The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Court jesters do not normally appear as decisive influences on human evolution, but they are to be found from the earliest times, employed by kings, pharaohs, emperors, sultans and even popes to say what obsequious subjects dared not say. Only occasionally did a ruler, like Karl Ludwig, Elector of the Palatinate of the Rhine (1617–1680), say he ‘did not feel the need to keep a court jester, for when he wanted to laugh he would summon two professors from the university, set them debating, then sit back and enjoy the folly of the scene’. Jesters were certainly valued as entertainers or antidotes to melancholy, but their importance comes from their having the right to say anything ‘without offence’, with immunity from punishment for slander, a privilege that no-one else has had. The actor-clown Richard Tarlton was allowed to criticise Queen Elizabeth I to her face and to denounce her favourites as ‘knaves’. The isolation and loneliness of kings, surrounded by flattery and intrigue, made humble jesters, who could never aspire to high office, indispensable in connecting rulers with reality, and unmasking hypocrisy and deceit. In their clownish garb, when they stood on their heads, they seemed to be seeing the world the right way up. ‘They are the only ones who speak frankly and tell the truth,’ wrote Erasmus, and the French court jester Marais told Louis XIII (1601–1643): ‘There are two things about your job I do not like; to eat alone and to shit in public.’ Abu Nawas, jester to Caliph Harun al-Rashid, used to take his master out in disguise at night into the streets of Baghdad to see what life in the city was really like. The relationship between king and jester could become quite intimate and the emperor Akbar wept when his jester died. The jester was ‘an approved man of veracity’ (and occasionally a woman – there are records of Queen Mary I rewarding her female jester with ‘twelve pairs of new shoes’).

  Court jesters were called Wise Fools, and the function they fulfilled can be judged from the names of Chinese ones: Assisting Uprightness, Newly Polished Mirror, Adding Clarity. The most famous Chinese jester, Tung-Fang Shuo (160–93 B.C.) remained a legend for centuries after his death because he was not only witty but also an astute critic of the emperor Wu, castigating him for extravagance and for ignoring the interest of the poor, always surprising in his responses, capable of profound observation and of revealing that every question or event had more sides to it than anyone else realised. A fool, said a Jewish proverb, is half a prophet. And since truth cannot be easily swallowed whole or raw, jesters were usually also poets, magicians, musicians or singers, able to convey unpalatable insights in an epigram, a witty story or a song. To be amusing was not their deepest purpose, they were importantly artists in the search for truth. They point to one of the neglected sub-plots of history, which is the unmasking of sham.

  It was not just kings who needed jesters; mediaeval noblemen who could afford it employed them too. Today, however, business tycoons expect something quite different from their ‘coaches’ and do not easily tolerate employees ‘taking the piss’. The different arts which the jesters mastered have been divided among serious specialist professions. Musicians, magicians, poets have gone their separate ways and truth has become identified more with knowledge than with wisdom. The court jester’s spirit, intent on speaking the truth, can be found still alive in the theatre, the mirror in which people can see themselves differently from what they imagine themselves to be, and the place where actors put themselves into the skin of another person and discover what it is to be someone else. Journalists are also unacknowledged heirs of the court jesters, when they denounce lies and obfuscation by public figures; but they do not enjoy the immunity of jesters. In some countries they are in danger of prosecution or even assassination, in others their voices are increasingly drowned by the rise of public relations experts, who are now four times more numerous than them.

  Truth, which used to be imagined as an immovable rock that provided a firm footing for clear decisions, is today a diamond that radiates light in numerous directions and demands to be viewed from different angles. Just as diamond cutters could create only seventeen surfaces at the beginning of the seventeenth century and thirty-three at the end, while today as many as 144 are possible, so truth is becoming increasingly dazzling, and indeed almost blinding, as hundreds of different disciplines each cast a different light upon it. Never has it been so difficult to understand the implications of even a small piece of knowledge, or to dissipate the clouds of misinformation in which it is enveloped. One jester cannot suffice. To be inspired by a single muse is no longer enough.

  Sir Thomas More’s playful joviality now appears too limited in its ambition. There is another role for humour beyond entertainment, self-defence or protest. Humour can also teach a new attitude to truth, as can be seen from the history of its development in England, where it seems to have consciously expanded to become an instrument for the appreciation of strangers. Whereas traditionally comedy was supposed to ‘correct the conduct of mankind’ by ridiculing aberrations from the norm, the Irish dramatist George Farquhar (1677–1707), on migrating to London, observed that ‘we have the most unaccountable medley of humans among us of any people on earth . . . as a consequence of the mixture of many nations.’ Of course, other great cities were also mixed, but he confronted this as a dilemma, and asked ‘How to please so many tastes?’ In other words, how to respond to difference, instead of trying to stamp it out? ‘A great diversity of character’ was the inevitable result of a country becoming more commercial ‘with a multiplicity of trades and professions’, said Adam Smith’s disciple John Millar (1735–1801), who influenced the drafters of the American constitution: ‘Rapid improvements of arts and manufactures . . . produced a degree of wealth and affluence, which diffused a feeling of independence and a high spirit of liberty, through the great body of the people.’ Another dramatist, Congreve (1670–1729), had been quick to notice that ‘any man that has a humour is under no restraint or fear of giving it vent’. ‘Every man follows his own [humour] and takes a pleasure, perhaps a pride, to show it,’ wrote the diplomat Sir William Temple (1628–1699), who added: ‘The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humour, and the fourth wit.’ A humorous person became not just someone amusing, but someone who is himself amused. Gradually, humour evolved to become more than a method for mitigating conflict and disagreement: it now stimulated interest in the peculiarities that made people different. The sympathetic perception of incongruity became a positive talent. A culture of sensibility encouraged a deeper interest in the unique nature of individuals. Instead of laughter being directed against people who were different, instead of it being antipathetic, it became sympathetic and an opportunity for good-natured play.

