And another thing

1 November 2008

What were Gladstone and Disraeli laughing about? Too rude to tell

V.S. Naipaul, that clever and often wise man, once laid down: ‘One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.’ Well, where’s the comedy now? There is certainly plenty of hysteria. Old Theodore Roosevelt used to say: ‘Men are seldom more unreasonable than when they lose their money. They do not seek to apportion blame by any rational process but, like a wounded snake, strike out against what is most prominent in their line of vision.’ I notice that the OED, as a rule politically correct, thinks hysteria is chiefly female: ‘Women being much more liable than men to this disorder, it was originally thought to be due to a disturbance of the uterus... Former names for the disease were vapours and hysteric passion.’ Women certainly laugh more than men, more frequently too, a form of anti-hysteria therapy Nancy Mitford called ‘shrieks’.

We first hear of it in Chapter 18 of the Book of Genesis, one of my favourite biblical scenes, taking place outside and within Abraham’s tent. John Frederick Lewis, so good at tents, ought to have painted it. Angels, one of whom turns out to be God, visit the patriarch, and God tells him that Sarah, his elderly wife, will conceive and bear him an heir. Sarah, within and rustling up a meal for the visitors, overhears this. She ‘laughed within herself, saying, “After I am waxed old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?”’ God overheard this laugh, not so much a shriek, more a snort, and resented it. He recognised it was not a joyous laugh, more sardonic, cynical and sceptical. It seemed to doubt his powers to order babies, and he angrily asked aloud: ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ Sarah denied her snort: ‘“I laughed not,” for she was afraid. And he said: “Nay; but thou didst laugh.”’ This is the first recorded laugh in history, and the scene is so vivid it makes one believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament, or at least in the imaginative talents of those ancient Hebrews. Also, it is interesting to note that the first joke arose out of what can only be called the sex war: God is a tremendously male figure in the OT. It may be, indeed, that Sarah’s laugh reflected resentment that God had not given her a child before.

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