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Over fifty-five years ago Al Capp was at the peak of his career as a cartoonist. His strip Li’l Abner was a masterpiece of satiric humor. Millions of readers daily chuckled at the misadventures of the people from Dogpatch. Al Capp also wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly about humor. He pointed out that all humor is based on pain, that we laugh at misfortune. Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton. Laurel and Hardy. All the early movie comedians used pain and misfortune as their stock in trade. There was the pie in the face. The chair pulled out from under someone. The embarrassment of an individual or a group. Dick Van Dyke was a master at the “fall.” He could tumble over a hassock or be made a fool of for everyone’s amusement. Think about any situation that you have laughed over and it’s likely based on someone’s discomfort. There are some who can only laugh at the misfortunes of others, even creating situations to hurt to some extent another for the sake of a laugh. Good comedians make themselves the butt of the joke. “A funny thing happened to me on the way . . .” They fall down, have a bucket of water fall on them or look foolish to their own embarrassment. Pity the poor coyote in the cartoons being foiled by the roadrunner? Feel sorry for him when a boulder smashes him flat? No. We laugh. His pain and predicament provoke our hilarity. When a piano is dropped on a cartoon character and crushes him, we laugh. We know it’s not real and he’ll bounce back. In real life, the sight of a human being crushed would not be funny. We don’t laugh at the blood spilled at a car wreck or a disaster. That’s beyond the boundaries of humor. We don’t want the protagonist of our humor crushed beyond hope, just enough staggered or embarrassed to give us a good belly laugh. At a good old-fashioned wake everyone unwinds, enjoys themselves and says a few nice things about the departed. It let’s the pressure out of the intensity of the moment. One oriental philosophy is to make joy at funerals in happy fashion. They believe the person has left this life for a happier and better one. There are times when an incident strikes us funny and no one else sees the humor. We laugh and then feel embarrassed or perhaps puzzled that we see the humor and no one else does. All of us remember our favorite jokes or real life tales. Usually, they involve ourselves or a family member. One of my favorite stories is the one told by Bob Lahiere about his father who came to America as a poor French immigrant who found his way from New Jersey to Tennessee where at one time he owned more acreage of land than any other individual in the state. But that’s not the funny part. Bob told it to me some years ago and I get him to repeat it to newcomers every chance I get. Each time I laugh until I could cry. His father arrived in this country and could speak or read no English. He waited in the restaurant for his train to leave. Being hungry, he stared helplessly at the menu. When the waitress came over, he looked over at another man’s plate and thought it looked good. There was a meatloaf, potatoes with gravy and corn served in a strange manner. Corn was a familiar dish in his native France. But this was still on the cob. He even began to abandon the European fashion of keeping the fork in the left hand instead of switching it to the right as Americans do. He watched the man eat his meat and potatoes. He did the same. Hunger took over and he never looked back. When he came to the corn, he had seen the man pick it up with his hands. He did the same and ate the corncob, the whole corncob. He had not noticed the man only bit the corn off the cob. It’s not as funny here in print as it is when Bob tells the story. His facial expressions and movement of his hands, mimicking someone eating a whole corncob, are hilarious. We laugh at the pain endured by Bob’s father, and the indigestion. Bob laughs at it. And I’m quite sure his father told the tale on himself and laughed. It is often said laughter is the best medicine. A good laugh can cure a lot of problems. Maybe we should remember one thing particularly. It takes less muscles to smile than to frown.
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