COMEDY

128 LAUGHTERHere we find the Christian disapprobation of laughter and its fear ofbodily disorder, yet both are overridden by a class consciousness thatsees laughter as the enemy of social distinctions. According to SamuelJohnson, neither Swift nor Pope could be induced to laugh, and LordFroth in Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1694) states, ‘There is nothingmore unbecoming a Man of Quality than to laugh; Jesu, ’tis such avulgar expression of the passion! Everybody can laugh’ (Congreve,1973:7). The class-based rejection of laughter penetrated further thanthe fear of appearing vulgar. Addison claimed that laughter ‘slackensand unbraces the Mind, weakens the Faculties, and causes a Kind ofRemissness, and Dissolution in all the powers of the soul’ (Addison andSteele, 1979, vol. 2:237–238). That every important household used tokeep a jester is conclusive proof that ‘everyone diverts himself withsome person or other that is below him in Point of Understanding, andtriumphs in the Superiority of his Genius, whilst he has such objects ofderision in his eyes’ (Addison and Steele, 1979, vol. 1:142–143).Superiority theory was therefore confirmed by the superior members ofsociety refraining from laughing.The continuity of superiority theory, and a general disdain forlaughter in elite circles, was eventually challenged in the eighteenthcentury by analyses of humour that indicated the importance of pleasurein laughter over mockery and derision. Superiority theory operates inthe absence of a joke and focuses on physical defects, personalmisfortunes, and social inequality; as such its view of humour isdictated by grotesque and burlesque forms. The new accent ofeighteenth-century laughter studies highlighted the linguistic formulaeof humour, the operation of verbal triggers, and the juxtaposition ofelements in the production of comic effects. Francis Hutcheson(1694–1746), professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow,was an early and effective challenger to the Hobbesian position. Writingin The Dublin Journal in 1726, Hutcheson attacked the malevolenttheory of laughter remarking that when we laugh there is a ‘great fund ofpleasantry’ (Hutcheson, 1750:7). Hutcheson was keen to prove thatlaughter and a sense of the ridiculous ‘is plainly of considerablemoment in human society’ and ‘is exceeding useful to abate ourconcerns or resentment’ in matters of small affront or inappropriateconduct (Hutcheson, 1750:32). Indeed, he found ‘that nature has givenus a sense of the ridiculous as an avenue to pleasure and a remedy forsorrow’ (Trave, 1960:69). A new generation of writers began to praisethe corrective, admonitory aspects of comedy over its corrosivequalities. Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis finds humour a ‘lenitive