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Not being Navajo, there were no "first laugh" ceremonies in my household. But who could forget their child's first laugh? It's like having one of the mysteries of life presented to you out of nowhere, right in your own house. That laugh comes from some unknown place deep inside. It may be a response to surprise (peekaboo... now, I'm here, now I'm gone, now I'm back again!) or who knows what, but it's granted to us, imprinted on us, with a kind of inexpressible joy. The Navajos evidently consider a baby's first laugh the moment you become a social being, enter the human community, and join the rest of us -- and the person who induces that laugh has the honor of holding the ceremony. Anyone who has ever gotten a classic "belly laugh" out of a baby certainly has a sense that an honor has indeed been bestowed and that a ceremony should be in order.
The laugh is assumedly there to take you through a dark world without a total loss of joy, to join you to the rest of us in the conspiracy of life, and to give you a little distance on what passes for reality. It precedes anything we would normally consider humor, reflecting the deepest comedy at our core. Anyone who has had a child undoubtedly noticed that the laugh also precedes the punch line, that the form of the joke is somehow a pleasure even before you understand why a chicken crossing the road is funny or what that rabbi, penguin, and president were doing in a bar. It's far deeper and truer.
So true that Lewis Lapham in the Winter issue of his remarkable magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, grabs his Mark Twain and steps directly into the darkness of our present gilded age with the verve that humor arms you with. As always, his magazine unites some of the most provocative and original voices in history around a single topic, in this case comedy. (You can subscribe to the Quarterly by clicking here.) As ever, TomDispatch thanks the editors of that journal for allowing us to offer an exclusive look at Lapham's introduction to the new issue. Tom
The Solid Nonpareil
Why No Mark Twain for Our Second Gilded Age?
By Lewis H. Lapham[This essay will appear in "Comedy," the Winter 2014 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. This slightly adapted version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. -- Mark Twain
Twain for as long as I've known him has been true to his word, and so I'm careful never to find myself too far out of his reach. The Library of America volumes of his Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays (1852--1910) stand behind my desk on a shelf with the dictionaries and the atlas. On days when the news both foreign and domestic is moving briskly from bad to worse, I look to one or another of Twain's jests to spring the trap or lower a rope, to summon, as he is in the habit of doing, a blast of laughter to blow away the "peacock shams" of the world's "colossal humbug."
Laughter was Twain's stock in trade, and for 30 years as bestselling author and star attraction on America's late-nineteenth-century lecture stage, he produced it in sufficient quantity to make bearable the acquaintance with grief that he knew to be generously distributed among all present in the Boston Lyceum or a Tennessee saloon, in a Newport drawing room as in a Nevada brothel. Whether the audience was sober or drunk, topped with top hats or snared in snakebitten boots, Twain understood it likely in need of a remedy to cover its losses.
No other writer of his generation had seen as much of the young nation's early sorrow, or become as familiar with its commonplace scenes of human depravity and squalor. As a boy on the Missouri frontier in the 1830s he attended the flogging and lynching of fugitive slaves; in the California gold fields in the 1860s he kept company with underage murderers and overage whores; in New York City in the 1870s he supped at the Gilded Age banquets of financial swindle and political fraud, learning from his travels that "the hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence." Twain bottled the influence under whatever label drummed up a crowd -- as comedy, burlesque, satire, parody, sarcasm, ridicule, wit -- any or all of it presented as "the solid nonpareil," guaranteed to fortify the blood and restore the spirit. Humor for Twain was the hero with a thousand faces.
With Groucho Marx I share the opinion that comedians "are a much rarer and far more valuable commodity than all the gold and precious stones in the world," but the assaying of that commodity -- of what does it consist in its coats of many colors, among them cocksure pink, shithouse brown, and dead-end black -- is a question that I gladly leave to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Twain's contemporary who in 1900 took note of its primary components: "The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human... Laughter has no greater foe than emotion... Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple... Our laughter is always the laughter of a group."
Which is to say that all jokes are inside jokes and the butts of them are us, the only animal that laughs, but also the only one that is laughed at. The weather isn't amusing, neither is the sea. Wombats don't do metaphor or stand-up. What is funny is man's situation as a scrap of mortal flesh entertaining intimations of immortality, President Richard Nixon believing himself the avatar of William the Conqueror, President George W. Bush in the persona of a medieval pope preaching holy crusade against all the world's evil.
Venting One's Spleen
The confusion of realms is the substance of Shakespeare's comedies -- as a romantic exchange of mistaken identities in As You Like It, in Measure for Measure as an argument for the forgiveness of sin:
But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.Spleens in the Elizabethan anatomy give rise to mirth because they also produce the melancholy springing from the bowels to remind us that although unaccountably invested with the power to conceive of ourselves as vessels of pure and everlasting light, we were made, as were toads, of foul and perishable stuff. Apes play games in zoos and baobab trees, but, not knowing that they're bound to die, they don't discover ludicrous incongruities between the physical and the metaphysical, don't invent, as does Franà §ois Rabelais' Gargantua, "the most lordly, the most excellent" way to remove the smell and fear of death from the palace of his "jolly a**hole," by wiping it first with silk and velvet, lastly and most gloriously, with the neck of a "well-downed goose."
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