The Bite of Wit

Author(s): Peter Gay

Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 135, No. 3 (Sep., 1991), pp.
327-331
Published by: American Philosophical Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/986770
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 The Bite of Wit*

PETER GAY

Sterling Professorof History

Yale University

umor, we all know, is a serious matter. Wordsworth's famous

critique of the analytic spirit-"We murder to dissect"- aptly
applies to laughter. A symphony or a poem analyzed continues
to provide, may in fact refine and enhance, pleasure. Not so with humor:
to explain a joke, a witticism, a comic aside, is to banish laughter. And
this rather solemn aspect of humor is a sound reflection of its essentially
serious nature. Henri Bergson, one of the most interesting students of
the comic, noted that "Laughter is a froth with a salt base. Like froth,
it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers up some
to taste, will find the substance thin indeed; and a portion of bitterness."
This "portion of bitterness" lies at the source of that worn common-
place, the tragic clown. "Harlequin without his mask," Thackeray wrote
in his study of eighteenth-century English humorists,
is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes,
the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and see Harlequin-a
man full of cares and perplexitieslike the rest of us, whose Self must always be
serious to him, under whatever mask, or disguise, or uniform he presents it to
the public.
In a book on aggression in nineteenth-century middle-class culture on
which I have been working for some years, I have decided to take this
seriousness seriously, and to present humor as - in large part-an act of
aggression. It is from that century that I shall take most of my material.
But I should note three points right at the beginning: first, I am using
the word "aggression" neutrally, neither as a word of praise nor of
blame. Second, I stress the qualification, "in large part:" there is humor
that is wholly innocent of any aggressive admixture. There are innoc-
uous exercises of wit, performances without victims. I offer as one
example the humor of children, those endlessly repeated little jokes-
always repeated in precisely the same way-which are really rehearsals

* Read November 1990.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 135, NO. 3, 1991

327

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328 PETER GAY

of linguistic competence, sheer joy in achievement. And third, only the

pressure of time-those twenty minutes that the American Philosoph-
ical Society has deemed, in its wisdom, to be the right length for any
presentation-can keep me from making the differentiations among cul-
tures that a historian feels bound to make. After all, we know that what
is funny to one person, or one nation, is supremely unfunny to another.
The scatological cartoons that convulsed typical German Burger
throughout the nineteenth century left their English counterparts cold.
Indeed, only a handful of humorists could touch chords of mirth every-
where: Mark Twain's rather coarse-grained tales of the American fron-
tier traveled, without visible loss, all the way to Paris and Vienna. But
he was a significant, and rare, exception.
With these provisos in mind, I turn to my theme, the bite of wit. It
is, to begin with, a privileged haven for invidious comparisons. Hobbes
long ago defined "the passion of laughter" as "nothing but sudden con-
ception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferi-
ority of others or with our own formerly." In The Essenceof Laughter,Bau-
delaire characterized this sense of comparative eminence as nothing less
than "satanic." He saw it as a mark of human rebellion against the divine
order: "Laughter comes from the idea of one's own superiority. Satanic
idea if there ever was one! Pride and aberration!"
This laughing form of aggressiveness-like much aggressiveness-
was anything but easy for the aggressor. And here I note a phenomenon
that complicates our understanding of what I am calling the bite of wit:
its deep-seated ambiguity. For the sense of eminence of which Hobbes
and Baudelaire speak is not an easy or unchallenged one. Laughter,
Hobbes shrewdly noted, is "incident most to them, that are conscious
of the fewest abilities in themselves by comparison whereof they sud-
denly applaud themselves"; much superior laughter, he thought, in
short, is nothing better than "a sign of pusillanimity." Humorous aggres-
sion can be, and often turns out to be, a form of self-defense.
The keenest nineteenth-century observers elaborated this disen-
chanted psychological insight. Laughter deriding others, they knew, is
all too often incense one burns at one's self-constructed altar, and a
rickety altar at that. "There is a symptom of weakness in laughter," to
quote Baudelaire once again. He saw it as a desperate hoping against
hope. "One of the most vulgar instances," he wrote, one "sure to gen-
erate laughter in bystanders," is "a man slipping on the ice, hurting him-
self, perhaps breaking a limb, only to have the witnesses' faces contorted
convulsively with amusement." It is interesting to observe that Bergson,
too, should use this infallible comic moment-a man slipping on a
banana-as a sure incitement to laughter. But this laughter, these stu-
dents of humor were certain, was anything but uncomplicated sadism.
One enjoyed to see others suffering mishaps because it indicated, trem-
ulously, that one might be exempt from such involuntary pratfalls.
"That," Baudelaire comments, "is his," the laugher's "starting point: I
am not falling; I won't commit the folly of overlooking a broken sidewalk

