MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
Everything is clearly going very well. am specially glad to hear that the two
new friends have now made him acquainted with their whole set. All these, as I
find from the record office, are thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent
scoffers and worldlings who without any spectacular crimes are progressing
quietly and comfortably towards our Father's house. You speak of their being
great laughers. I trust this does not mean that you are under the impression
that laughter as such is always in our favour. The point is worth some
attention.
I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and
Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve
of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided,
but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a
time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not
know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the
humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless
acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter
of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the
phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity,
and austerity of Hell.
Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play
instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to
divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling
or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes
charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more
promising field. I am not thinking primarily of indecent or bawdy humour, which,
though much relied upon by second-rate tempters, is often disappointing in its
results. The truth is that humans are pretty clearly divided on this matter into
two classes. There are some to whom "no passion is as serious as lust" and for
whom an indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as
it becomes funny: there are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the
same moment and by the same things. The first sort joke about sex because it
gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because
they afford a pretext for talking about sex. If your man is of the first type,
bawdy humour will not help you—I shall never forget the hours which I wasted
(hours to me of unbearable tedium) with one of my early patients in bars and
smoking-rooms before I learned this rule. Find out which group the patient
belongs to—and see that he does not find out.
The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is
specially promising among the English who take their "sense of humour" so
seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which
they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the
all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying
shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is "mean"; if he boasts of it
in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no
longer "mean" but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice
boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can passed off as
funny. Cruelty is shameful—unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical
joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's
damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be
done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows,
if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost
entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any
suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as
"Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humour".
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only
a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else;
any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant
people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it;
but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have
already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy
builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know,
and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.
It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the
intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter ELEVEN
SCREWTAPE