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Laughter from the historical perspective

My post on laughing attracted two comments: an alleged counterexample from an Icelandic saga and a veritable flood of vituperation. The second writer was so disgusted that he could not even make himself finish reading the essay. In principle, abuse does not deserve attention, but I’ll offer an explanation to both of my critics, so that those interested in the subject could come away with a better understanding of the matter. Let me note that I have been studying the history of laughter and the sense of humor for decades, read countless articles and books on this subject, and published a major essay on it. I am not saying this to promote my scholarship but only to point out that I am less ignorant and adventuresome than my opponents might believe.

People have been laughing since the beginning of creation, but they did not do so because something struck them as funny, and when they did do or say something funny from our point of view they did not laugh. In an Old Icelandic poem (from the Edda), to avenge his father, the hero disguises himself as a woman. The person named Blind notices the disguise. Very clever, but, apparently, not funny, and no one laughed. Among other things, sexual laughter played a great role (it may or may not be the reason we still laugh at obscene jokes, however stupid and stale, but Risus Paschalis certainly goes back to a most ancient custom). Laughter as a life-giving force has also been recorded (think of Sarah’s laughter at being told that she has conceived). Laughter of triumph, laughter caused by someone’s stupidity (trusting an enemy, for example) or bad manners (a guest belched in company, and everybody laughed), and laughter as a sign of a woman’s courtly breeding are commonplace. Our ancestors were quick to notice incongruity and produce puns, none of which had anything to do with what we call the sense of humor.

Now the alleged counterexamples. The sagas are full of “famous last words,” usually meant to show the character’s contempt of death (laughter at a funeral is also a very ancient topos, possibly connected with laughter as a life-giving force). A man is sent to reconnoiter whether the person being attacked (Gunnar at Hlidarendi, to use an Anglicized spelling) is still in the house. In his attempt to assess the situation he is pierced with a sword. “Is Gunnar there?” The answer: “I don’t know. But his sword is”; having uttered these words, he falls dead. A warrior removes an arrow from his breast, examines it, notices some fat around the arrowhead, and comments: “The king fed us well” (and dies). Those are among the most anthologized cases known from Old Norse literature, but their number can be multiplied ad libitum. No one laughed; no one found such statements funny, and that’s the whole point. Compare the evidence from Icelandic with (among a host of others) St. Lawrence’s turn me over, I am well done, while he is being tortured on a gridiron, and Ralph Percy’s words (at least such is the tradition) addressed to Henry VI at the battle of Hadgeley Moor (1462): “I have saved the bird in my bosom.” He may have meant that his oath of loyalty and the wound will stay forever in his breast. This is all “literature,” rhetoric based on classical models. We have no idea what people really said in the throes of death. As regards the sagas, let us not forget that they were recorded by educated people versed in Latin. And many skaldic verses were indebted for their content to the tradition of heroic (eddic) poetry.

An even less appropriate counterexample concerns Tristan and Isolde (such are their German names). The two are clandestine lovers and make desperate efforts to conceal their meetings. At one stage only an ordeal can save Isolde, and she thinks of a scheme. Tristan, disguised as a pilgrim, carries her ashore; “inadvertently” he drops his load and falls on Isolde, whereupon she swears that she has never lain in anyone’s arms except those of her husband King Mark and that pilgrim. Hot iron does not burn her, and she is cleared of guilt. Here we have an example of another topos, an ambiguous oath. We are not told whether King Mark’s retainers laughed at Isolde’s pronouncement (I assume they did not), but they would, most probably, have laughed at a clown in a modern circus. The civilized Greeks laughed at the sight of crippled veterans (someone with only one arm or leg or without both: isn’t it screamingly funny?). From this point of view they were not a bit better, perhaps worse, than the crusaders of the High Middle Ages. The jokes recoded even in Boccaccio, let alone those in old popular culture (for instance, the stories of Til(l) Eulenspiegel) are either grossly obscene (sexual humor) or scatological.

To repeat the conclusion of my post: The modern sense of humor does not antedate the Renaissance. This momentous breakthrough coincided with many others. People became the masters of perspective in painting and in narrative technique, began (however slowly) to show interest in what we would call psychology, developed a new view of authorship, introduced a mass of often awkward subordinating conjunctions (and in doing so, caught up with the Romans), and so forth. By roughly the middle of the fourteenth century and certainly by the fifteen hundreds they had learned to react not only to “signs” but also to “icons,” to use semiotic terms. We laugh at verbal jokes unaccompanied by and independent of the situation in which they are produced. Moreover, we don’t need a situational background. Medieval Europeans (if we can trust their literature) never behaved so unless they heard the jokes in Latin; but this was studied, rather than spontaneous, laughter: they knew where to laugh.

