CHAPTER IX

FREEDOM AND LAUGHTER

        When the business man or student wishes to get free from his cares, drudgery, and seriousness of work he resorts to games and plays which give the needed relaxation. The games, the theaters with their comic, plays, places of amusement, clubs with heir mirth, jokes, jests and anecdotes smooth out the cares, the crow’s feet, the wrinkles on the brow of many a worker whose occupation is either monotonous or full of earnestness, of seriousness, effort and concentration of attention. Like school boys and school girls, men of the factory, the office, the shop and the store become free agents and are no longer hindered and cramped by rule and regulation of business and trade. Free scope is given to their cramped state of mental activity. Relaxation from constraint gives rise to free unimpeded activity; hence joy and laughter. Relaxation goes with free activity.

        The ridiculous and the comic have within them this aspect of relaxation. The mind feels soothed and relaxed by the comic, the joke, the pun, the anecdote, the amusing story, and the fable. There is a release from pressure of limitations, conditions, regulations, and efforts of conforming oneself to and squeezing one’s individuality into a definite frame. When the consciousness of such effort is gone, there is relief, and the feeling of relaxation is present.

        We can compare the comic and laughter with rest. In fact, we may go further and compare laughter with sleep; not with the sleep in which the senses and consciousness are inactive, but with the sleep state in which mental activities are present. May we not compare the ludicrous with the dream? The dream occurs during the rest state, during sleep. And what is sleep but a release from all the troubles and trammels of waking life?

        In my work on "Sleep" I have shown that "we go to sleep when we relinquish our hold on the relations of our external environment. We fall asleep when our consciousness is fagged, when we wish no longer to enter into communication with the external world, when we lose interest in our surroundings. When our interest in external existence fags and fades away we go to sleep. When our interests in the external world cease we draw up the bridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication, as far as it is possible, and become isolated in our activity and inner dream life. We fall asleep when the vital interests in external being have fallen into the background; we awake when those interests are aroused. When the struggle for existence ceases we repair to our castle and battlements.

        "Sleep is the interruption of our intercourse with the external world; it is the laying down of our arms for a respite in the struggle of life. Sleep is a truce with the world. When all psychomotor reactions to the stimuli of external environment cease we sleep. We sleep because we are no longer interested to take an active part in the battle of life. From a teleological standpoint we may say that is a dismissal of the external world with all its vicissitudes, troubles, and paints. We cease to desire, we cease to react, and we sleep and ream in peace." As Heraclitus puts it: "Those who are awake have one world in common; those who are asleep retire every one to a private world of his own."

        We have further shown that sleep is brought about "by a mass of impressions possessing little or no variability, by limitations, or by relative withdrawal of stimulations, or, what is the same, by monotony of stimulations and limitations of voluntary movements." The thresholds in regard to stimuli coming from the external environment are raised, that is—it becomes more and more difficult for external stimuli to reach consciousness; the person, or the animal falls into sleep. The hold on external life is gone, there is complete relaxation, both physical and mental. The sleeper reacts neither with muscle, nor with sense, nor with intellect to the various impressions that come crowding on him from all sides. The hold on external life is relinquished and the state is one of passivity and relaxation.

        The sudden release or relief from a great strain is apt to make people laugh at the least occasion. In wars and forced marches where there are great strain and danger soldiers have been known to laugh at the most trivial accident and remark. In school, in the lecture room, in court, in the popular assembly, in church any trivial incident calls forth laughter. The more dignified the surroundings are, the more solemn the circumstances, the more will the trivial appeal to use as ridiculous. On such occasions the mind is tuned to the serious, and there is a subexcitement of potential, subconscious reserve energy which is stimulated to life in order to respond to the occasion. When the trivial appears the strain of the immense amount of subexcited, subconscious, nervous energy is relieved, the amount of energy overflows the smaller muscles of the face and of respiration, the tension is relived, and the result is laughter. This is akin to Spencer’s view of laughter that it is the relief of a strain, and also to that Kant, who maintains that "Laughter is the result of expectation which suddenly ends in nothing." We may lay it down as a law that relief from a great strain is an important aid to laughter. That is why often a flat remark made by a dull schoolmaster or by heavy-witted professor in the college room excites laughter—it is the relief from the strain of the schoolroom.

