THE BURDEN OF HUMOR
What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so
dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public
laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic?
Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life
is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man had
more of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare, and yet his
serious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness,
have pushed their way into the race's arsenal of immortal platitudes.
So, too, with Aesop, and with Balzac, and with Dickens, to come down the
scale. All of these men were fundamentally humorists, and yet all of
them achieved what the race has come to accept as a penetrating
sagacity. Contrariwise, many a haloed pundit has had his occasional
guffaw. Lincoln, had there been no Civil War, might have survived in
history chiefly as the father of the American smutty story--the only
original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature.
Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age,
might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome
trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Molière; his
surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to
the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony,
turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling of the _scherzo_.
No, there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense,
humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume that
there is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of
life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness?
None other, I am convinced, than the fact that the average man is far
too stupid to make a joke. He may _see_ a joke and _love_ a joke,
particularly when it floors and flabbergasts some person he dislikes,
but the only way he can himself take part in the priming and pointing of
a new one is by acting as its target. In brief, his personal contact
with humor tends to fill him with an accumulated sense of disadvantage,
of pricked complacency, of sudden and crushing defeat; and so, by an
easy psychological process, he is led into the idea that the thing
itself is incompatible with true dignity of character and intellect.
Hence his deep suspicion of jokers, however adept their thrusts. "What a
damned fool!"--this same half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and butt
alike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of comedy from his general
concept of comedy itself, and that concept is inextricably mingled with
memories of foul ambuscades and mortifying hurts. And so it is not often
that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone
frivolity in a sage.
h l mencken
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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii
Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.â€
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein