OCR Text |
Show Laughing at Misfortune We laugh heartily when our fel-lowman fel-lowman slips on a banana peel and awkwardly falls. That laughter shows, basically, our resentment at any demonstration of the unusual, un-usual, coupled with a comfortable realization that we ourselves are outside the disaster. There is unconscious un-conscious brutality, therefore, in laughing at the sight of a fat man chasing his hat in a high wind. Higher up the scale of humor there is brutality in wit, which almost always holds an element of ,cruelty. |