Laughter

Professor Francis Arthur Powell Aveling, Reader in Psychology at the University of London, last week offered corrections to the popular notion about laughter, its causes and significance. "The really happy man," he said, "never laughs--or seldom--though he may smile. He does not need to laugh, for laughter, like weeping, is a relief of mental tension--and the happy are not overstrung.

"It is only the 'superior' or discontented man who really laughs and perhaps that is why laughter, like tears, is ugly--being made up of grimaces and contortions, the mask of a hard or selfish mind. . . .

"Laughter is a kind of behavior, exceedingly curious were it not so commonplace, which begins in a puckering of features and ends in jelly-like convulsions of the whole body. . . . But smiles are beautiful, as marks of sympathy and understanding."

U. S. laymen wondered if the legendary difference between the English sense of humor and the American might not have colored Psychologist Aveling's conclusions. Is all laughter "ugly . . . hard . . . selfish?" Is a father "ugly" when he manifests delight at the cunning or courage of his small son ? Is it "selfish" of children to chortle and bubble when the magician yanks the rabbit from the hat? Are those people "hard" who sometimes burst out laughing even when they are all alone, for no reason that they could tell you except that "it seems so good just to be alive on a day like this?" What about "Jovian laughter"? Was, or is, that a phenomenon of discontent ?

Such lay questions were answered by Dr. Thaddeus Lincoln Bolton, psychologist at Temple University, Philadelphia, who set Psychologist Aveling right on a minor point besides carrying the Aveling analysis of laughter one illuminating step further. The minor point was: whereas Dr. Aveling supposed hyenas and humans to be the only laughing animals, Dr. Bolton had observed laughter in cows, calves, horses, monkeys; "and the most obvious laughter in the animal kingdom is that of the dog."

Concerning the instinctive basis for laughter, Dr. Bolton said: "Laughter is a form of expression denoting the culmination of some conquest or struggle . . . also the expression of a vicarious triumph. ... It is a phenomenon of triumph. . . . What we generally call laughter is the expression of a coarse emotion which, as culture increases, is reformed to the form of a smile. Smiling, therefore, is not the expression of an opposite emotion, as Professor Aveling avers, but simply a refined and secondary development of laughter."

The dialectic of laughter, from boor to baronet, is thus: shout, guffaw, laugh, chuckle, smile. Inferior forms of laughter would seem to be the titter, the giggle, the cackle, the roar, the snigger.