University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV

PLAY, RECREATION, HUMOR AND PLEASURE SEEKING

ONE of the great difficulties in thought is that often the same word expresses quite different concepts. Some superficial resemblance has taken possession of the mind and expressed itself in a unifying word, disregarding the fundamental differences.

Take the word "play.'' The play of childhood is indeed a pleasurable activity to the child, but it is really his form of grappling with life, a serious pursuit of knowledge and a form of preparation for his adult activities. It is not a way of relaxation; on the contrary, in play he organizes his activities, shuffles and reshuffles his ideas and experiences, looking for the new combinations we call "imaginations.'' The kitten in its play prepares to catch its prey later on; and the child digging in a ditch and making believe "this is a house'' and "this is a river'' is a symbol of Man the mighty changing the face of Nature. The running and catching games like "Tag'' and "I spy,'' "Hide and go seek,'' "Rellevo'' are really war games, with training in endurance, agility, cool-headedness, coöperation and rivalry as their goals. Only as the child grows older, and there is placed on him the burden of school work, does play commence to change its serious nature and partake of the frivolous character of adult life.

For the play of adult life is an effort to find pleasure and relaxation in the dropping of serious purposes, in the "forgetting'' of cares and worries, by indulging in

excitement which has no fundamental purpose. The pleasure of play for the adult is in the release of trends from inhibition, exactly as we may imagine that a harnessed horse, pulling at a load and with his head held back by a check-rein, might feel if he were turned loose in a meadow. This is the kind of play spirit manifested in going out fishing, dressed in old clothes, with men who will not care whatever is said or done. There is purpose, there is competition and coöperation and fellowship, but the organization is a loose one and does not bear heavily. So, too, with the pleasure of a game of ball for the amateur who plays now and then. There is organization, control and competition; but unless one is a poor loser, there is a relaxed tension in that the purpose is not vital, and one can shout, jump up and down and express himself in uninhibited excitement. Whether this excitement has a value in discharging other excitement and feelings that are inhibited in the daily work is another matter; if it has such a value, play becomes of necessary importance. In outdoor games in general, the feeling of physical fitness, of discharging energy along primordial lines and the happy feeling that comes merely from color of sky and grass and the outdoor world, bring a relief from sadness that comes with the work and life of the city man.

Often the play is an effort to seek excitement and thus to forget cares, or it is a seeking of excitement for its own sake. Thus men gamble, not only for the gain but because such excitement as is aroused offers relief from business worries or home difficulties. The prize fights, the highly competitive professional sports of all kinds are frequented and followed by enormous numbers of men, not only because men greatly admire physical prowess, but because the intense excitement is

sought. I know more than one business and professional man who goes to the "fights'' because only there can he get a thrill. There is a generalized mild anhedonia in the community, which has its origin in the fatigue of overintense purposes, failure to realize ideals and the difficulties of choice. People who suffer in this way often seek the sedentary satisfaction of watching competitive professional games.

Indeed, the hold of competition on man exists not alone in his rivalry feeling toward others; it is evidenced also in the excitement he immediately feels in the presence of competitive struggle, even though he himself has little or no personal stake. Man is a partisan creature and loves to take sides. This is remarkably demonstrated by children, and is almost as well shown in the play of adults. A recent international prize fight awakened more intense interest than almost any international event of whatever real importance. That same day it passed practically unnoticed that America ended a state of war with Germany.

A law of excitement, that it lies in part in a personal hazard accounts for the growth of betting at games. The effort to gain adds to the interest, i. e., excitement. That it adds tension as well and may result in fatigue and further boredom is not reckoned with by the bettor or gambler. To follow the middle of the road in anything is difficult, and nowhere is it more beset with danger than in the seeking of excitement.

Games of skill of all kinds, whether out of doors or within; baseball, cricket, billiards, and pool afford, then, the pleasure of exertion and competition in an exciting way and yet one removed from too great a stake. Defeat is not bitter, though victory is sweet; a good game is desired, and an easy opponent is not welcomed. The

spirit of this kind of play has been of great value to society, for it has brought the feeling of fair play and sportsmanship to the world. Primitive in its origin, to take defeat nobly and victory with becoming modesty is the civilizing influence of sportsmanship. In the past women have lacked good-fellowship and sportsmanship largely because they played no competitive-coöperative games.

I shall not attempt to take up in any detail all the forms of pleasure-excitement seeking. Dancing, music, the theater and the movies offer outlets both for the artistic impulses and the seeking of excitement. In the theater and the movies one seeks also the interest we take in the lives of others, the awakening of emotions and the happy ending. Only a few people will ever care for the artistic wholesale calamity of a play like "Hamlet,'' and even they only once in a while.

