Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Meaning of Life j 547Humor is often a kind of aggression. Being laughed at is aversive andfeels like an attack. Comedy often runs on slapstick and insult, and inless refined settings, including the foraging societies in which weevolved, humor can be overtly sadistic. Children often laugh hystericallywhen other children hurt themselves or suffer misfortune. Many reportsin the literature on humor among foragers are similar. When the anthropologistRaymond Hames was living with the Ye'Kwana in the Amazonrainforest, he once smacked his head on the crossbar of the entrance to ahut and crumpled to the ground, bleeding profusely and writhing in pain.The onlookers were doubled over in laughter. Not that we are all that different.Executions in England used to be occasions for the whole familyto turn out and laugh at the condemned man as he was led to the gallowsand hanged. In 1984, Orwell presents a satire of popular entertainmentthrough Winston Smith's diary that comes uncomfortably close to a typicalevening in today's cinemaplexes:Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full ofrefugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audiencemuch amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with ahelicopter after him. first you saw him wallowing along in the water likeporpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then hewas full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenlyas though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting withlaughter when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat full of children with ahelicopter hovering over it. there was a middleaged woman might havebeen a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years oldin her arms, little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head betweenher breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the womanputting her arms around him and comforting him although she was bluewith fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as ifshe thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopterplanted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went allto matchwood, then there was a wonderful shot of a childs arm going upup up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose musthave followed it up and there was a lot of applause . . .I can hardly bear to read it, but on the other hand I don't remember everlaughing so hard in the movies as when Indiana Jones pulled out his gunand shot the grinning, scimitar-twirling Egyptian.The horror that Orwell elicits by his pathetic description of the victims'terror shows that cruelty alone is not the trigger for humor. The