  The phrase ‘sense of humour’ was first used in English in 1840. Having a sense of humour began to be seen as a desirable attribute around 1870. Increasingly valued ever since, not just socially but also as fulfilling an intellectual and moral need, it is now a force whose full potential has still to be realised. If Nobel had been more sensitive to the spirit of his time, he might have established a prize for humour, but the Swedish Bank that endowed a Nobel prize in the unfunny science of economics, and chose the year 1968 to do so – when youth was ridiculing authority of every kind – demonstrated that the rich and powerful, though they are often able to joke as well as anyone, persisted in seeing joking as no more than a piquant sauce to make a dull dish eatable.

  The significance of humour has also been diminished by the myth that each nation has a distinct sense of humour, a myth invented to strengthen the exclusive loyalty that growing nations demanded. The humour of strangers has never been a secret language impossible for outsiders to appreciate. Humour all over the world makes fun of the same sort of targets. The oldest kind is the humour that comes naturally to ordinary people, disrespectful, scurrilous and earthy, preserved in folk stories that last for centuries, lose nothing of their savour from repetition, and require no book learning: they are despised but secretly enjoyed by those who aspire to refinement. Examples of unive
rsal humour abound. The jokes of Nasreddin, the fourteenth-century Turkish Sufi, have been endlessly reproduced across half the world from Budapest to Beijing, adopted by Afghans and Iranians and Uzbeks as their own, inspiring even the music of Shostakovich, and they are still laughed at. There is nothing arcane in the story of the emperor Tamerlane meeting Nasreddin in the bath-house and asking him, ‘If I were a slave, how much would I be worth?’ ‘Fifty pence,’ said Nasreddin. ‘But,’ retorted the emperor, ‘this towel I am wearing is alone worth that.’ ‘Yes, of course, that is my offer for the lot.’ Cervantes’ Don Quixote likewise had an immediate universal appeal and has been appreciated in over seventy languages, including fifteen Indian ones. The same jokes reappear in the most unlikely places: those about the meanness of the people of Aberdeen are identical to those made by Bulgarians about the people of Gabrovo; they both say they stop their watches and clocks at night so as not to wear out the cogs. So how do they know the time in the dark? They blow a trumpet, and a neighbour shouts back: ‘Who is the idiot making that racket at twenty past two in the morning?’ Aernout van Overbeke (1632–1674), judge of the high court of the Dutch East Indies, included hundreds of English, French, German, Italian and Spanish jokes in his collection of 2,440 amusing Anecdota, which everyone could understand. Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843–1918) wrote his humorous novels in the Oriya language (spoken by forty-five million Indians) to assert the dignity of the people of Orissa, but he drew inspiration from the eleven languages he learnt, and from praying daily ‘surrounded on all sides by befitting quotations from the scriptures of all the world’s religions inscribed on the walls’.

  Though many English people nowadays regard their sense of humour as an essential ingredient of their national character, and trace it back to Chaucer, a whole century elapsed after the poet’s death before his readers decided that Chaucer was funny. As late as the early eighteenth century, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit (1709), said the Italians were the supreme humorists: ‘It is the only manner in which the poor cramped wretches can discharge a free thought. We must yield to them the superiority in this sort of wit. The persecuting spirit hath raised the bantering one.’ Before the age of nationalist conflicts, it was easier to recognise the universality of humour. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, much influenced by Rabelais and Cervantes, was initially more admired in France than in England.

  Though laughing at foreigners is a universal amusement, a closer look at humour in fact dissolves national stereotypes. The Chinese have not only been devoted to Confucius, but have made fun of him too, and even whimsically claimed that he might have been a woman; they have also worshipped a God of Joy, Hsi-shen, and participated in the Taoist fight against dogmatism, using the ‘funny story’ (hsiao-hua) and the ‘side-swipe’ (ku-chi) to protect their individual aspirations for freedom. The publisher of the German translation of my book on The French cut out the chapter on humour (though he did relent after many protests), and an international poll in 2011 did indeed rank Germany as the country with the least sense of humour. But the Germans invented the irreverent Till Eulenspiegel (the arse-wiper), internationally famous for his jokes in the Middle Ages, and in the nineteenth century Berlin was called the ‘mother city of wit’. The comic magazine Eckensteher once rivalled Punch. The Berliners who laughed co-existed with straight-laced bureaucrats who tolerated hilarity in the hope that it would distract from political agitation. Jewish humour is universal too because it is an answer to universal problems, triumphing over vulnerability through self-mockery, revelling in reconciling irreconcilables so that disagreement becomes a spur to ingenuity, delighting in debate that takes logic to absurdity, and making seventy different ways of interpreting the Torah a source of pride. So a rabbi could settle an argument between two colleagues in the following way: when one gave his opinion, the rabbi agreed with him, then the other offered a diametrically opposed opinion, and the rabbi agreed with him too; when the rabbi’s wife protested, ‘They cannot both be right’, the rabbi, after long reflection, answered, ‘You are also right.’