Men and women seek variety, they seek excitement in any and all directions, they want relief from the tyranny of purpose and of care. But also,—they hate a vacuum, they can usually bear themselves and their thoughts for only a little while, because their thoughts are often basicly melancholy and full of dissatisfaction. So they seek escape from themselves; they try to kill time; reading, playing and going to entertainments. In fact, most of our reading is actuated by the play spirit, and is an effort to obtain excitement through the lives of others.

Humor[1] is a form of pleasure seeking and giving, but depends on a certain technique, the object of which is to elicit the laugh or its equivalent. The laugh is a discharge of tension, and while usually it accompanies

pleasure, it may indicate the tension of embarrassment or even complex emotional states. But the laugh or smile of humor has to be elicited in certain ways, chief of which are to bring about a feeling of expectation, and by some novel arrangement of words, to send the mind on a voyage of discovery which suddenly ends with a burst of pleasure when the "point'' is seen. The pleasure felt in humor arises from the feeling of novelty, the pleasure of discovering a hidden meaning and the pleasure in the "point'' or motive of the story, joke or conduct.

Usually, the humorous pleasure has these motives: it points at the folly and absurdity of other people's conduct, thought, logic and customs. It gives a feeling of superiority, and that is why all races love to poke fun at other races: certain characteristics of Jew, Irishman, Yankee, Scot, etc., are presented in novel and striking fashion, in a playful manner.

It points out the weak and absurd side of people and institutions with which we have trouble; and this brings in marriage, business, mothers-in-law, creditors, debtors, as those whose weakness is exposed by the technique of humor.

Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places. So the humorous technique deals with the get-rich-quick folk, the foolish nobleman, the politician, the priest (especially in the Middle Ages), etc.

Not only does humor seek to obtain pleasure from an attack on others and thus to feel superior or to compensate for inferiority, but also it reaches its highest form in exposing man himself, including the humorist.

The humorist, seeking his own weaknesses and contradictions, his falsities, strips the disguise from himself in some surprising way. Bergson points out that to strip away a disguise is naturely humorous unless it reveals too rudely the horrible. The humorist takes off the mask from himself and others, and in so far as we can detach ourselves from pride and vanity, we laugh. The one who cannot thus detach himself is "hurt'' by humor; the one who somehow has become a spectator of his own strivings can laugh at himself. Thus humor, in addition to becoming a compensation and a form of entertainment, is a form of self-revelation and self-understanding carried on by a peculiar technique. On the whole this technique depends upon a hiding of the real meaning of the story or situation under a disguise of the commonplace. The humorist phrases his words or develops his situation so as to send the thoughts of the listener flying in several directions. There is a brief confusion, an incongruity is felt, then suddenly from under a disguise the point becomes clear and the laugh is in part one of triumph, in part one of pleased surprise.

I shall not attempt an analysis of the psychology of humor, for illustrious writers and thinkers have stubbed their intellectual toes on this rock for centuries. In later years the analyses of Freud and Bergson are noted, but there is a list of writers from Aristotle down whose remarks and observations have brought out clearly certain trends. For us the direction that any one's humor takes is a very important phase in the study of character.

Humor is a weapon, and the humorist has two ends in view: the one to please his audience and to align them on his side, the second to attack either playfully

or seriously some person or institution with the technique of humor. Certain trends are seen in humor, one to seek a feeling of superiority by revealing the inferiority of others in a surprising way, another to release a burdensome[2] inhibition, a third to play with and in a sense mock the disagreeable features of life, and the fourth to seek detachment from one's self, to seek relief from sorrow, disappointment and deprivation by viewing the self as from afar.

So there is a sarcastic humor which points out the foibles and weaknesses of others either grossly or delicately. Usually these others are those differing from one's own group—the Irish, Jew, farmer, Negro— and the jokes either deal with their personal appearance (a low humor) or their characteristic expressions, points of view and actions. The audience is convulsed at their quaintness or folly, though often enough on the stage the comic figure delivers a sort of wisdom mingled with his foolishness, and this adds to the humorous explosion. The sarcastic humor in its highest form reaches satire, where under a disguise powerful institutions or the habit and ways of life of a group are criticized. In polite society people are continually attacking each other in a kind of warfare called repartee, in which the tension is kept just without the bounds of real hostility, while the audience sides with the one whose shaft is the most telling. In the lower ranks this interchange, which is surprisingly frequent, is coarse and insulting. It is supposed to be a test of character to be able to "stand'' these attacks with equanimity and even to join in the laugh against oneself. To "kid'' and take "kidding'' is thus an important social trait.

