XI
STAGE HUMOR
I
When we consider the antics indulged in by actors of the custard-pie comedies which make many of us guffaw violently as they succeed one another on the screen and when we analyze the witticisms which make many of us smile appreciatively as they cascade down the dialog of Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal,’ we disclose that our laughter, gentle as it may be or boisterous as it is more often, can be aroused by two distinct factors, by the shock of surprize and by the reaction of an awakened sense of superiority. Wit delights us by its exploding unexpectedness; and humor awakens pity for its victims and also pride that we are not as weak as they are, not as short-sighted or as muddle-headed, not as prone to make fools of ourselves.
As the simplest and easiest form of wit is a play on words and as the simplest and easiest form of humor is a practical joke, we need not be surprized that the comedies and farces of ’prentice playwrights are likely to crackle with an arbitrary collocation of vocables so put together as to create at least the semblance of wit and also that these firstlings of the comic muse are likely to contain episodes of arbitrarily built up practical joking. These two characteristics are infallible witnesses to the juvenility of the author of any play in which they are abundant. Marlowe died young; and this may account for the dreary emptiness of the would-be comic scenes in ‘Doctor Faustus’ with their perverse practical jokery. If we needed internal evidence to corroborate the external proof that ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ is one of Shakspere’s earliest comedies we could find it in his obviously painstaking effort to achieve verbal brilliance and in the palpably artificial play-within-the-play lugged into the final act so that one group of characters can laugh at another group, created solely to serve as butts for the merriment of their associates.
As Shakspere was an Elizabethan Englishman he outgrew his relish for puns very slowly; and he retained his willingness to rely on the practical joke as a basis for comic situations even as late as the middle of his career, when he wrote the last and tenderest of his romantic comedies, ‘Twelfth Night.’ It is only fair to admit that the trick which Maria and Sir Toby play upon Malvolio is not an empty mechanism; it is just what those two delightful companions would devise to get even with the cross-gartered Puritan and to punish him for his paraded self-sufficiency. So the trick which Prince Hal and Poins play upon Falstaff and which prompts him to the noble narrative of his combat with the men in buckram,—this also is completely in accordance with the character of the fat knight and of the future king; and moreover it serves most admirably to reveal Falstaff’s superb imperturbability and his infinite resourcefulness in extricating himself from a morass wherein a slow-witted man would have sunk helpless.
With the mad Prince and Poins we laugh at Falstaff, no doubt; but we are ready also to laugh with him, because he is so humorously human. We like him even if we cannot have any respect for him; in fact, we like him so much that we are a little inclined to resent the way in which his creator has chosen to treat him in more than one episode of the ‘Merry Wives,’ especially his concealment in the buckbasket of foul linen and his subsequent upsetting into foul water. Shakspere, even tho his masterpieces may survive for all time, was himself a man of his own time; and at the end of the sixteenth century people were more callous than they are at the beginning of the twentieth, thicker of skin and stouter of stomach, more tolerant of needless pain and even of purposeless brutality. We cannot doubt that Shakspere must have been a spectator at “the whipping of the blind bear”; and to him as to other Elizabethans madness was comic rather than tragic. To-day we have for Malvolio, and even for Shylock, a sympathy which is born of a better understanding and which assuredly would astonish no one more than it would Shakspere.
George Eliot, with her shrewd insight into the recesses of human nature, declared that “a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections”; and there is no doubt that our affection for Shakspere is now and again not a little strained by his eager pursuit of the obvious pun and by his persistent employment of the obvious practical joke. Our taste in jests is more restricted than his; and we labor in vain to excuse him by the plea that he descended to the pun and the practical joke only to gratify the ruder likings of the groundlings who stood restless in the unroofed yard of the Globe Theater. It is simpler, and it is honester, to admit frankly, first of all, that Shakspere was a right Elizabethan Englishman who shared the tastes of his contemporaries and his countrymen; and second, that the false glitter of dialog and the artificial practical joking are simply testimony to the immaturity of his genius at the time when he composed the comic dramas in which we discover these defects. Not only has our taste in jests changed in more than three centuries, but Shakspere’s own taste in jests changed in less than twenty years. In his later masterpieces, in the best plays of his best period, the wit is intellectual rather than verbal and the humor is sympathetically human.
