TEXT D Analysts have had their go
at humor, and I have some of this interpretative literature, but without being
greatly instructed. Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in
the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific
mind. In a newsreel theatre the other day I saw a picture of a
man who had developed the soap bubble to a higher point than it had ever before
reached. He had become the ace soap bubble blower of America, had perfected the
business of blowing bubbles, refined it, doubled it, squared it, and had even
worked himself up into a convenient lather. The effect was not pretty. Some of
the bubbles were too big to be beautiful, and the blower was always jumping into
them or out of them, or playing some sort of unattractive trick with them. It
was, if anything, a rather repulsive sight. Humor is a little like that: it
won’t stand much blowing up, and it won’t stand much poking. It has a certain
fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect. Essentially, it is a
complete mystery. A human frame convulsed with laughter, and the laughter
becoming mysterieal and uncontrollable, is as far out of balance as one shaken
with the hiccoughs or in the throes of a sneezing fit. One of
the things commonly said about humorists is that they are really very sad
people-clowns with a breaking heart. There is some truth in it, but it is badly
stated. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that there is a deep vein of
melancholy running through everyone’s life and that the humorist, perhaps more
sensible of it than some others, compensates for it actively and positively.
Humorists fatten on trouble. They have always made trouble pay. They struggle
along with a good will and endure pain cheerfully, knowing how well it will
serve them in the sweet by and by. You find them wrestling with foreign
languages, fighting folding ironing boards and swollen drainpipes, suffering the
terrible discomfort of tight boots (or as Josh Billings wittily called them,
"tite" boots). They pour out their sorrows profitably, in a form that is not
quite fiction nor quite fact either. Beneath the sparkling surface of these
dilemmas flows the strong tide of human woe. Practically
everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down
moments, and you certainly don’t have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of
situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and
crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where
his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the
opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays
close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the
heat. The author uses the example of the soap bubble blower to show that______.
A.people should perfect the art of humor just as the bubble blower does to the bubbles B.neither too much exaggeration nor absolute explicitness is fit for humor C.humor should make people frantic for a while D.skill is required to produce humor