Humor is often used to expose the folly of the pretentious. Much of the stock in trade of the humorist lies in his attack on the pedant, the pompous, the great, the new-rich, the over-important of one kind or another. To find them less than they pretend to be gives two especial kinds of pleasure to the audience; the first the stripping away of disguise (Bergson), and the second the relief of our own feeling of inferiority in their presence by showing how inferior they really are.

Since inhibition wears on us, the great inhibitions are directly attacked by the humorist. Thus sex forms one of the great subjects of humor, and from the obscene story told by those on whom the sex inhibitions rest lightly to the joke about clothes, etc., told by those who mock the opposite sex, the whole idea is to bring about pleasure in the release of inhibitton and the play of the mind around the forbidden. Freud has some interesting remarks on this type of humor, which he regards largely as sexual aggression. It is necessary to say that the release of inhibition is always that of an inhibition not too strongly felt or accepted. A really modest person, one to whom the sex code is a sacred thing, does not find pleasure in a crude sex joke. Similarly with the inhibition surrounding marriage, which is a stock subject of humor. The overearnest person dislikes this type of humor and reacts against it by calling it "in bad taste.'' In the Middle Ages (and to-day among those opposed to the Catholic church), the priest and nun were slyly or coarsely attacked by the humorist, and in all times those somewhat skeptical find in religion, its ceremonials and customs, a field for joke and satire.

The most interesting of the types of humor flirts with the disagreeable. Man is the only animal foreseeing

death and disaster, and he not only quakes in the knowledge of misfortune, but also he jokes about it. It may be that the excitement of approaching in spirit the disagreeable is pleasant, and perhaps there is pleasure in attacking disaster, even in a playful way. The ability to joke about other people's misfortunes is not, of course, a measure of gallantry or courage and usually indicates a feeling of superiority such as we all tend to feel in the presence of the unfortunate, even where no element of weakness has caused their mishap. But to joke about one's own troubles, danger and disaster at least indicate a sense of proportion, an ability to stand aloof from oneself.

This propensity is remarkably manifest in hospitals, in war and wherever disaster or danger is present. The soldiers nickname in a familiar way all their troubles and all their dangers. The popular phrases for dying illustrate this,—croaked, flew up the spout, turned up the toes, etc. In the war the different kinds of guns and missiles had nicknames, and puns were made on the various dreaded results of injury. It was declared by the soldiers that no missile could injure any man unless it has his name and address on it, which is, of course, a poetical, humorous comparison of the missile to a longed-for letter. I heard a wounded man say the only trouble was that the postoffice department mistook him for another fellow. Grim humor always is evident in grim situations; it is a way of evasion and escape, and also it is a challenge.

When one objectifies himself so that he sees himself, his purposes and his weaknesses in the light in which others might see him and find him "funny,'' then he has reached the heights in humor. Certain people are notoriously lacking in this quality of detachment, and

they cannot laugh at themselves or find any humor in a situation that annoys, mortifies or hurts them. Others have it to a remarkable degree, and if they possess at the same time the art of telling the humorous story about themselves, they become very popular. This popularity accounts for a good deal of seeming modesty and humorous self-depiction; it is a sort of recompense for the self-confessed foible and weakness; it is a way of seeking the good opinion and applause of others and is sometimes sought to a ridiculous extreme.

The character and the state of culture stand revealed in the type of humor enjoyed. If a man laughs heartily at sex jokes, one may at least say, that while he may live up to the conventions in this matter, it is certain that he regards the inhibitions as conventions, even though he give them lip-homage. No one finds much humor in the things he holds as really sacred, and if these are attacked in the joke he may laugh, but he is offended and angry at heart. Any man permits a joke on women in general, but he will not permit an obscene joke about his wife or his mother. Humor must not arouse the anger of the audience or the reader, and in this it resembles wrestling matches and friendly boxing, which are pleasant as attacks not seriously intended, but the blows must not exceed a certain play limit or war is declared.

To be entertained, to entertain, to escape from fatigue, monotony, inhibition, to seek excitement, to while away the time and thus to escape from failure, regret and sorrow are parts of the life and character of all. They who have nothing else but these activities in their lives are to be pitied, and they are unwise who allow themselves too little amusement and recreation.

But we have not spoken of pleasure as a whole, pleasure

apart from entertainment, play and humor. The satisfaction of any physical desire is pleasant, so that to eat and drink and have sexual relations become great pleasure trends. There are some who live only for these pleasures, ranging from glutton to epicure, from the brutally passionate to the sexual connoisseur. Others whose appetites are hearty subordinate them to the main business of their lives, achievement in some form. There is a whole range of taste in pleasures of this kind that I do not even attempt to analyze at this point, even if it were possible for me to analyze it.