There are several ways to understand the problem. First and foremost, it is necessary to study the occurrences of the word laugh and its derivatives in older texts and correlate them with the environment that produced laughter (this task has been performed especially well by French scholars). Second, modern researchers should beware of what anthropologists call the identity hypothesis, that is, the assumption that people don’t change and that our reactions are the same as they were in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The greatest danger lies in the seemingly natural belief that what is “funny” today was funny long ago. Laughter and the sense of humor met relatively late in the history of the post-antiquity Europeans. That is why I wrote that neither Sheridan’s nor Oscar Wilde’s comedies, even if adapted to the circumstances of that time, would have had any success in the Middle Ages. Finally, one is advised to show restraint in polemic. I am sorry to finish my explanations on a didactic note, but offending, disparaging, and professing disdain for an opponent is a bad idea. I hope nobody can object to legitimate self-defense even on December 31, when the whole world is expected to be full of the condensed milk of human kindness, to quote Mark Twain rather than Shakespeare. (Isn’t the joke excellent?)

Why Sheltie?

To remind our readers that this is an etymological blog, I’ll answer one question about word origins. The rest will have to wait until next Wednesday, but possibly I have enough for two Wednesdays. The question was why the Shetland sheepdog is called Sheltie? What caused the metathesis (tl to lt)? Indeed, such a change looks most unusual, but I think the suggestion in the OED is the best one we can think of. There was no metathesis! In the Shetland dialect, the inhabitant of the islands is called Hjalti. It is this word (Hjalti) that seems to have yielded Sheltie (the change of initial hj- to sh- is no problem). The result is almost a pun, and it is a most efficient pun! Funny, isn’t it?

The Oxford Etymologist, full of verve (on which see a special post) but meek in spirit, wishes everybody a happy, healthy, and productive New Year and hopes to receive many questions and comments in 2015 and beyond.

Image credits: (1) Monkey before skeleton by Gabriel von Max, 1900. Public domain via WikiArt. (2) Shetland sheepdog. Photo by Karen Arnold. CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for December 2014, Part 1 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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I have noticed that many of my acquaintances misuse the phrases a dry sense of humor and a quiet sense of humor. Some people can tell a joke with a straight face, but, as a rule, they do it intentionally; their performance is studied and has little to do with “dryness.” A quiet sense of humor is an even murkier concept. What is it: an ability to chuckle to oneself? Smiling complacently when everybody else is roaring with laughter? Being funny but inoffensive? Sometimes readers detect humor where it probably does not exist.

For example, in the Scandinavian myth of the final catastrophe, the great medieval scholar Snorri Sturluson noted that the lower jaw of the wolf, the creature destined to swallow the whole world, touched the ground, while the upper jaw reached to the sky. If the wolf, he added, could open its mouth wider, it would have done so. For at least two hundred years scholars have been admiring Snorri’s dry sense of humor, though there is no certainly that Snorri had any sense of humor at all. What we read in his text is an accurate statement of fact, a description of a monster with a mouth open to its full extent.

In Europe, if we disregard the situation known form Ancient Greece and Rome, the modern sense of humor, which, first and foremost, presupposes laughter at verbal rather than at practical jokes, hardly existed before the Renaissance. (Practical jokes seldom thrill us.) The likes of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde would not have had an appreciative audience in the Middle Ages. A look at the words pertaining to laughter may not be out of place here. The verb laugh has nothing to do with amusement. Its most ancient form sounded as khlakhkhyan (kh, which, as the above transcription shows, was long, stands for ch in Scots loch and in the family name MacLauchlan). If this word had currency before the formation of the system of Germanic consonants, its root was klak, which belongs with cluck, clack, click, clock, and other similar sound-imitative formations. The most primitive word for “laugh” seems to have designated a “guttural gesture,” akin to coughing or clearing one’s throat. Chuckle, a frequentative form of chuck, is a cousin of cackle. Giggle, another onomatopoeic verb, is a next-door neighbor of chuckle. The origin of Latin ridere (“to laugh”: compare ridiculous, deride, and risible) is unknown.

