Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.

A British friend of mine asked me, long ago, 'Do you ever laugh at things when you know you shouldn't?'

I was completely puzzled. 'No,' I said (honestly). I grew up yawning boredly through all the movies with 'hilarious' violence and pie-in-the-face slapstick. Why is it funny to hit someone with a cream pie? It's just messy. They said it was funny, so I shrugged. And waited for something to make me laugh.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about laughter. Actually, I meant to write about humour. I believe that humour is a necessary component in good writing. It's needed to balance a story, even if the story is serious or scary. In that other essay, I was inveighing against the belief some people seem to hold that deliberately directing laughter at other people, based on their perceived shortcomings, constitutes humour. I don't believe that it does. I will stick to that statement because it's basic to the way I see the world. That being said, I'd like to talk a little bit, not about humour, but about laughter, which seems to be what interests most people.

Every single time I've become involved in a discussion on h2g2 about humour, someone has brought up all the other things that make people laugh. Now, I'm a slow study, but the very large (pre-decimalisation) penny has finally dropped: modern people think laughter is always a response to humour. Oh, no. Laughter can be a very nasty thing, indeed. And it can be a profoundly sad thing, as well. It can also be a form of self-defence.

Consider cross-cultural laughter. It's a tricky thing. You are talking to a Japanese man. He laughs. You think this is because you have made him happy. You may be making him nervous, instead. In some cultures, laughter is often a sign of discomfort. If you think you're being a wag, you may keep going, thus increasing his discomfort.

Not everything that makes us laugh is funny.

There is a lot of nervous laughter in the world today. The more people have suffered, the more they are afraid, the more insecure everything is, the more laughing is going on. That's not necessarily a wonderful thing. The awful jokes and terrible slapstick I was subjected to on my TV screen as a kid came from films of the 1930s. Why were they so busy laughing? It was the Great Depression.

Watch this film clip from archive.org. It won't take you long. Is this funny? Of course not. Why would putting someone into a barrel of icy water be funny? What's coming out of the audience is nervous laughter based on fear.

All they that see me laugh me to scorn. . .   – Psalm 22:7, Authorised Version

Psalm 22 is the most terrible chapter in the Bible. The phrase 'laugh me to scorn' is actually one word, 'la-a-gah'. From this, I think we can conclude two things: if there was a Hebrew word for it, laughter combined with contempt was pretty usual, and if it was something that happened while you were watching another person die an agonising and undignified death, it didn't say anything nice about you.

By the way, you don't get out of understanding that reference by not believing that the stuff in that book really happened. Check the title of this column, we discuss fiction. If it's true about people, it's true, no matter what your opinion of the religious content.

I stood once in Windsor Castle. I probably would barely remember that day (other than the ugliness of the effigy of Prince Albert), except for the horrible shock I got at an exhibit of Michelangelo's cartoons. One of them is seared in my memory. (I'm sorry, I've tried to find it for you, but can't.) The cartoon showed Odysseus' men, who had been turned into pig-men by Circe. It was sort of a science-fiction drawing, though of course by a great genius. Circe and her minions had taken off the heads of the sailors and replaced them with the heads of swine.

In the cartoon, a sailor with the head of a pig looked on, weeping, as Circe's putti mocked his discarded head. One urinated on the head, while others laughed.

Cruel laughter is like that. It turns the laugher into a monster.

Adolf Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. All the inmates give the Hitler salute. One person fails to salute. The Führer demands to know why.

'I'm the nurse,' is the explanation. 'I'm not crazy.'

Not very funny? In 1938, lots of people laughed, though. A long time ago, I found a book from 1938, printed in Czechoslovakia, that was full of jokes like that. They used these jokes to deal with the tension and fear induced by Nazism.

Victims everywhere know this kind of laughter, people who belong to ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. People the other people are directing their 'la-a-gah' at.

My favourite Turkish joke, told to me by a Turkish friend in Germany. Cultural note: to Germans, Turks are cheap, like Yorkshiremen, and speak broken German. To Turks, Germans are wasteful and have dysfunctional family lives.

A Turk is walking down the street in Germany. He looks up. A German couple are quarrelling on their balcony. The man shoves his wife, and she falls from the balcony, landing headfirst in a dustbin, her legs kicking.

The Turk studies the scenario, then calls, 'Why you throw away? Is still good!'

Not hilarious? No. A good defence, though. Historically, in the US this kind of defensive joke has been used by immigrants, African Americans, and Appalachian Southerners for a very long time. If you don't know what I'm talking about, ask an Irishman.

My first Chaucer prof would probably be pleased to know that I still remember the phrase 'cosmic laughter' in connection with Troilus and Criseyde. The phrase is supposed to describe Troilus' reaction to his after-death realisation of what his life had been all about. It's a question of perspective, something Douglas Adams once commented the human race couldn't afford.

Be that as it may, some laughter, while not humorous, is really about making connections. When you see it, you laugh. Arthur Koestler spoke of 'aha' experiences. These can be pleasant, or not, but they can provoke cosmic laughter, as well.

Cosmic laughter happens in Peter Brook's version of the Mahabharata when Yudhishthira finally makes it to heaven by using a rope ladder and passing some interesting tests¹. There, everybody is having a drink and talking over all the nonsense that went on for pages and pages, verses and verses, scene after scene. . . Yep. Guess what? Everybody's really on the same side.

Eons ago, I wrote a poem about Isaac, from the point of view of his mom. Isaac's name means 'laughter', did you know that? The story was that his mother, Sarah, laughed when an angel told the family that she would have a son. (She thought she was too old.) So when the baby came, they called him Laughter. I've lost most of the poem, but the ending went like this:

Feel free to laugh.

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

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