for thirty years unscathed by all the jokes, as many other ridiculous tyrants have, as though protected by the armour of medals they have awarded themselves. Encircled by admirers, careerists, bureaucracies and armies, all who wield power can ignore what they do not want to hear; but that is not the only reason why mockery does not touch them.
Humour may be guilty of reinforcing conformity by being its safety valve. Though carnivals have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down, they did so only for a few days. Though privileged clergymen put on masks, or women’s clothes, or vestments back to front, and sang bawdy songs, celebrated mock weddings with animals, and cursed instead of blessing their congregations, their aim was to strengthen their authority, as a group of them explained in 1444: ‘We do these things in jest and not in earnest – as the ancient custom is – so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate.’ A contemporary judgement on Machiavelli, who called himself a ‘comic and tragic historian’ was: ‘He laughs at human errors, because he cannot correct them.’ Just as revolutionaries enjoy the conviviality and thrill of conspiracy, so those who laugh enjoy laughing too much to ask where else humour could lead, beyond relaxation and amusement.
Humour, moreover, has repeatedly been assailed by formidable enemies. The powerful have relentlessly punished those who mocked them. The Christian Church for long declared laughter to be the work of the devil, though it did not succeed in eliminating it any more than all the other sins it condemned. St Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651–1719), one of the most influential educational entrepreneurs, the first to establish Catholic schools with lay teachers instead of priests, warned his pupils against smiling in his Rules of Christian Decorum (1703): ‘Some people allow their teeth to be almost entirely visible. This is completely contrary to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them.’ Even the French Revolution disapproved of laughter, its Code of Conduct for parliamentary debates prescrib
ed that ‘absolutely no sign of applause or approval will be allowed; insults and displays of individual character are forbidden, as too are outbursts of laughter.’ In the hope that ‘reason’ would prevail in their decisions, the inventors of the Declaration of the Rights of Man restrained themselves, in twenty-eight months of debate, to only 408 outbursts of laughter, one every other day on average, rejecting the proud claim of the supposedly irrational masses that they were the most joyful people in the world, who liked to ‘begin and end every activity with singing and buffoonery’. Even the land of freedom that is the U.S.A. expelled Charlie Chaplin.
A silent conspiracy by people in search of respectability has spread the myth that assuming airs of gravity is the best way to prove that one is wise and reliable, and that loud laughter is a sign of peasant vulgarity, to be looked down upon by the ‘well brought up’. It may be that there is now less loud and uncontrolled laughter or sheepish grinning in the world than there once was. Theatres no longer have breaks in their performances to allow people in paroxysms of laughter to regain their composure, which used to happen in Feydeau farces. In the nineteenth century laughter may well have become more restrained as the middle classes evolved new ways of behaving, turning their laughter into a ‘mere spasm’. Only children were allowed to laugh freely, whether in fear, or bewilderment or playfulness, but they were also taught that their survival depended on taking the world more seriously than it seemed to deserve. Politicians responded by trying to please everybody by demonstrating that while remaining serious, they could also appreciate a joke of the right sort: Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the U.S.A. (1858–1919), was probably the first politician to allow himself to be seen smiling broadly instead of looking stern.
So there are many reasons why the extraordinary number of pathetic people who have been raised to high office have proved to be impervious to ridicule. They are not there to tell the truth, and certainly not the whole truth; they would have to resign in shame if they did; and besides their lies often make people feel better, give courage or hope; they are humorists in their own way too, in that they invent tall stories about their achievements. There can be no winners in this game of tennis balls that explode in the receiver’s face. Lao She tried to make it less painful and, like a physician, remains one of humanity’s venerable benefactors. But mockery by itself has only limited strength, it merely translates physical violence into verbal cruelty. So in the next chapter I shall explore what else can be achieved by humour, not in public but in private life.
I know humour needs to be approached with great caution and delicacy; it hates to be explained and repels all theories about it with deadly salvoes of wit; it would lose its charm if it ceased to be a puzzling and slippery art that disconcertingly paints with ideas and dances with words. But one can search for other possibilities in humour, so that it is more than a distraction and more than a weapon, and so that sarcasm, compassion and fantasy can play together in a grand, overpowering symphony that encourages ordinary people in their daily lives to put aside their pretences and discover the truth about one another.
My teacher who told me to wipe the smile off my face was an admirable, widely read and sad man, but we never spoke about anything except our lessons. He used to read philosophy books in French, and punished me by making me cut open their pages, for French books in those days were still bound in the old-fashioned way, with uncut edges; but he was too absorbed in his own philosophising, or too shy, to get to know his young pupils; so he never discovered what I was smiling about, and perhaps he would have been a happier teacher if he had found out that there was affection, not venom in my grin.