II
George Eliot, to quote her again, makes one of her philosophic characters declare that a liking for Bellini’s music “indicates a puerile state of culture.” Certainly the liking for practical jokes is an even more certain indication of this condition. And “puerile” is an aptly chosen adjective, since the practical joke is boyish; and boys are pitiably uncivilized. Until they tame their native energy they are callous to the sufferings of others and they even enjoy cruelties they inflict in the spontaneous expression of their thereby demonstrated superiority. Just as the Clown in the pantomime butters the slide so that the Pantaloon shall slip and tumble down tumultuously, so the boy in real life delights in disguising the frozen pavement with scattered snow so that the unsuspecting gentleman in spectacles will make a violent and vain struggle to keep his balance. This evokes joyful shouts from the youthful perpetrators of the unkindly act. If a grown-up happens to witness the mishap he is not moved to laughter; his immediate impulse is to go to the aid of the elderly victim.
Yet this same grown-up when he is one of the audience at a pantomime reverts to the puerile stage of culture and becomes a child again; for the two hours’ traffic of the stage he is subdued to what he gazes at; and he may be moved to loud merriment by deeds which, seen in the street, would cause him instantly to summon the police. He laughingly approves of the unprovoked assassinations of Punch.
We are assured by scientific investigators that civilization is only a thin veneer at best and that beneath the courtesy of the most civilized society there lie dormant the archaic instincts of primitive man. However remote we may think ourselves from our probably arboreal ancestor, the beast within us is never dead; and he is ever ready to rouse himself from his long slumber and to put us to shame sometimes by his blood-lust and sometimes by his monkey-tricks.
The scientists also assert that every one of us, from his conception to his coming of age, passes through the successive stages of the evolution of mankind, slowly rising year by year from savagery to barbarism and from barbarism to civilization (supposing that he is lucky enough to progress so far). If this must be admitted, then we need not be surprized that the audiences in our theaters can be interested by wit which is juvenile and by humor which is primitive. These audiences are made up of all sorts and conditions of men, in every stage of development. Even if we assume that most of these spectators are civilized (perhaps a precarious assumption), we cannot doubt that only a few of them have attained to a high level of culture; and by this very attainment these more advanced members of the audience are separated from the main body, which has not progressed in its preferences so far away from its ruder and cruder progenitors.
The larger the theater itself, the more closely compacted the spectators, the more primitive is the comic effect which will provoke the swiftest and the most uproarious response; and the refined and delicate-minded minority finds itself conforming to the primitive tastes of the less particular majority, even if it does so only for the moment. While the curtain is up the high-brow has a fellow-feeling with his low-brow companions; and he is therefore willing not merely to smile deprecatingly but even to laugh heartily at mechanical dislocations of the vocabulary and at equally mechanical practical jokes. When he is a spectator of the passing show, the self-conscious Pharisee of culture will consent to fellowship with publicans and with sinners.
In one of his earlier philosophical inquiries, that in which he analyzed the sources of laughter, Bergson recalled the old story of the man in church who remained dry-eyed when the rest of the congregation were dissolved in tears by the pathos of the sermon and who explained his failure to be moved as due to the fact that he did not “belong to that parish.” And Bergson asserted that this explanation, absurd as it may seem, is not unsatisfactory or illogical, if applied to laughter rather than to tears. “However hearty a laugh may be,” the French philosopher declared, “it always conceals an afterthought of complicity with other laughters, real or imaginary.”
So it is that when the spectators refuse to become accomplices before the fact, there is no certainty that they will respond to the wit or to the humor of the play they are witnessing. Only when they have yielded themselves to a communal intimacy, so to call it, can the dramatist find an immediate appreciation of his merry jests. Shakspere spoke out of abundant experience as player and as playwright when he declared that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it.” And Goethe was no less shrewd when he asserted that “nothing is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.”
III
The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the mot d’esprit. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the mot de situation. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are wont to call this the mot de caractère.
It is the first of these, the witticism existing for its own sake and sufficient with itself, detachable from the dialog, not integrated with either character or situation, merely a merry jest at large, it is verbal glitter of this sort which is essentially juvenile, which we may expect in the piece of ’prentice playwrights and which we find in the early comedies of Shakspere; more especially in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost.’
