They Laugh that Win
McPherson, J. L.
Professor Alex Inkeles told a group at the University of Mich igan that the more often you laugh the higher you are likely to be on the social scale. "Contrary to popular belief," he...
...2. Elfin or Mocking Laughter (properly classified with mating cries and seduction maneuvers) . 3. The Laugh of Misplaced Concreteness or Trill of Intrusion (associated with extremely embarrassing accidents...
...people in warm countries...
...Professor Alex Inkeles told a group at the University of Mich igan that the more often you laugh the higher you are likely to be on the social scale...
...As joy and laughter all but vanish from science, politics, work, social work, religion and social status, fun morality departments are springing up everywhere, with directors, curricula, budgets and fun-morale builders...
...Eventually polling techniques must be supplemented by controlled experiments, participant observation (with the investigator laughing right with the group under study), and laboratory examinations to rule out genetic factors like basic ticklishness...
...In the mass society nothing can remain private—not even death...
...With his life thus cleft in two, the Riantary Puritan is apt to resent any implication that he takes himself very seriously and any implication that he doesn't...
...Its absence signifies the imminent announcement of the death of a pope or popular comedian, or possibly a demonstration of pre-medication nasal distress...
...As man has become expendable so have his feelings and emotions...
...Certain ly not in America where the Cheshire grins of assorted millionaire poll cats have dissipated any lingering images of up perclass sobriety and reserve...
...members of right-wing sects...
...Some better method must be found, too, for quantifying laugh-experience...
...THE MODERN Ctusts...
...But even in this first crude formulation we can detect the faint outlines of a science of risibility that may some day stand alongside the dismal science of economics and other serious studies...
...Items supporting and refuting Inkeles should be set up in parallel columns, e.g...
...How many of the people who laughed during the past day, Professor Inkeles, laughed only during their scheduled times for laughing...
...military spokesmen see nothing...
...age at which sense of humor matured, if ever...
...Everyone knows that one good solid laugh a week may be worth a thousand titters...
...A set time and place is being provided us all for the therapeutic indulgence of laughter, while other set times and places are reserved for being bored to death...
...And today, in America at least, fun has its own trade journals and ideologues...
...Radical critics, recoiling from the more sordid aspects of fun morality (which aren't much fun and are quite immoral), have tended to adopt either the doleful demeanor of the Riantary Reactionary or the antiseptic attitude of the humorless liberal...
...The mass media "cover" a man whenever anything at all interesting happens to him: they "cover" him more relentlessly and efficiently than a secret police ever could...
...As the inner life of the mass man is impoverished, vicarious participation in the life of others has become a psychological equivalent, a needed stimulant...
...INKELES's RULE, or the law of nonGravity, will surely give way, once the qualifiers, revisionists and neo-Inklings have begun their work, to a more complex and less intelligible statement...
...Put it in the vernacular: "Folks who ought to know their place laugh in the big shot's snarl ing face": and it still won't wash...
...The Inkeles Method of Self-Reporting has one glaring defect: it tempts respondents to cover up or exaggerate their laughoutlet...
...That, indeed, is the crucial question...
...Let us press on...
...And there is not even a private exit...
...Queen Victoria was Old King Cole was not Amused, a Merry Old Soul...
...But, in fact, fun morality rises out of, is a manifestation of, Riantary Puritanism...
...Hearty or timid...
...We must conclude that the contrariness status of the Inkeles Rule remains unproved.* This is unfortunate, because a scientific statement should, if possible, be contrary to some popular belief, in order to help stimulate non-conformity...
...But because he is afflicted with strong guilt feelings, he banishes laughter from many areas of life, and forces to seek an outlet in surreptitious and despiritualized forms...
...Or do people bubble upward through the social structure on the basis of their laugh buoyancy...
...Is there no alternative to the chill fanaticism of the chiliastic utopian but the loud laugh that bespeaks the vacant peace of mind...
...But the Inkeles Rule should force us to reexamine two major cultural forces: Riantary Puritanism and Fun Morality...
...For those wishing to gather evidence on popular belief we recommend either the Trilling Method of Insightful Observation or the Riesman Method of incidental Content Analysis...
...Malevolent or reassuring...
...CONCEPT CLARIFICATION...
...Until we win back the right of laughter from the upper classes we can be assured that the world will be no laughing matter...
...Patterns of traumatic sobriety naturally vary from group to group...
...The lower you are in social status the more likely etcetera" certainly doesn't...
...The Riantary Puritan gives lipservice to laughter, asserting that, when exercised within legitimate social bonds for legitimate purposes, laughter is a healthy, even a holy, thing...
...Future studies will also measure and control the effect of other variables besides temperature and social status: age...
