WHY WE LAUGH. BY SAMUEL S. COX, AUTHOR OF "BUCKEYE ABROAD," EIGHT YEARS IN CONGRESS," FREE TRADE," ETC. NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. EXONTEZ STAADZOW NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1880. PN6161 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Copyright, 1880, by HARPER & BROTHERS. PREFACE. THE idea which prompted this volume was to string such humors as were illustrative, upon some philosophic threads, which had been floating in my mind. Has not humor a philosophy of its own-physical, mental, and moral? It is said by Hazlitt, in his article on wit and humor, that you can not give a reason why you laugh; that people must laugh of themselves, or not at all. Without denying that we laugh with spontaneous impulse, and sometimes the more, at any restraint upon this impulse, yet the very categories of the critic himself prove that the laugh has a rational philosophy. They answer the Horatian query-" Quid Rides?" Inquiring of one accomplished in physical science, and an expert in dissecting the parts of the human frame, he, unlike old Burton, found no melancholy in the anatomy. "What portion of the human body engages in the act of laughing?" I asked him. He responded, "No one part in particular; all parts work. Health is called hearty because it results from the combination of all parts in the laugh." True, the facial muscles play a prominent rôle; just as the face does in a man or a clock; but in the act of laughing, every part is in exer cise! Every fibre laughs with the human being, when he condescends to be amused. Hence, when the question, "Why do you laugh?" is asked, the answer is vain if it simply shows, as another author undertakes to show, half ironically, that we ought not to laugh at all, but that we ought only to smile. Laughter is not sardonic. It is not from the Herba sardonica. That vegetable may produce a convulsive twitch. It may make involuntary contractions of the pectoral muscles and lungs; but these are not dependent on the outward sensation or the inner reflection. Hence, this sardonic philosophy properly regards the man who laughs as a fool. He is a mountebank, a clown, a simple, simpering zany. But laughter has its mental causes, and its logical and moral consequences; and to answer the question why these causes and effects exist is within the domain of an inquiry which the sages, from Aristotle to Sydney Smith, and from him of Malmesbury down to the rare critic I have quoted, have not disdained to propound. When, therefore, in our daily routine, and in our American life; when by highway, as in the Legislature, or by by-way, as at the hearth; when in the newspaper and on the stage, in the car and in the steamer; when even in the pulpit as well as in the circus, the restless American race makes its music-facial, mental, and moral- and thus unshadows its care, and cheers its anxiety by humors so peculiar as to make a school of its own, the inquiry which has the dignity of philosophy can not be unworthy of illustration and commentary. This I propose in these |