The Humor of Continental Europe

By Brander Matthews

Na recent consideration of the psychology of laughter, a French philosopher recalled the old story of the man

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in church who remained unmoved when the rest of the congregation were dissolved in tears by the power and the pathos of the sermon, and who explained his self-control as due simply to the fact that he did not belong to that parish. And M. Bergson then asserted that this explanation, absurd as it may seem at first, is not unsatisfactory or illogical if applied to laughter rather than to tears. "However hearty a laugh may be," so the acute French observer maintained, "it always conceals an after-thought of complicity with other laughers, real or imaginary;" and he drew attention then to the numberless comic effects which are not translatable from one language to another, because the underlying idea which gives them point and piquancy is peculiar to the people in whose language they were invented. Shakespeare was very shrewd even in his unthinking youth; and it is in one of his earliest plays that he told us how

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it."

George Eliot pushed the same thought a little further when she declared that "a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections." We may be interested to know how the other half lives, but we pay little attention to what the

other half laughs at, so long as this does not happen to appeal to our own sense of humor. And yet if we really wish to understand our neighbors, we need to know what it is that they laugh at, what they are willing to laugh at, and what they refuse to laugh at. Fletcher of Saltoun did not care who made the laws of a country so long as he made its songs; and perhaps the old sage would achieve his purpose even more certainly if he had chosen to make the jokes of the people rather than the lyrics or the laws. More than one government has been laughed out of power. The dissolving force of ridicule is indisputable, although there is an immense difference in the quips and mocks which different races find amusing. The French, for example, have often seen no malice in broad caricatures which the British have resented as transgressing the boundaries of decency.

It is one of the commonplaces of criticism now that the drama and the novel have each an interest beyond their literary appeal, because-in so far as they are sincere attempts to set forth life as it appears to the author-they enlarge our knowledge of our fellow-men. Foreign novels and foreign plays contain an unconscious declaration of the thoughts, the feelings, the moral standards of the people for whose entertainment they were devised. In every good play, as in every good work of fiction, we can find a significant revelation of racial characteristics, unintentional, no doubt, but none the less instructive; and it is by the aid of the imaginative literature of a nation that some shrewd observers are accustomed to guide their opinion of that people. And as that shrewdest of observers, Walter Bagehot, once put it with his customary clearness, "There is a certain intimate essence of national meaning, which is as untranslatable as good poetry."

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It is because we can abstract from the sincere fiction of foreign peoples this "intimate essence of national meaning" that the novel and the play have for us their larger significance. But from the humor of a people we can express this intimate essence even more certainly than we can from their fiction. Show me what a man laughs at, and I will tell you what he is." The merry jest which sets in a roar the miscellaneous audience of a variety-show is a document of real value in estimating the character of a population; and the casual quip of a paragrapher which goes the round of the papers may help us to a sound conclusion as swiftly as the more laborious investigations of the political philosopher.

It is not a misleading portrait of the American that the foreigner can find in Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Mr. Dooley; and John Bull himself is not more characteristically British than Mr. Punch. Perhaps more sharply than in any other way would a comparison of what is found laughable in the United States with what is found laughable in Great Britain bring out the essential unity of the English-speaking peoples and also the differentiation-superficial, it may be, and yet significant-of the American branch from the British. Probably a master of the new science of ethnic psychology would be able to explain the surprising fact that the merely mechanical pun seems to give pleasure to the inhabitants of the British Isles, although it is strenuously abhorred by the citizens of these States.

Another fact also calling for explanation, although easier to elucidate, is the belief widely held here in America that our kin across the sea are slow-witted, and that they fail to take a joke as swiftly as they might. This belief was once summarily stated by an American who lived in a European city where there was a large British colony. "Telling a joke

to an Englishman," he said, "is like trying to write on blotting-paper." This belief is paralleled, oddly enough, by the conviction of the English themselves that the Scotch are obtuse in matters of humor. It was an Englishman who declared that it took a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotchman's head. Of course the obvious retort is that it was an English joke that the Scotchman had failed to apprehend; and so it is the American joke which the British are sluggish in perceiving.

The Scotch have a pawky wit of their own, as we all know; but they have also, and in abundance, humor of a more universal currency, exportable everywhere. Sir Walter Scott was as unlike as may be to that editor of the Scotsman who confessed that he "jocked wi' deeficulty"; and "Ian Maclaren" and Mr. J. M. Barrie are in no peril of surgical operations. Yet there is truth in the assertion that the men of Edinboro' are often hermetically closed to the humorous appeal of a joke which the men of London find exquisitely amusing, just as the men of London are sometimes hostile, or at least inhospitable, to the joke which has been most warmly welcomed by the men of New York. In other words, there is some humor which is so broad in its humanity that it transcends all boundaries of time and place, of race and of country; and there is humor of another kind, local in its flavor, and needing for its full appreciation the solvent of local sympathy.

In any collection of examples selected from the humorous literature of foreign languages, there should be a proper representation of both these classes-of the humor which is fairly universal in its appeal, like "Don Quixote" and "Tartarin on the Alps," and also of the humor which is more narrowly national, racial, ethnic, and which is therefore more