Thomas Moore, in his brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, called attention to the fact that English comedy, from the ‘Way of the World’ to the ‘School for Scandal,’ was the work of young men, who either died before they attained intellectual maturity or abandoned the theater; and in the juvenility of these comic playwrights, from Congreve to Sheridan, we can see the explanation and the excuse for the verbal fireworks which explode all down their dialog. So the younger Dumas was under thirty when he wrote the ‘Demi-Monde’ with its elaborately paraded epigram; and he was over fifty when he composed ‘Françillon’ with its dialog bathed in wit and yet devoid of detachable dewdrops. So Oscar Wilde left us only the comedies composed when he was comparatively youthful; and he had perforce to give up playwriting before he had attained to artistic sincerity. His epigrams, often amusing in themselves, are half of them taken out of his note-book to be tacked arbitrarily into his dialog. They may glitter like spangles but they are only sewed on. The built up repartees and the manufactured retorts of Wilde’s characters are sometimes too rude to be probable in the polite society which the author took a snobbish pride in putting into his plays; but at least they lacked the bare brutality of the rejoinders we find in Congreve’s comedies and more particularly in Wycherly’s, rejoinders which recall Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson as a conversationalist, that “whenever the doctor’s pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt.”
Even Sir Arthur Pinero in his juvenile pieces fell victim to a prevailing epidemic of epigram. At least, I can adduce one specimen of his youthful effort in his very youthful play, ‘Imprudence.’ As it was unsuccessful it has remained unpublished, and I must therefore rely on my memory. The lovers have quarreled and parted forever. This is at an afternoon tea; and when the time comes for the young lady to go home, the young gentleman approaches her with the courteously formal query, “Shall I call you a hansom?” To which she retorts, “You are mean enough to call me anything!” Many things, no doubt, must be pardoned to a young lady who is desperately in love and who has just broken with her devoted lover; but this impossible repartee is not one of them. Sir Arthur Pinero’s dialog in his later social dramas is nervous, tense, highly individual, and totally devoid of these outgrown artificialities; and in them he evokes laughter by the clash of character on character. His piercing sayings are the product of essential wisdom and not of external wit.
It is evidence of Molière’s early maturity that there are no mots d’esprit even in his most brilliant comedies. He eschewed the empty witticism; and in his ‘Criticism of the School for Wives’ he explained with conscious pride that the jokes in his dialog were not put there for their own sake; they were meant to illustrate situation and character. Molière has his clever sayings, his epigrams and his aphorisms, but they are always germane; they are mots de situation and mots de caractère, and never merely mots d’esprit. More than any other comic dramatist does Molière deserve the praise that William Archer once bestowed on Bronson Howard, that his good things grow out of his story, “like blossoms on a laburnum,” and are not “stuck on like candles on a Christmas tree.”
The same commendation may be given to Sir James Barrie, who has now come into his own and has conquered his juvenile tendency to get his laugh by whimsicalities lugged in by main strength,—like the husband’s amputation of the excrescences of his wife’s hat, in the ‘Professor’s Love Story.’ In the later ‘Dear Brutus’ the whole fabric of the story is whimsical and fantastic, fanciful and delightful. To a play like this we may apply Goethe’s characterization of Claude Lorraine’s faery palaces, that it was “absolute truth—without a sign of reality.” At its performance little ripples of intimate laughter ran around the audience, never breaking into a unanimous guffaw. The humor of the dialog may be, as indeed it must be, the humor of Barrie himself; but it seems to us the spontaneous utterance of the character from whose mouth it comes.
IV
The mot de caractère, the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unconsciously, “giving himself away,” as the American phrase is, this is not to be confounded with that ancient stage-trick, the catch-word, repeated again and again with the hope and expectation that it will become more laughable the more often it is heard. The catch-word may be effective when it is used with artful discretion; but it is a dangerous device likely at last to annoy a large part of the audience. Since Corporal Nym companions Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives’ as well as in ‘Henry IV’ we may infer that he had found favor in the eyes of the spectators at the Globe, or else Shakspere would not have carried him over from play to play; and yet modern audiences soon weary of Nym’s inability to open his mouth without letting fall the word humor. “That’s the humor of it” is not at all humorous to-day.
But even the catch-word, said once and said again, and then said yet once more, may be made to serve as a mot de caractère, as a revelation of character. In Molière’s ‘Fourberies de Scapin,’ when the befooled father is told that his beloved son has rashly adventured himself on board a Turkish galley and has been seized and held for ransom, his reiterated query,—“But what the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is increasingly mirth-provoking because it is exactly the futile protest which that foolish parent would put forth again and again in that particular predicament.
In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter.
When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”
The elder Sothern took an unsuccessful comedy of H. J. Byron’s, the ‘Prompter’s Box,’ renamed it the ‘Crushed Tragedian’ and rewrote it so that he might himself appear as a broken-down old actor, fallen upon evil days but forever puffed with pride in his own histrionic achievements. He comes in contact with a banker, who, when he learns that Sothern is an actor, makes the remark that “It must be ten years since I was in a theater.” Whereupon the crushed tragedian, drawing himself up and draping himself in imaginary robes, delivers the annihilating retort, “It must be at least as long since I was in a bank!”