        Similarly a trifling incident in a church, such as the bark of a dog or the sneeze of the minister or of one of the congregation in the middle of a solemn hymn, excites smiles and laughter. There is the contrast of the solemn and the insignificant, the superior and the inferior, the excellent and the base. There is relief from a strenuous state and release of subconscious energy adjusted and tuned to a high occasion, energy no longer needed, now spent in free activity of joy, overflowing the small, delicate muscles of face and respiration, and manifested as smiles and laughter. A situation that brings about relief of a psycho-physiological state of high tension appears as contrast giving rise to laughter and the ludicrous. We may, therefore, lay it down as a law that the significant and the insignificant, the noble and the ignoble, the grave and the gay, the heroic and the grotesque, the unusual and the usual, the superior and the inferior, when juxtaposed, raise laughter.

        In the ludicrous and the comic we let go the earnestness, the seriousness of life; we get free from the limitations and the harassing hindrances of the external world—business, work, trade is forgotten. The monotony of the humdrum routine of life is left behind. When we are no longer in contact with the actual facts, as far as our interests are concerned, we are let loose from all rules, laws, regulations, manners, and customs to which we have to conform. We rise above the requirements of life. With an activity unimpeded by the conditions of the external environment, unclogged by the hard, material facts of daily life, we are freed from the bondage of authority and control. The external world with its hard, unwieldy realities no longer troubles us. We become free agents. We soar in the air of spiritual freedom, ease, grace, and power of superabundance of energy. We bask in the light and the warmth radiating from the depths of our spirit. We laugh as we watch the sparkle, the rainbow colors, the kaleidoscopic display of rising and bursting of resplendent bubbles playing above the ocean of life.

        In comedy and laughter there is letting go of the realities of life; there is present a relaxation from the persistent concentration on the problems which life sets before us; there is relief from the seriousness, irksomeness, and grinding demanded by the authoritative, despotic decrees of the autocracy of the external environment; there is liberation from the limiting, controlling, regulating social surroundings. We spin and weave airy webs out of severe, inflexible realities, and destroy them like soap bubbles, like gossamer and cobweb, with a smile and a laugh. We take liberties with stern realities, circumvent them, transcend them, play with them, and laugh at them. As in a dream, or, rather in a day reverie, we are no longer at the mercy of the external world. We spin the yarn or web of lie as fancy and caprice please. In this respect the play of the comic and the life of dream and reverie are alike.

        There is, however, an important difference between the comic and the dream. The dream is an inconsistent rambling due to the lagging, sluggishness, and gradual loss of tenacity of mental power; it like the tottering walk, the incoherent speech and thought of the drunkard. The dream is a fanciful weaving of the mind due to mental paralysis and dissociation of consciousness. Dreams and reveries are due to the feeble grasp on the shuttle of active waking life. The comic, however, may even have a firmer hold on reality than waking life; it may display a wider view and deeper understanding of the complications and snarls presented to us by external surroundings. In the comic as in art we let our fancy work untrammeled by hard reality and oppressive social life. Our fancy works with greater and freer ease and energy than it does in the monotony of the tasks set to us by our daily occupations requisite for the maintenance of life. The sordid requirements of life no longer concern us. We enjoy the life of the free. Like the gods on Olympus, we laugh from the very joy of the sense of freedom. Laughter is born of surcharge of power, of superabundance of energy.

        When there is manifestation of reserve energy where none has been expected then laughter comes to the foreground. We laugh the triumphant, jubilant laughter when ease, facility, dexterity, and grace emerge out of difficulty, awkwardness, and perplexity. The sense of the ridiculous, on the contrary, appears, when awkwardness, perplexity, and uneasiness arise where ease and facility are expected. We laugh from surcharge of energy, and we laugh from opposite state in cases where such energy is found wanting. We laugh from strength and we laugh at weakness. Laughter arises from the sense of freedom of mental activities. We laugh from consciousness of our superior power when we see the weakness of the inferior.

        When there is actual delight in the inferiority, in the humiliation of another person, ridicule passes into the lower forms of sneering, sarcasm, scoffing, and jeering. The obscene and scurrilous joke belongs also to the lower forms of mental activities, inasmuch as the obscene takes delight in the humiliation of the person ridiculed, stimulates the sexual instinct, and arouses sexual energy. Many such obscene jokes are found in Shakespeare, especially in his comedy "Measure for Measure," the plot of which is laid in Vienna, full of vice, licentiousness, lewdry, and bawdry, the very city in which Freud, by the irony of fate, centuries afterward, developed his "scientific" sexual theories. However the case may be, it remains true that laughter arises from the consciousness of our own superiority.