Laughter, Smiles, Tears

Bhagavan Das · Confusing Words Series · 12 pages

From chapter VIII of The Science of the Emotions, and the third of the Bhagavan Das analyses in this batch. Laughter is defined, as psychologists have generally recognised, as the physical manifestation of a sudden and excessive recognition of one's own superiority — and the gradations follow from what accompanies that recognition. Where it comes with repulsion the laugh becomes the laugh of ridicule; where both repulsion and the sense of superiority are strong, the laugh of scorn, whose beginning is the sneer; where the ridicule is light-hearted and openly make-believe, the laugh of jest and good humour.

The smile is placed precisely rather than treated as a small laugh: the loud laugh is very seldom combined with genuine, deep-seated benevolence, and the smile is the nearest approach to laughter there. A further observation sets a limit on the theory — that while a sense of superiority is necessary to laughter, too much of it defeats risibility altogether, so that when dignity has passed into pomposity, or taken on solemnity or gravity, laughter becomes as impossible as under excessive humility, deadly earnestness, dourness, melancholia or dogged pugnacity, all of which produce what is called a lack of humour. The superiority most often responsible for loud laughter is said to be that of physiological vitality and animal spirits, whence horseplay and broad jokes; and laughter itself is described as the abrupt expansion of the physical body in jerks.

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