It is a little difficult to decide whether these two examples illustrate the mot de caractère or the mot de situation, since they illuminate both character and situation. But the mot de situation can exist independently, relying for its effect solely upon the moment in the action when it is spoken. In a forgotten farce called ‘French Flats,’ Stuart Robson was warned to keep out of the way of a certain tenor, who was fiercely and fierily jealous. A little later we saw him venture into a room wherein we knew the operatic Othello to be concealed; and when he reappeared with his clothes torn from him and with a woe-begone expression, we waited expectantly for him to explain,—“The tenor was behind the door.” This sentence, innocent of all humor when taken by itself apart from the situation, was only the eagerly looked for explosion of a bomb fired by the long fuse which has been sputtering in full sight of the spectators.
V
Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to draw a hard and fast line between qualities which are closely akin, between talent and genius, for example. We are told that “talent does what it can and genius does what it must”; and this sounds impressive, no doubt, but it does not get us any forwarder. It implies a distinction in kind which is difficult to prove. So it is with the corresponding attempts to distinguish sharply between wit and humor. We can see clearly enough that many of Sheridan’s clever things are wit, beyond all question; and we can also see that most of Molière’s clever things are humor; but there remain not a few laughter-provoking effects which it is almost impossible to classify. Perhaps some of them cannot fairly be entitled either witty or humorous; they are just funny.
In one of Charles Hoyt’s unpretending farcical comedies, all of them unhesitatingly American, new births of our new soil, there was a droll creature who found it amusing to purloin a succession of articles from a certain house, crossing the stage again and again at intervals bearing out the objects he was appropriating, the last of these being nothing less than a red-hot stove. On one of his earlier marauding expeditions he came before the audience with a huge ostrich egg in one hand and with a tiny bantam chicken in the other. He came down to the footlights and stood for a moment looking first at the egg and then at the hen, with growing amazement. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t believe it!”
Now, I cannot call the remark witty in itself, and I am not at all sure that it is humorous; but it is funny,—at least this was the unanimous opinion of the joyful audience. Equally funny was a brief scene in another of the nondescript spectacles of Weber and Fields. There was on one side of the stage, not too near the footlights, the portico of a house, over which was a ground glass globe with an electric bulb inside it. Weber and Fields came on together; and Weber remarked, as they faced the audience: “This is his house. I know it because he told me it had a white light over the door.” (For the benefit of my readers I shall spare them the dialect which intensified the flavor of the ensuing dialog.)
“A white light?” said Fields. “I didn’t see a white light.” At that moment the globe became red just as Fields turned to look at it. “That isn’t a white light,” he asserted when he again faced the audience. “It’s a red light!”
“I tell you it’s a white light. I saw it,” said Weber; and when he twisted his head to steal a glimpse of the globe it had again changed its color. “I bet you five dollars it is a white light!”
“Five dollars?” cried Fields looking over his shoulder at the light, which had then become red. “I bet you ten dollars it is a red light!”
“Ten dollars?” shouted Weber, “I—I—” Then he cautiously stole a look at the globe, which was once more innocent of any color. “I bet you fifty dollars it is a white light!”
When Fields, in his turn, looked back the globe was red, and he instantly raised his bet to a hundred dollars.
I forget how high the wager mounted at last, each of the pair feeling assured that he was betting on a certainty; but at last they had wagered all they possessed and with the stakes in their hands, they slowly revolved to gaze at the light together. But to their astonished dismay, and to the vociferous delight of the spectators, the light over the door was green!
“What can we do?” asked the saddened Weber. “We have both of us lost!”
And the saddened Fields answered, “We must throw the money away!”
What helps to make this pleasant scene even more pleasing is that the audience was never supplied with any explanation as to the cause of the changes of the color of the lights. That remains to this day a dark mystery.
VI
This may not be witty, and it may even not be humorous, but it was funny. It provoked incessant laughter in its progress to its apex, which was greeted with uncontrollable roars. And laughter, like that, clean and simple and honest, is a thing to be thankful for. It is what Artemus Ward called “a sweet, sweet boon.” It needs no apology and no explanation; it is its own excuse for being,—even if it resists classification. It is wholesome and hygienic; and as Henry Ward Beecher declared, “Whoever and wherever and however situated a man is, he must watch three things,—sleeping, digestion and laughing. They are three indispensable necessities.”
(1919)