Laugh? I nearly cried

Giles Foden on links between weeping and whooping in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation

Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears

Tom Lutz

352pp, Norton, £11.95
Buy it at BOL

Laughter: A Scientific Investigation

Robert R. Provine

258pp, Faber, £12.99
Buy it at BOL

In his excellent book Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (1999), M A Screech considered the uses of laughter at certain moments in the Bible. Sometimes these are belly laughs, sometimes chuckles, sometimes the dark laughter of the grotesque - as when Christ is laughed at by spectators as he hangs in agony at Golgotha.

The crucifixion is, perhaps, the classically dangerous cultural rendezvous for laughter and tears, and not just in Monty Python's Life of Brian. The uneasy conjoining of the two has been a feature of Western civilisation right from Euripides (maniacal women kicking a severed head round like a football) to Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon (the ambivalent trembling of a trifle that may, or may not, be a terrorist bomb).

Maybe the Greek and the Irishman have it right. In an absurd world, perhaps a bit of nervous laughter is more honest than floods of tears. As Tom Lutz points out in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears - one of two new books in the burgeoning literature of emotion - there is a tradition of moral weeping that has more to do with a show of piety than with genuine sadness. This piety isn't always heavenly. Saint Augustine, who unlike other divines found himself unable to sob his troubles into God's ear, would no doubt have disapproved of teenagers crying themselves a river through Titanic.

Although some argue that elephants shed the odd tear in sadness and we know that crocodiles express fluid from their lachrymal ducts when opening their mouths very wide (thus crocodile tears), it is generally agreed that humans are the only animals who cry because of their feelings. We do so at our most important thresholds - birth, love, sex, death - and we do so in different ways but most often when "least able to fully verbalise" overwhelming emotions.

Yet, as Lutz elaborates, some crying is a turning away from emotion rather than a purging of it: he adduces the evidence of deposition scenes (the lowering of the dead Christ from the cross) in hundreds of classical paintings, in which there is invariably a weeping figure not looking at the body. Often it is the Virgin Mother, and it could be argued that her tears, like those of many mourners since, "signal a desire, a wish, or a plea".

Tears taken to signify the bereaved's desire to "wind the clock back" may seem inappropriate for Mary, but it makes more sense when you think of Freud's 1909 lectures at Clark University in the US, where he argued, in Lutz's paraphrase, that "patients need to come to terms with their desires rather than their loss". In some paintings, such as Giovanni Bellini's Pietà in the Accademia in Venice, Mary has clearly done this, lying with the body in her lap, her face full of the profound sorrow of acceptance. She is contemplating events rather than demanding their reversal. There is no apostrophe (literally, in Greek, a "turning away"), no address or appeal to the apparently absent Father, and not a single teardrop curls down her cheek.

Contemplative acceptance is the challenge of the bereaved, even if they do not have a Christ to redeem their loss. For crying infants, meanwhile, redemption comes in the shape of food or attention. A child's tears demand a reaction, although if neglected it will, like a severely depressed person, stop crying altogether. "It is the infant who believes it will be picked up that wails," says Lutz, "energised by its fear that it will be left alone."

For Darwin, crying was simply standard mammalian behaviour; later followers have built sophisticated theories of the "separation cry" as the oldest evolutionary vocalisation, a tracking device well suited to nocturnal forest-dwellers, though still with us through the plasterboard of many a bedroom wall.

Grown-up tears can sometimes mask calculated demands, as Mr Bumble knows when his wife starts to blub in Oliver Twist : "Tears were not the things to find their way to Mr Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof. Like washable beaver hats that improve with rain, his nerves were rendered stouter, and more vigorous, by showers of tears, which being tokens of weakness, and so far tacit admissions of his own power, pleased and exalted him." He goes so far as to encourage her to continue: "'It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and soften downs the temper,' said Mr Bumble. 'So cry away.'"

Did Dickens know about goblet cells and the glands of Manz and Zeiz? Did he know that there are three types of crying: basal (continuous lubrication, at the rate of five to 10 ounces a day), reflex (onions, flies, pokes in the eye) and psychic (partners, parents, kids)? This useful book could have told him all the science; although, as Lutz freely concedes, it is at its best on the cultural rather than the natural history of tears.

The strongest passages are those concerned with potentially laughable weeping: the endless sobbing of Goethe's Young Werther, or the hero of Henry Mackenzie's 18th-century novel The Man of Feeling, who cries at just about everything, including the death of the house dog, Trusty. Of that book Fanny Burney, reading it aloud with friends, reported how they roared with laughter where 10 years earlier they had wept copiously. Oscar Wilde reacted against a later, Victorian wave of sentimentalism."One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing," he wrote, and accordingly gave a steely glint to his own fairy tales.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Robert Provine's Laughter: A Scientific Investigation deals with exactly such abnormal or inappropriate amusement, citing Titus Andronicus ("Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour") on the return of the eponymous Roman general's own severed hand and the heads of the two sons it was supposed to ransom. The grotesquerie of Shakespeare's tragedy would take a literary mind back to Euripides, but Provine's investigation is, as it says on the tin, a scientific one. He moves swiftly on to kuru, that degenerative neighbour of BSE in the early stages of which victims display "paroxysmal hilarity", often "laughing at their own stumbling gait and fall" with relatives sometimes joining in.

Kuru is just one of a number of fascinating conditions listed by Provine. They include the masque manganique , a fixed but jovial facial expression described in Moroccan miners suffering magnesium poisoning, and the toxic effects of crowfoot or wild parsley; profuse in Sardinia, it gave us and Homer the term "sardonic laughter". Provine's enjoyable fairground tour of the science of the laugh also takes us to sound labs and opera houses (can there be a true musical notation of laughter?) and raises the ticklish question of why we can't tickle ourselves. Elsewhere he considers everything from laughter's part in boosting the immune system to the role of laughter in speech evolution. As with grooming (the tit for tat of monkeys removing fleas from each other), it is clear that laughter was important in the development of social cohesion. Who knows, perhaps the first human sound uttered in those primeval forests was a "laugh of togetherness" rather than a "separation cry"?

This isn't as far-fetched as it first seems. Our relatives the chimpanzees produce a laugh-like sound, often when gambolling. It's an ah-ah-ah rather than the human ha-ha-ha, Provine tells us, before employing some nifty respiratory science in an attempt to propose a causal link between bipedalism, laughter and vocalisation.

It is a nice thought if true (better to begin with a laugh than a whimper), but the way laughter even among friends can so easily tip over into the aggressive or macabre shines a darker light on the thesis. The French philosopher Bergson thought that we laugh mainly when others are humiliated, particularly when they become mechanical or marionette-like or maimed. It is the sheer arbitrariness of this kind of laughter that makes it so terrifying: as like the closing shots of Harry Enfield's comedies as those stumbling kuru victims. As like a man nailed to a cross in a place called Golgotha.

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