Plum Pie (34 page)

And nobody has laughed in a theatre for years. All you hear is the soft, sibilant sound of creeping flesh, punctuated now and then by a sharp intake of breath as somebody behind the footlights utters one of those four-letter words hitherto confined to the cosy surroundings of the lower type of barroom. (Odd to reflect, by the way, that when the word 'damn' was first spoken on the New York stage—in one of Clyde Fitch's plays, if I remember rightly—there was practically a riot. Police raided the joint, and I am not sure the military were not called out.)

The process of getting back to comedy would, of course, be very gradual. At first a laugh during- the progress of a play would have a very eerie effect. People would wonder where the noise was coming from and would speculate as to whether somebody was having some sort of fit. "Is there a doctor in the house?" would be the cry. But they would get into the way of it after a while, and it would not be so very long before it would be quite customary to see audiences looking and behaving not like bereaved relatives at a funeral but as if they were enjoying themselves.

The most melancholy humour today is, I suppose, the Russian, and one can readily understand why. If you live in a country where, when winter sets in, your nose turns blue and has to be rubbed with snow, it is difficult to be rollicking even when primed with two or three stiff vodkas.

Khrushchev in the days when he was out and about was probably considered Russia's top funny man—at least if you were domiciled in Moscow and didn't think so, you would have done well to keep it to yourself—and he never got beyond the Eisenhower golf joke and the Russian proverb, and if there is anything less hilarious than a Russian proverb, we have yet to hear of it. The only way to laugh at one was to watch Khrushchev and see when he did it.

"In Russia," he used to say, making his important speech to the Presidium, "we have a proverb—A chicken that crosses the road does so to get to the other side, but wise men dread a bandit," and then his face would sort of split in the middle and his eyes would disappear into his cheeks like oysters going down for the third time in an oyster stew, and the comrades would realize that this was the big boffola and that if they were a second late with the appreciative laughter, their next job would be running a filling station down Siberia way. There may come a time when Russia will rise to He-and-She jokes and stories about two Irishmen who were walking along Broadway, but I doubt it. I cannot see much future for Russian humourists. They have a long way to go before they can play the Palladium.

I see, looking back on what I have written, that I have carelessly omitted to say what Humour is. (People are always writing articles and delivering lectures telling us, generally starting off with the words 'Why do we laugh?' One of these days someone is going to say 'Why shouldn't we?' and they won't know which way to look.) I think I cannot do better than quote what Dr. Edmund Bergler says in his book on
The Sense of Humour
. Here it comes:

'Laughter is a defence against a defence. Both manoeuvres are instituted by the subconscious ego. The cruelty of the superego is counteracted by changing punishment into inner pleasure. The superego reproaches the ego for the inner pleasure, and the ego then institutes two new defences, the triad of the mechanism of orality and laughter.'

What do you mean, you don't know what he means? Clear as crystal. Attaboy, Edmund. Good luck to you, and don't laugh at any wooden nickels.