  There have, however, been differences in where laughter has been judged to be appropriate. Those Japanese who were worried about exposing their teeth to public view set aside their theatres as places where one could go to laugh and keep one’s mouth perpetually open in hilarity. In China some demanded that full attention should be given to the serious business of eating at banquets and that laughter-making conversation would be a distraction, while the ancient Greeks brought entertainers to amuse them only when they had finished their dinner. What was peculiar about the English was that, once their little island was in command of a huge empire, they had the confidence to allow humour to invade almost every sphere of life; it became a proof that they had no fears. But the idea that their humour was radically different from that of their neighbours was mere bravado. Across the Channel, the French defined themselves as the most jovial country on earth when they were at the height of their power. It is a major defect of the tourist industry that it does not make the appreciation of the use of humour in every nation as important as the appreciation of its food.

  Humour and anxiety are not opposites, but closely related; the two words once meant almost the same thing. None of the impressive discoveries about the genetic and neurological influences on mental well-being have yet found a reliable method of exchanging anxiety for serenity, and all that is known is that whatever theories or healing techniques are used, it is the quality of the relationship between the patient and the therapist that is ‘the single most important ingredient of effective psychiatric care’. Humour does not automatically create deep bonds between people, because it is so often played at a shallow level; and it is still in an adolescent phase when, as with Thomas More, it has no influence on the harshness of official business. It may start as a private conspiracy between two people combining to narrow the gap between them and to sound out delicately each other’s fears and defences, but it can progress so that they give each other the courage to question normally unassailable assumptions. It can lead to a superficial scepticism, but also to an almost scientific approach, mistrust for the apparently obvious. The compassionate element in it teaches how to see the world from another’s viewpoint; the fantasy element to construct alternatives; while sarcasm reveals the limits of one’s sympathies; but only when these are joined together, and create awareness of one’s own absurdities, does it allow us to believe that we belong to the same species. This gives humour a central role in human relationships. If the cinema is the eighth muse, humour is the ninth.

  But, of course, it is complicated by infinite gradations of sensitivity. I must confess that I laugh childishly at the most puerile jokes, just as tears pour out of my eyes at scenes of banal sentimentality, so I am not the person to censor or prescribe anything related to humour.

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  What stops people feeling completely at home in their own country?

  I was young once

  I wandered alone

  And I lost my way.

  I only felt rich

  When I met another.

  A human’s joy is another human.

  How much progress has been made in the art of meeting another human being since the thousand-year-old Sayings of the High One, the Nordic god Odin? They are full of fearful warnings about the difficulty of dealing with other people, and of distinguishing between friends and enemies. Has finding joy in other people been made easier or harder by the complexities of civilisation? The Sayings give this advice:

  If you find a friend you fully trust

  And wish for his good will

  Exchange thoughts

  Exchange gifts

  Go often to his house.

  Since those words were uttered, the division of the earth’s inhabitants into nation-states has made a big difference to whom one talks with and whom one trusts. Nations are often deaf to what their rivals say, but they have also brought apparently incompatible people together and have a m
agic power to make even those who have persistently been losers feel that they are winners. Most of their members have never met and are often left guessing about one another’s opinions, so that many of the messages they exchange are platitudes which may give either true or false clues about the real extent of the familiarity, affection or resentment between them. Nations invent myths to suggest that, ever since a distant past, their members have been destined for each other and made to live in harmony, even when their unification has been relatively recent and their frontiers uncertain, and so they come to resemble immovable parts of the landscape like mountains or rivers. But with whom do they really like to talk?

  I have decided to visit the descendants of the Vikings who worshipped Odin, because they are esteemed as having formed nations that make them among the most egalitarian, democratic, prosperous and happy people in the world. They have reached a pinnacle and so presumably may point to what nations might become in the future. I have chosen a half dozen of the heroes and heroines of Denmark – now ranked number one in the United Nations Happiness Report – not because they can speak for millions of Scandinavians, but to discover with whom they talked, who inspired them and why they felt the need to breathe foreign air.

  Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) is one of the most famous of all Danes, having been translated into 152 languages. He is also the author of the most popular of all Danish songs, ‘In Denmark I was born’, which explains why he loved his native land: it is his home, its language is his mother’s voice, and above all there is the song’s emotional refrain: ‘You love me, Denmark, You love me.’ Andersen’s stories, however, are also about his suffering. Denmark, he said, was ‘where I have felt more unhappy than happy’. He complained that he was ‘different from everyone’ and that he ‘must escape his roots’.