Pleasure in dress, in ceremonials, in all the ornamentation of life, forms part of the artistic impulses. The love of music is too lofty to be classed with the other pleasures. This is true of only a few people. For most of us music is an entertainment and is usually poorly endured if it constitutes the total entertainment. As part of the theater, of the movie, of dancing, it is "appreciated'' by everybody. To most it stirs the emotions so deeply that its pleasure vanishes in fatigue if too long endured. The capacity to enjoy music, especially the capacity to express it, is one of the great variables of life. It is true that the poseurs in music and the arts generally seek superiority by pretending to a knowledge, interest and pleasure they do not really have, just as there are some who really try to enjoy what they feel they should enjoy. Nowhere is there quite so much pretense and humbug as in the field of the artistic tastes. Nowhere is the arbitrariness of taste so evident, and nowhere is the "expert'' so likely to be a pretender. I say this in full recognition of the fact that science and religion have their modes and pretenses as well as art.

The "progress'' of man is marked as much as anything by a change in "taste,'' change in what is considered

mannerly, beautiful and pleasant. This progress is called refinement, although this term is also used in relation to ethics. Refinement in cooking leads to the art of the chef. Refinement in dress becomes developed into an intricate, ever-changing relation of clothes and age, sex, time of day, situation, etc., so that it is unrefined to wear clothes of certain texture and hues and refined to wear others. Refinement in manner regulates the tone of voice, the violence of gesticulation, the exhibition of emotions and the type of subjects discussed, as well as controlling a dozen and one other matters, from the way one enters a room to the way one leaves it. The savage is unrefined, say we, though he has his own standards of refinement. An American is a boor if he tucks his napkin in at the neck and uses bread to sop up the gravy on his plate, whereas Italians find it perfectly proper to do these things and find the bustle of the American life totally unrefined.

That refinement and developed taste are matters of convention and entirely relative is not a new thesis; it is an old accepted truth. What I wish to point out is this, that every development in refinement adds some new pleasure to the world but subtracts some old ones. He who develops his musical tastes from ragtime to the classics finds joys he knew not of, but is offended and disgusted whenever he visits friends, attends a movie or a theater. When people ate with their fingers there was little to be disgusted at in eating; when people need spotless linen and eight or ten forks, knives, and spoons for a meal, a single disarrangement, a spot on the linen, is intolerable. The higher one builds one's needs and tastes, the more opportunities for disgust, disappointment and discontent.

Most of the people of the world have never understood

this. To the majority, acquisition, the multiplication of needs, desires and tastes constitute progress and seem to be the roads to happiness. Get rich, have horses, autos, beautiful things in the house, servants, go where you please and when you please,—this is happiness. The rich man knows it is not, and so does the wise man. Desires grow with each acquisition, the capacity for satisfaction diminishes with every gratification, novelty disappears and with the growth of taste little disharmonies offend deeply.

Some men have reacted in this way against gratification and satisfaction, against the building up of needs and tastes, and in every age we hear of the "simple life,'' the happy, contented life, where needs are few and things are "natural.'' The ascetic ideal of renunciation is the dominant note in Buddhism and Christianity; fly from the pleasures of this world, give up and renounce, for all is vanity and folly. To every struggler this seems true when the battle is hardest, when achievement seems futile and empty, and when he whispers to himself, "What is it all about, anyway?'' To stop struggling, to desire only the plainest food, the plainest clothes, to live without the needless multiplication of refinements, to work at something essential for daily bread, to stop competing with one's neighbor in clothes, houses, ornaments, tastes,—it seems so pleasant and restful. But the competition gets keener, the struggle harder, tastes multiply, yesterday's luxury is to-day's need—to what end?

Will mankind ever accept a modified asceticism as its goal? I think it will be forced to, but it may be that the wish is father to the thought. Sometimes it seems as if the real crucifixion for every one of us is in our contending desires and tastes, in the artificial

competing standards that are mislabeled refinement. To be finicky is to court anhedonia, and the joy of life is in robust tastes not easily offended and easily gratified.

Perhaps this is irrelevant in a chapter on play and recreation, but it is easily seen that much of play is a revolt against refinement and taste, just as much as humor is directed against them. In play we allow ourselves to shout, laugh aloud and to be unrefined; we welcome dirt and disorder; we forget clothes and manners; we are "natural,'' i. e., unrefined. The higher we build our tastes the more we need play. If such a thing as a "state of nature'' could be reached, play and recreation in the adult sense would hardly more than exist.