[13]
How does one acquire a sense of humour?
Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) was one of the wittiest men of his time, though he is now remembered mainly as the inventor of Utopia or as a Catholic saint. His serious image as Lord Chancellor of England, Speaker of the House of Commons, a successful lawyer and a Renaissance scholar contrasts with an unusually jovial manner. ‘From boyhood he was always so pleased with a joke, that it might seem that jesting was the main object of his life . . . When quite a youth, he wrote farces and acted them. If a thing was facetiously said, even though it was aimed at himself, he was charmed with it, so much did he enjoy any witticism that had a flavour of subtlety or genius.’
He urged his friend Erasmus, ‘prince of the Renaissance humanists’, to write In Praise of Folly, ‘which was much the same thing as setting a camel to dance’. Everyone in his house, including the servants, was encouraged to play a musical instrument of some kind, and participate in games and play-acting, inventing imaginary scenes and characters, and given lines to speak in the first person as in a play. ‘A merry talk cometh never amiss to me.’ He even employed a jester, who was treated with such respect that he was included in Holbein’s portrait of the More family, a now famous painting which emphasised the importance More accorded to the intimate pleasures of private life and the education of his children, to bantering repartee with his wife, and above all to his almost daily very personal ‘mutual conversation’ with his most beloved daughter Margaret, whose talents he believed would one day equal his own.
The imaginative quality of his wit showed itself in his book Utopia, which expresses the bewilderment that seizes young people capable of thinking for themselves when they are confronted by the bizarre expectations that the world has of them.
On entering adulthood, Thomas More was so horrified by the vanity and greed of people in power, who think their ‘own fart smells sweet’ because they are so in love with their own opinions, that he withdrew into a monastery for two years to hide from them. He learnt Greek to seek inspiration from a vanished world, but used that knowledge to translate one of the sharpest comic and sarcastic critics of the Hellenic civilisation, the Syrian Lucian of Samosata (A.D. 125–c. 180). Utopia is a young man’s book of revulsion against the society of his day, dismissing its most fundamental institutions and practices as absurd, condemning governments as ‘a conspiracy of the rich who on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends . . . and engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible’, demanding the abolition of property, and of money too, which produces ‘much anxiety and great occasions of mischief’, and pleading that ‘every man might be of what religion he pleased’. But all this was fantasy; he thought such dreams would never become reality, and he wrote his story as a conversation in which he is one of the characters supplying objections to his own radical proposals.
That contradiction within himself tormented his whole life, wanting to give up on the world, but also to improve it. He accepted a post in the royal service ‘much against my will’, all the more so because he had watched a reformer he admired failing and escaping into exile. He thought he had a solution, not to expect too much, and to be as practical as he could: ‘What you cannot make wholly good, you may at least make as little bad as possible.’ He combined this with a determination that rulers should be honestly told the truth, even if it might lead to punishment. He struggled to discover how he could avoid the common fate of public servants, ‘good, honest, innocent men’ who were corrupted by ‘the serpent of ambition’. Past experience seemed to say that honesty would not pay; but he persisted in thinking that rulers should be told the truth, and he refused to lie about his religious beliefs when his king changed his own. So he chose to submit to execution, which he could easily have avoided; it was in fact a virtual suicide, like the suicides of all the humorists who came after him. Though his idea of the afterlife was slightly different from Lao She’s, he told his family: ‘We will merrily meet in heaven.’ His disapproval of the world around him was so strong that he was willing to leave it, despite all the pleasure he obtained from his family; but he kept his private and public life in separate compartments; in public office, far from ever smiling at those he judged to be delinquents, he treated them with remarkable ferocity. His sense of humour served only as a
temporary escape from reality rather than as an instrument for understanding and reshaping it.
Since his day, despite all that has been done to make life more agreeable, many different kinds of anxieties have emerged, adding themselves to long established ones, to make it more difficult to see the world dispassionately. Constant change stimulates fears of an uncertain future; big cities harbour loneliness; medicine not only cures but also generates an ever-growing list of threats that nourish hypochondria; invisible germs and viruses replace the demons and hobgoblins of the past; sharpened intelligence and increasing wealth do not protect from worry; self-esteem becomes more elusive as traditional hierarchies collapse; competitiveness increases stress; pressures at work damage relations between colleagues; fear of failure nourishes a sense of inadequacy; and neither more leisure nor more alcohol suffice to compensate. So it becomes necessary to think afresh about how to respond to these challenges.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 15