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Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.
~ Charlie Chaplin
On May 5, 2019, little pockets of humanity erupted in conniptions all over the world to mark the 21st World Laughter Day. The commemmoration, owing its birth to Dr. Madan Kataria of Mumbai, sees people assemble in parks, squares and spots of greenery, and laugh their heads off, all because they believe in the therapeutic value of laughter. What, I ask, however, about the remaining 364 days? Do we find time to break into a grin over something — trivial or grave — every once in a while?
Laughter, as we experience from films, books, and our day-to-day interactions and observations, is always enriching and elevating, having as it does a powerful dose of medicine for the body and mind. Observing just a day annually for laughter is not enough. If laughter is practised throughout life, everything will become hale and hearty.
Laughter is not necessarily always a happy and positive affair. It also runs the risk of being branded as mad and scornful. “Live laughing, don’t live being laughed at,” so goes a song in an MGR-starrer. If someone laughs in their sleeves when I happen to be buffeted by some misfortune or bad luck, that laughter has a dose of venom in it, a touch of sadism. When your audience laughs at your jokes, though, there is an approbation that connotes happiness. That kind of laughter is the signature of a blissful mind.
This sunny side of life, bubbling with mirth over the mundane and the monumental, was once part of my life, too. Personally, gone are those days, the days of boisterous laughter. I hardly find time to smile at anything life has to offer me these days, let alone burst into laughter. Once in a while, I throw my mind back to experience once again the memories of days when I threw my head back in spontaneous fun.
Of a pleasant Sunday evening, I was stretching my legs out on the beach, enjoying a cool breeze. My gaze shifted from the sky to the waves and to young couples frolicking in the water, vendors selling their wares and a fortune-teller holding the hand of a woman and prophesying her future. But when I saw three college girls playing on the sands, my eyes became fixed on them. It felt as though yesterday had shed its black robes and donned today’s white and shiny robes. The spritely sweet girls brought back to my mind my school days, full of fun and frolic.
We were the three notorious musketeers, so to speak. My mind was cherishing all funny moments of those memorable days. What a care-free life it was. We hardly worried about anything — not even our studies, to be very frank. We enjoyed pleasure out of pleasure and pain as well. Come what may, our only reaction to any situation, howsoever dire, was to laugh and laugh and laugh. Be it scoring low grades, flopping in exams, facing punishment, or any other problem, the three of us would laugh away the odds and just move on, not giving a damn about anything.
Once, we had planned to watch a Hindi film. None of us could understand a bit of the language, but we took pride in watching non-native films. Unlike nowadays, going to theatres with friends was not encouraged by parents then. Naturally, we, the three “partners in crime”, devised a plot. We told our parents that one of the relatives of the other two was conducting a special orientation class that would be very useful for us to attend. The moment I said this to my father, he generously replied, “I can take you all to the session.” He asked me to share the location. I was shocked and fell silent over the unexpected question. Address? Address? Address? I was looking around, head low, as if casting about for something, till father asked me once again. I blubbered a bit before it struck me to say: “My friend say she’d give it to me tomorrow.” Similar scenes took place at the other two friends’ homes.
On that evening, we met at a nearby temple and laughed at our foolishness. Still, one of my friends was not ready to give up on the movie. We zeroed in on the next course of action. Children those days were not blessed enough to Google stuff. But fortunately, one of us three was rich enough to have a telephone connection and a directory. She managed to ferret out the contact number of the movie theatre at which the film was on show, and called the officials to get the address. Because, of course, school orientation classes are held at the theatre.
At the theatre, we laughed out loud not only for drab comic scenes in the movie but also for things that happened off-screen. As the movie played, we decided to sample some of the kozhukattais that one of my friends had brought along (very sad that these days food items are banished from theatres as poets from Plato’s Republic ). As we fought with each other for a bite of kozhukattai, all of a sudden, a hand stretched back eerily from the seat before us. “Esusme, engalukkum pasikudhu, konjam kozhukattai thareengala? [Excuse me, we are also feeling hungry, would you please give us some kozhukattai?].”
Personal anecdotes that make me look bad apart, laughter is indeed the signature of a blissful mind. All that evokes laughter is admirable, mitigating your pain and making you calm. So, no wonder, humourists such as P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton in literature and Charlie Chaplin in cinema have stood the buffets of time, still triggering waves of laughter even in this digital era.
Considering that cinema is an extension of literature, Chaplin’s silent movies understandably spark peals of laughter. However, in talkies, the words he spoke are not only hilarious, but also thought-provoking. He had a stock of techniques for evoking laughter. One of these involved a deft handling of language. For instance, he once said...
“Man is what woman makes him; but woman makes herself.”
The juxtaposition of two contrasting ideas, funny and thoughtful, is his forté. He revelled in paraprosdokians too. In...
“I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying”
... the first part of the sentence evokes a mood of happiness, raising expectations that the other half will also have a similar tone. But it goes on to bely this set-up by giving way to a tone of pathos. The technique the ace comedian used is bathos, in which the reader’s mood is first elevated and then deflated.
Now, thinking of humour writers, P.G. Wodehouse’s name is the first to rush into one’s mind. “There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a French man. It is called the guillotine.” This remark is quite typical of Wodehouse, the shock value of his punchline, through the deft use of metaphor and hyperbole, forcing us to plunge into laughter. He juxtaposed his Bertie Wooster, full of good-natured ignorance, with Jeeves’ superhuman equanimity and intellect to concoct an inexhaustible reservoir of comedy. PGW is well-known also for his use of sarcasm and has created phrases that have been indelibly etched on the minds of the readers. A few slices:
“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and forgotten to say, ‘when’.”
“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
“When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.”
PGW’s Jeeves series and other works are quite immortal for the laughter they have evoked across generations. So great was his comic genius that the following quote in the National Review seems quite fitting: “The Modern Library asked its board of advisors to pick the hundred greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century. We define the assignment differently. P.G. Wodehouse wrote 96 novels; what are the other 4?”
I still remember having read an article that made me hold my breath. No one can imagine or write about the advantages (are there any?) of having one leg. This tragic state of being has been rendered hilarious by the use of comic language by G.K. Chesterton in his article, ‘The advantages of having one leg’. It exhibits a humourist’s mental strength, the uniqueness of mind that always sees the comic aspect of things in the ordinary and commonplace. “This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doric column,” he writes in the article. Did being lame ever receive a better justification?
One must also have come across the use of malapropisms in works of humour. The character Dogberry in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing , who is the ancestor of the comic policeman in modern films, was well-known for malapropisms. He said once that he had “comprehended” a criminal when the right word to use would have been “apprehended”. While his superior officer was taken aback by the wrong use of the word, the Globe theatre audience burst into laughter.
The very word ‘malapropism’ was derived from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals , in which a woman character named Malaprop always used wrong words to the comedic effect. In fact, Sheridan named the character as such, inspired by the French word ‘mal à propos’, which means ‘out of place’.
There were writers who used humour not only to evoke laughter but also to drive home their ideologies. In such cases, the humour takes on the form of satire, a textbook example of the genre being George Orwell’s Animal Farm . The very idea of farm animals driving out their inhumane human leader and taking control of the ranch is quite hilarious. His famous pithy saying, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” is an immortal piece of humour and satire. Satire, with its power to make you simultaneously laugh and contemplate deeply, can be a potent weapon of social transformation.
I hope that you will have laughed heartily as you read this piece, and also hope I didn’t leave behind any inadvertent errors for you to laugh in my face about. And if you want to laugh at my ideas, please feel free to laugh in your sleeves where I can’t see you doing so.