Nowadays, few words turn up in our speech more often than fun. Fun is the greatest attraction of everything. On campus, after the most timid souls get out of the math anxiety course, they are assured that math will be fun. A popular instructor is called a fun professor; students wish one another a fun class. Fun is the backbone of our education, and yet the word fun surfaced in texts only in the seventeenth century, and, like many nouns and verbs belonging to this semantic sphere, was probably a borrowing by the Standard from slang. Its etymology is disputable; perhaps fun is related to fond, and fond meant “stupid.” Joke, contemporaneous with fun, despite its source in Latin, also arose as slang.

We seldom think of the inner form of the word witty. Yet it is an obvious derivative of wit. One could expect witty to mean “wise, sagacious,” the opposite of witless (compare also unwitting), and before Shakespeare it did mean “clever, ingenious.” In German, the situation is similar. Geistreich (Geist + reich) suggests “rich in spirit (mind)” but corresponds to Engl. “witty.” Likewise, jest had little to do with amusement. Latin gesta (plural) meant “doings, deeds” and is familiar from the titles of innumerable Latin books (for example, Gesta danorum “The Deeds of the Danes”). Apparently, in the absence of the concept we associate with wit speakers had to endow the existing material with a meaning that suddenly gained in importance or surfaced for the first time. “The street,” where slang flourished, reveled in low entertainment and supplied names for it. Sometimes the learned also felt a need for what we call fun but were “lost for words” and used Latin nouns in contexts alien to them.

Jest is by far not the only example of this process. Hoax, which originally meant “to poke fun at,” is an eighteenth-century verb (at first only a verb) derived from Latin hocus, as in hocus-pocus. By an incredible coincidence, Old English had hux “mockery,” a metathesized variant of husc, a word with a solid etymology, but in the remote past it may have meant “noise.” When the history of the verbs for “laugh” comes to light, it often yields the sense “noise.” Such is Swedish skratta (with near identical cognates in Norwegian and Danish). People, as rituals and books inform us, laughed on various occasions: to promote fertility (a subject I cannot discuss here), to express their triumph over a vanquished enemy, or to show that they were happy. Noise sometimes constituted part of their reaction. None of that had anything to do with our sense of humor.

German Scherz “joke” first denoted “a merry jump.” Its synonym Spaß reached German from Italian (spasso; in the seventeenth century, like so many words being discussed here), but German did not remain a debtor. It “lent” Scherz to Italian, which returned it to the European languages as Scherzo, a musical term. The origin of Dutch grap “joke” is uncertain (so probably slang). Almost the entire English vocabulary of laughter and mockery is late: either the words were coined about four hundred year ago, or new meanings of old words arose. It is as though a revolution in attitudes toward laughter (or at least one aspect of it) occurred during and soon after the Renaissance. People felt a need for new terms expressing what we take for eternal impulses and began to promote slang and borrow right and left.

Below I will list a few verbs with their dates and some indication of their origin. The roman numbers refer to the centuries.

• Jeer (XVI; “fleer and leer have affinities for form and meaning”; so The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology),
• fleer (XV, possibly from Scandinavian),
• sneer (XVI; perhaps from Low German or Dutch),
• flout (XVI, possibly from Dutch),
• taunt (XVI, from French),
• banter (XVII, of unknown origin).

Only scoff and scorn are considerably older, though both also came from abroad. To be sure, the picture presented above is too simple; it does not take into account the history of people. New words were borrowed, while old ones fell into desuetude. The formula “of unknown origin” does not mean that no suggestions about their etymology exist. They do, but none is fully convincing.

Our ancestors laughed as much as we do, but we have added a new dimension to this process: we can laugh at a witty saying (when they spoke their native languages, this was, apparently, a closed art to them). Strangely, the educated “barbarians” enjoyed Roman comedies, but laughing at Latin witticisms taught them nothing and did not become a transferable skill. The Europeans who descended from those “barbarians” needed a long time to catch up with their teachers. A study of laughter is not only a window to the development of European mentality. It also sheds light on popular culture. We observe how the slang of the past gained respectability and became part of the neutral style. Here etymologists can make themselves useful to everyone who is interested in how we have become what we are. Enjoy yourselves, friends, but don’t be always the last to laugh.

The post A laughing etymologist in a humorless crowd appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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