...Riantary Puritanism frequently afflicts: members of left-wing sects...
...Were the interviewers carefully instructed to keep a straight face...
...Cruel or kindly...
...and so on...
...2. develop more precise research methods 3. place our formulas in a sound theoretical context (argue about what we have done...
...women...
...rural-urban resi deuce...
...Since he is subconsciously afraid of losing his sense of humor, he may often be reluctant, or even unable, to laugh at all...
...Insane or Olympian...
...31I Fun morality is often rejected out of hand by the Riantary Puritan to whom fun suggests spinelessness, superficiality and pleasure while morality suggests backbone, deep thinking and deprivation...
...The spectator comes first and the exigencies of "coverage" prime any residual concern for the protection of individual feelings...
...There is some thing grotesque about a society which proclaims the dignity of the individual in its public charters and at the same time degrades him to an object of show manship...
...Man in mass society is separated from the means of private experience just as the wage worker was earlier separated from the means of production...
...The execution of Enrique Despaigne, a Cuban police lieutenant accused of many murders, was recently postponed for three hours upon the request of television cameramen who needed full daylight for maximum coverage...
...What sort of upperclass laughter is being reported...
...Doubts arise...
...writers of letters to editors...
...rightwing sects see nothing funny about left wing sects...
...Do the upper classess really have more to laugh at...
...liberals, conservatives and hybrids...
...people in cold wars...
...THEORETICAL CONSIDERATION...
...To advance the study of risible stratifi cation we should do three things: 1. clari fy our concepts (argue about words...
...Is this the kind of world, the kind of class-bound laughter, we want...
...marital status...
...Crafty or childish...
...It is still too early to answer such questions...
...regret over previous laugh experience...
...Hesitant or sidesplitting...
...4. The Cackle of Mutual Reassurance (Capitoline Geese Gabble...
...Since decent, just and humane social relations cannot exist without opportunities of laughter for all, we face today a major crisis...
...Wry or fatuous...
...STUDIED LAUGHTER: METHODOLOGY...
...This is only a beginning...
...We must take early warning from the Inkeles rule...
...Inkeles claims that his rule is "con trary to popular belief...
...These include: 1. Hostess Laughter, or the Tinkling Cymbal...
...His search for reassurance may lead him to display compulsive buffoonery (part of the asininity syndrome) or to withdraw into symptomatic sedateness (showing neurotic pain reaction in the face of broad humor...
...Whose popular belief...
...The world has now indeed truly become a stage, a stage on which we enact the tragedies of our lives for the amusement of a mute audience...
...liberals, conservatives, and hybrids see nothing funny in their various favorite public figures figuring out their various favorite publics...
...More and more people must be asking themselves: Have we no other choice...
...Tearful or dry...
...humorists see nothing funny in each other...
...Unless, eschewing all positive thinking, we press forward vigorously with Negative Laughing, we may find that all high seriousness has been swept away in a muddy flood of solemnity...
...What does it all mean...
...Contrary to popular belief," he said in a lecture, "the lower you are in social status the less likely you are to report having laughed during the past day...
...The atrophy of human sensibility in mass society is expressed and symbolized by the disappearance of privacy...
...5. Commercial Endemic Laughter (The presence of this pervasive type means nothing...
...Birds of a feather flock together," or "the poor ye have always with you" sound like popular beliefs...
...But let us not linger over such side-issues...
...We do not know...
...Industry and government soon followed...
...number and nature of laugh opportunities...
...Abundant or hollow...
...Left-wing sects see nothing funny about their own frequent calls to action...
...amount of solitary versus social laughter, including number of partners involved in social laughter experience at different ages...
...Ladylike or lascivious...
...humorists...
...Non-conformity is currently receiving the near-unanimous endorsement of scientists...
...The schools started it years ago with alloted times for the organized expression of joy and cheer...
...It is precisely at those moments of personal crisis and tragedy when a person is most in need of privacy that the media pursue him most vigorously—e.g., the obscene cruelty of the scramble of interviewers and cameramen who faced Arthur Godfrey the other day when he emerged from a hospital after a near-fatal cancer operation...
...Even self-rating scales would help...
...New York Times, December 6, 1958...
...What about really cold countries like Greenland and really hot ones like Ghana...
...The Harvard Professor said his rule held true in warm countries such as Italy as well as cold coun tries such as Britain...
...military spokesmen...
...Of the various subtypes, Cocktail Party Shrill is best known...
...Have upwardly mobile staff members been noticeably more jovial since this study was made...
...Much more remains to be done in the classification and clarification of laughter...
...If we are to clarify laughter, we must distinguish it from certain stylized noises, impure varieties of laughing, some of which betoken a deep malady in the body social...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