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 THE BITE OF WIT 329

or a piece of pavement obstructing the way." Derisive laughing is, to mix

my metaphor, whistling past a graveyard of threatening disaster.
Laughter as self-protection, then, almost inescapably is directed
against others. That is the bite of wit. As Alexander Bain, the pioneering
English psychologist, who was relatively cheerful in his assessment of
laughter, would admit at mid-century: it was not only kindly feelings
that ignited laughter, but, too, "the spectacle or notion of filthy,
degraded, or forbidden things; the so-called ludicrous, which is usually
the clash of dignity with meanness." Wit bites as man finds himself
steadily at war, with himself as with others.
In his widely read lectures on comedy, George Meredith paid tribute
to this pugnacious side of the comic throughout. He visualized comedy
as the votary of Bacchus, "rolling in shouting under the divine protec-
tion of the son of the wine-jar." But it was not an innocuous drunken-
ness. Take the wit of the Restoration. That, to his mind, was "a combat-
ive performance, under a license to deride and outrage the Puritan." In
general, the wit of the English comic stage, he wrote, is "warlike." Its
aim is "to wound," its essential attitude, "entirely pugilistic."
I could, if time allowed, offer many other examples of this sort of
analysis. But I must move on, to the social implications of biting wit. Mer-
edith, contrasting what he was pleased to consider sophisticated rebel-
liousness against the censorious solemnity of the puritans, left no doubt
that these implications are virtually ubiquitous. Indeed, humorists, in
the nineteenth century no less than before, saw their work as a form of
cure. They liked to consider themselves physicians to society who attack
vices for the sake of cultural regeneration. It is no accident that
nineteenth-century students of humor were virtually unanimous in
their recognition of one modern master, the only one to keep Aristo-
phanes company: Moliere. They quoted him to sustain their points, they
called him "witty," they instanced his comic heroes as models they could
only hope to approach. Baudelaire, to return to him for a moment, was
far from alone in seeing Moliere as "the best French expression" of lucid
and useful humor. Others did not limit his influence to France. Mere-
dith, in a rather unfortunate phrase, admiringly said of Moliere: "Never
did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice." His great comic char-
acters, Meredith added, are ideal targets for the humorist's lash:
"Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip himself and his
class-the false pietists and the insanely covetous." Setting these beau-
tifully carpentered puppets in motion, Moliere "strips Folly to the skin,
displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better
clothing."
Meredith was far from alone in rendering Moliere this homage. Per-
haps most remarkable among the others was Carl Sternheim, a brilliant
eccentric German playwright. He is little known in the English-speaking
world, in part because his comedies, with their strange, forced, tele-
graphic speeches, are virtually impossible to translate. But to the his-
torian of aggressive humor, Sternheim, who achieved a considerable rep-

