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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 30th July 2008

Getting beneath the skin of the tickling phenomenon

‘We can cause laughing by tickling the skin,’ wrote Darwin in Emotions (1872). We all know that. Difficulties arise when we probe a little deeper, where tickling hovers uncertainly on the borderline between eroticism, buffoonery and the slow, pleasurable but perhaps innocent process of having the flesh gently disturbed by the tips of another person’s fingers. Tickling is a very complicated matter, insufficiently explored by neurologists, Freudians and students of human behaviour, including novelists and poets.

Erotic forms of tickling are themselves complex. When the Glasgow girl in the song says ‘Stop yer tickling, Jock!’, does she really mean it? In the phrase ‘slap and tickle’, the man does the tickling and the woman the slapping. Or do they? And how does it end? Is this sofa activity terminated by ‘the deep, deep peace of the double bed’, to quote Mrs Patrick Campbell? Not necessarily. The most prolonged and lubricious tickling scene in film occurs in the Laurel and Hardy masterpiece Way Out West, where the saloon-bar siren tickles the hysterically giggling Stan to get from him the deeds of a gold mine, which he has tucked into his underclothes for safety. This remarkable scene, enacted in, on, under and around a spring-twangly double bed, is a remarkable piece of cinema, and it is amazing it got through the Hays Office intact. No doubt Stan was seen as too goofy to suggest sex. But it gives meaning to the phrase ‘tickled to death’.

The age of sexual tickling began in the late Middle Ages and climaxed in the time of Shakespeare. By way of prolegomenon, Chaucer’s most outrageous anecdote, The Miller’s Tale, proclaims ‘This world is now full tickel!’ In Thomas Heywood’s Play of Love (1533), there is a memorable quatrain about a girl:

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