Humor Is Absent Among Fanatics
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published December 21, 1980
10/29/2015
I have been surprised to receive a questionnaire dealing with the writing of humor and the difficulties experienced by writers in getting humorous material published.
Surprised, because surely it is realized by that portion of the world idle enough to have taken a glance at my work that I am one of the more serious writers to be found anywhere; a solemn, windy, half-knowledgeable fellow insisting on the glum truth that the world is not going to end tomorrow, nor California fall into the ocean before we have had time to digest our breakfast omelettes.
This questionnaire has set me thinking on the subject of humor, and the first point that occurs to me is that its greatest service lies in its being a safeguard against fanaticism.
You will not find humor among fanatics and the absence of humor is, to my mind, the first sign of mental unbalance.
I offer a case in point, which perhaps you already know: the late Lady Astor was for many years a member of Britain’s House of Commons. She spent the greater part of her life on what she was sure were good works, and one of them was a persistent campaign against the consumption of alcoholic beverages of any kind.
At the conclusion of one impassioned address she announced, “I assure the members of this honorable House that I would sooner commit adultery than drink a glass of beer.”
Which brought from the Labor back benches the cry, “Who wouldn’t?”
There was fanaticism neatly torpedoed. And humor is, of course, a devastating defense against criticism of one’s character or views.
The Earl of Sandwich found this out when he said to the great John Wilkes: “Sir, I predict that you will unerringly die either upon the gallows or of the pox.”
To which Wilkes replied, “My lord, I would say that that would depend entirely upon whether I embraced your principles or your mistress.”
Psychologists have insisted that all humor is nothing more than a sense of shock. If the shock is mild, we laugh. If it is severe, we are fearful or cry.
One eminent member of the profession, demonstrating this to his class, clapped his hand suddenly close to the head of a child who promptly laughed. Nettled, the psychologist unexpectedly tapped the child lightly on the end of the nose and had his finger bitten.
I am not sure of the moral of this. It might be that the psychologist had no sense of humor; or it might be that the child had no sense of humor.
In hurrying to get his finger attended to, the psychologist jerked open the classroom door and hit himself on the head, whereupon the whole class laughed.
This leaves me entirely puzzled.
Certainly, the unexpected is one of the elements of humor—but there are, I think, forms of humor peculiar to different nations and cultures.
The French excel in a subtle, intellectual humor while preserving a straight face. You will recall Anatole France’s Penguin Island, in which an ancient hermit, almost blind, embarks in a stone horse trough and, winding up in Antarctica, preaches solemnly to the penguins.
Finding them all so attentive, he baptizes them, causing great consternation in Heaven among the saints, some arguing that, the sacrament having been delivered in full faith by so holy a man, penguins are now people.
I urge you to read the book.
Fiction, they say these days, is a drug on the market. But I fancy that those who say it have largely received their mental nourishment from computers.
Another French story of which I am fond concerns two horsemen riding down a lonely road—the one an intolerable bore and the other intolerably bored.
Finally, unable to withstand the torture any longer, the bored one pointed to a man, half a mile away, who was yawning.
“Hush, my friend,” he whispered. “We are overheard.”
Despite the bitten psychologist, there is an element of shock in all humor, but also an element of truth, which we have sedately concealed from ourselves.
During the latter part of the 18th century when Ireland had a parliament of its own, there was one member, Roche, famous for his “bulls”—a curious mixture of metaphor and seeming nonsense, which nonetheless produces a flash of truth.
On one occasion when a bill was being argued as being of the greatest benefit to posterity, Roche rose and roared: “Posterity, sir! Why talk of posterity? What, I ask you, has posterity ever done for us?”
The more I think of it, the more sense the question contains.
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It gives us—the family of the late Leonard Wibberley—great pleasure and pride to announce the ebook release of Beware Of The Mouse, a charming prequel to Leonard’s bestselling classic The Mouse That Roared that, like Grand Fenwick, has been underestimated and overlooked for too long.
DESCRIPTION:
Set in the year 1450, the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick, ruled by the benevolent and noble Sir Roger and armed with its army of expert longbowmen, had existed peacefully without threat of invasion for decades. But when a rascally Irish Knight stumbles across its borders with news that the French were set to attack and that they had a new weapon of mass destruction called “the cannon,” the Irishman and Sir Roger must find a way to drop their differences and fight together, a feat made even more difficult when Sir Roger’s daughter, the Lady Matilda becomes unduly enamored in the Irish newcomer.
“Although completely different than the other books in the series, Beware of the Mouse might be the best of the lot!” – Goodreads Review
The complete Grand Fenwick series is now available on Kindle and in paperback.