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330 PETER GAY

utation, mainly in German, not long before the First World War, is of
considerable interest. His witty and ambivalent comedies, depicting, in
an informal series, what he called "the heroic life of the modern bour-
geoisie," are, one and all, a tribute to Moliere. To Sternheim, Moliere
was the good citizen, "physician to his estate," who attended his
patients not with "syrups and injections, but with probe and saw."
Moliere, Sternheim adds, would "reach into the intestines of the sick,
press the poison from their overfull stomachs, their bloated veins." But
he did so not to hurt but to cure, to breathe into his patients "a fine fire
of new youth."
These are inflamed and ugly metaphors, but they underscore, pre-
cisely, the aggressive element in humor that is my theme. As Alexander
Herzen, that civilized Russian exile, said, "Laughter contains something
revolutionary." He was convinced that, as far as the eighteenth century
was concerned, "Voltaire's laughter was more destructive than Rous-
seau's weeping." Other revolutionaries agreed. George Bernard Shaw,
one of the most self-conscious among social physicians of the Victorian
age and beyond, made this point about his own work more than once.
Thus in 1891, he declared himself eager to exploit and exacerbate "the
guilty conscience of the middle class" by his subversive humor. With his
celebrated, if perhaps rather publicly worn, self-confidence, he made
himself into a witty demolition expert, assailing accepted values, ac-
cepted ideals, accepted certainties with all his resources of disrespectful-
ness. "There is nothing new," he said coolly, "in the defiance of duty
by the reformer: every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and
a scripture torn up." And he declared it to be his aim as a dramatist to
"force the spectator to face unpleasant facts," to make him, in fact, "thor-
oughly uncomfortable whilst entertaining" him "artistically."
There were many such physician-humorists to their society through-
out the nineteenth century, and they practiced many specialties, pursuing
the same aim with different means. Heine was a poet. Shaw was a play-
wright. Thackeray and Dickens were novelists. And they could be
exceedingly earnest about their witty work. Thackeray, instructively
enough, became converted to his medical mission in the course of his
career. In his early years, as a journalist, he had deplored what he called
the "comic moralist" who rushes at his readers taking "occasion to tell
us that society is diseased." Then he had no use for what he called "this
literary ambuscade." But by 1845, when he began drafting Vanity Fair,
the masterpiece he never equalled, he took a very different line. "Our
profession," he now argued, "seems to me as serious as the Parson's
own." While he had first subtitled his novel, as it appeared serially
month by month, "Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society," he
chose a far more portentous subtitle for the published book, the omi-
nous, "A Novel without a Hero." He had become a comic aggressor.
Thus, in Vanity Fair, he fiercely went after people who, "Faithless, Hope-
less, Charityless," now live and flourish, people who invite the witty
moralist's scourge: "Let us have at them, dear friends, with might and

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 THE BITE OF WIT 331

main." The great market of life that is Vanity Fair is a bustling place, but
on the whole gives an impression, Thackeray concluded, "more melan-
choly than mirthful." The only remedy is corrective humor. But will it
work? Thackeray was more than doubtful. "Which of us is happy in this
world? Which of us has his desire, or, having it, is satisfied? - Come, chil-
dren, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."
Here, truly, is the depressed Harlequin shrugging at the world.
Interestingly - and obviously - society did not always appreciate
those self-appointed physicians meddling in their affairs. The career of
Dickens, as reflected in his contemporary reception, suggests a consid-
erable hesitation in accepting the bite of wit- at least his bite. No doubt,
Dickens was the most successful writer of his time, enlisting impas-
sioned admirers among virtually all ranges of the book-reading public.
And his readers rejoiced in his immortal caricatures. Sam Weller in the
Pickwick Papers or Mr. Micawber in David Copperfieldwere unqualified
triumphs. But unrelieved moral catastrophes like the neurotic capitalist
Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit or those hollow social climbers, the Veneer-
ings, in Our Mutual Friend, and the rest of his unpalatable cast of snobs,
parasites and hypocrites, were another matter. As Dickens ventured
into social criticism and left some of his genial humor behind, some
among his most perceptive reviewers complained that Dickens was in-
vading a domain in which he was not at home.
There is, to be sure, no radical shift from the early to the late Dickens;
there were grim types in his early, and cheerful types in his late, novels.
But it remains true that as Dickens discovered in his society ever more
grounds for anger and dismay, the balance of his satirical portraits
shifted from benign to aggressive; distasteful, even hateful, specimens
of folly and vice, etched in acid, take center stage. At times, indeed,
Dickens seems to read like an early Expressionist as he identifies his char-
acters by their profession alone; in Little Dorrit, that financier Mr. Merdle
entertains "Bishop magnates, Treasury Magnates, Horse Guard Mag-
nates, Admiralty magnates," social potentates who will speak through-
out their appearance only as "Bishop," as "Horse Guard," as "Treasury."
It may be that his satire is too indiscriminate. Certainly Dickens's Circum-
locution Office, also in Little Dorrit, however comical, is an unfair hit at
the British administration just as the ruffians in Hard Times are an unfair
caricature of British trade unions. But the point remains-and it is the
point with which I want to close-that the resistance to Dickens's biting
wit demonstrates what I have wanted to show: humor can hurt.

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