The Foundations of Personality [135]
to the world. Primitive in its origin, to take defeat nobly and victory with becoming modesty is the civilizing influence of sportsmanship. In the past women have lacked good-fellowship and sportsmanship largely because they played no competitive-cooperative games. I shall not attempt to take up in any detail all the forms of pleasure-excitement seeking. Dancing, music, the theater and the movies offer outlets both for the artistic impulses and the seeking of excitement. In the theater and the movies one seeks also the interest we take in the lives of others, the awakening of emotions and the happy ending. Only a few people will ever care for the artistic wholesale calamity of a play like "Hamlet," and even they only once in a while. Men and women seek variety, they seek excitement in any and all directions, they want relief from the tyranny of purpose and of care. But also,--they hate a vacuum, they can usually bear themselves and their thoughts for only a little while, because their thoughts are often basicly melancholy and full of dissatisfaction. So they seek escape from themselves; they try to kill time; reading, playing and going to entertainments. In fact, most of our reading is actuated by the play spirit, and is an effort to obtain excitement through the lives of others. Humor[1] is a form of pleasure seeking and giving, but depends on a certain technique, the object of which is to elicit the laugh or its equivalent. The laugh is a discharge of tension, and while usually it accompanies pleasure, it may indicate the tension of embarrassment or even complex emotional states. But the laugh or smile of humor has to be elicited in certain ways, chief of which are to bring about a feeling of expectation, and by some novel arrangement of words, to send the mind on a voyage of discovery which suddenly ends with a burst of pleasure when the "point" is seen. The pleasure felt in humor arises from the feeling of novelty, the pleasure of discovering a hidden meaning and the pleasure in the "point" or motive of the story, joke or conduct. [1] I use this term to include wit, satire and even certain phases of the comic.
Usually, the humorous pleasure has these motives: it points at the folly and absurdity of other people's conduct, thought, logic and customs. It gives a feeling of superiority, and that is why all races love to poke fun at other races: certain characteristics of Jew, Irishman, Yankee, Scot, etc., are presented in novel and striking fashion, in a playful manner. It points out the weak and absurd side of people and institutions with which we have trouble; and this brings in marriage, business, mothers-in-law, creditors, debtors, as those whose weakness is exposed by the technique of humor. Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places. So the humorous technique deals with the get-rich-quick folk, the foolish nobleman, the politician, the priest (especially in the Middle Ages), etc. Not only does humor seek to obtain pleasure from an attack on others and thus to feel superior or to compensate for inferiority, but also it reaches its highest form in exposing man himself, including the humorist. The humorist, seeking his own weaknesses and contradictions, his falsities, strips the disguise from himself in some surprising way. Bergson points out that to strip away a disguise is naturely humorous unless it reveals too rudely the horrible. The humorist takes off the mask from himself and others, and in so far as we can detach ourselves from pride and vanity, we laugh. The one who cannot thus detach himself is "hurt" by humor; the one who somehow has become a spectator of his own strivings can laugh at himself. Thus humor, in addition to becoming a compensation and a form of entertainment, is a form of self-revelation and self-understanding carried on by a peculiar technique. On the whole this technique depends upon a hiding of the real meaning of the story
Usually, the humorous pleasure has these motives: it points at the folly and absurdity of other people's conduct, thought, logic and customs. It gives a feeling of superiority, and that is why all races love to poke fun at other races: certain characteristics of Jew, Irishman, Yankee, Scot, etc., are presented in novel and striking fashion, in a playful manner. It points out the weak and absurd side of people and institutions with which we have trouble; and this brings in marriage, business, mothers-in-law, creditors, debtors, as those whose weakness is exposed by the technique of humor. Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places. So the humorous technique deals with the get-rich-quick folk, the foolish nobleman, the politician, the priest (especially in the Middle Ages), etc. Not only does humor seek to obtain pleasure from an attack on others and thus to feel superior or to compensate for inferiority, but also it reaches its highest form in exposing man himself, including the humorist. The humorist, seeking his own weaknesses and contradictions, his falsities, strips the disguise from himself in some surprising way. Bergson points out that to strip away a disguise is naturely humorous unless it reveals too rudely the horrible. The humorist takes off the mask from himself and others, and in so far as we can detach ourselves from pride and vanity, we laugh. The one who cannot thus detach himself is "hurt" by humor; the one who somehow has become a spectator of his own strivings can laugh at himself. Thus humor, in addition to becoming a compensation and a form of entertainment, is a form of self-revelation and self-understanding carried on by a peculiar technique. On the whole this technique depends upon a hiding of the real meaning of the story