"The terrible laughter of the Afrikaner"--towards a social history of humor.(Report)

A young Boer guerrilla fighter, Deneys Reitz, described the defeated Boer commandos drifting into the camps in May 1902, as a rabble of "starving, ragged men, clad in skins or sacking, their bodies covered with sores, from lack of salt and food ... their appearance was a great shock to us, who came from the better-conditioned forces in the Cape." (1) In the aftermath of the South African War (1899-1902), the Afrikaner seemed defeated--the rural economy was shattered, family farms were destroyed and more than 25 000 Boer women and children were dead in the concentration camps. (2) Yet in this apocalyptic post-war world, something strange was happening. Afrikaners were laughing.

This phenomenon was observed with wonder by English philanthropist Emily Hobhouse, who had reported on the conditions in the camps and the aftermath of the scorched earth policy. She wrote, for example, of the Van Graan brothers, who had both suffered enormous losses during the war. One "had seven little mouths to feed. He got seed potatoes from Repatriation for a promissory note, but the drought killed them. His brother lent him oxen to plough with, so he put in a little seed, but till it is ripe he has nothing to live upon. His beautiful house is in ruins, his blue gums all but two cut down, his fruit trees chopped." "But", Hobhouse continued, "how he laughed, and how his brother laughed." Hobhouse further observed that "[l]ike all the other burghers [Boer General] De Wet is laughing. If he did not, he says, he should die. It makes him great fun. I do regret not being quick enough to catch all the Dutch proverbs which spice his conversation, nor the humour which runs through all the family talk--they speak so quickly". In a rural hamlet in the Orange Free State, Hobhouse encountered "a poor man", who--when she offered him some meal--said: "I shall be so glad that I shall laugh without feeling any inclination to laugh." In Pretoria, Hobhouse noted, the Boers "say little and only laugh." She concluded: "There is getting to be something quite terrible to me in this laugh of the Boers which meets me everywhere. It is not all humour, nor all bitter, though partly both; it is more like the laughter of despair. We sit in a row by these stable walls and discuss every project possible and impossible, and then we laugh. Now and again the tears come into the men's eyes, but never into the women's except when they speak of children lost in the camps." (3)

This paper offers an interpretation of this "terrible" laughter of the conquered, of why the Boers "said little and only laughe[d]", and how this laughter was interpreted and even mobilized by Afrikaner culture-brokers in the subsequent decades. (4) This paper thus explores, firstly, evidence of Boer/Afrikaner humor during and in the aftermath of the South African War, and secondly, the role of humor in identity construction--both unconsciously and consciously employed to forge a particular kind of ethnographic volk character up until the 1930s. (5) In this way "laughter" is discussed, firstly, as a material dimension of Afrikaner life (in this case, the context of a damaging war and difficult post-war reconstruction) requiring theoretical elucidation and, secondly, as a rhetorical feature strategically mobilized in the construction of an Afrikaner "national culture". The paper concludes by addressing briefly historiographical and methodological issues experienced by social historians in using laughter, considering its possibilities as both a source and subject for historical enquiry. This study is thus situated in the growing international study of affect, and humor in particular, with the intention of initiating other case-studies of humor in order to make the tentative first steps towards a cohesive social history of laughter in southern Africa. (6)

Seriously Funny

It is dangerous to talk about laughter. As Arthur Asa Berger observed "Dissecting humor is an interesting operation in which the patient usually dies." (7) This has not prevented, however, commentators from classical Greece to the modern era from reflecting on laughter and its source. (8) Although systematic studies of laughter qua laughter only began in the 1960s, philosophers like Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant have all shaped our understanding of mirth, as have later theorists like Freud. Yet, oddly, as a subject of historiographical analysis, laughter has suffered from the "tenderness taboo" (in Gordon Airport's phrase): human behavior dealing with the visceral such as laughter--or, for example, bliss or sorrow--has been eschewed academically for fear that the researcher be unable to retain objectivity. Looking at laughter requires an understanding of the historiography of emotions. It redirects the attention of the historian back onto the human body (a focus that was arguably distracted from the visceral by the "textual" and "linguistic turns"). Febvre's famous call for a history of emotions has been followed by a growing body of historical enquiry, and the rise of the "affective turn". (9) The focus on emotions stems from social history's longtime concern with understanding socio-cultural experiences from the perspective of those who actually lived them. The culture of emotions, also known as "emotionology", consists of the collective emotional standards of a society. (10) The social history of emotions has revealed how our conceptualization of emotions alters in time (and space) and concomitantly so does the social emotion experience. (11) Certainly, in the study of affect, there is the enduring (and perhaps inevitable) epistcmological tension between the universalist, positivist and the relativist, interpretive models. (12) Within the wider context of emotion, the narrower focus on laughter and history also runs the gamut of models between the labile and contingent versus the innate, the social versus the biological. (13) Perhaps a useful formulation is the argument that the physiological capacity to have emotions--or to 'laugh', in this case--is universal, but the ways the emotions--and laughter--are elicited, experienced and expressed vary both at the level of different societies, communities and individuals.

The story told about laughter is usually a happy one. Laughter is celebrated as the "best medicine", as both socially positive and personally liberatory. Yet the laughter sceptics or the "misogelasts" (haters of laughter) contend that there might be something ugly behind the smile. These theorists are useful to social historians in that they have not sentimentalised humor and allow the possibility of a darker side to laughter. Schools of thought on humor are diverse and overlapping but may be crudely divided into camps. The "Superiority Theory" of humor, epitomized by Thomas Hobbes, argues that the passion of laughter is "[the] sudden glory arising from some conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others". (14) Thus the response to the comic arises from a sense of dominance over others. By extension, laughter is allied to the normative goal of social correction--the need to belittle and thereby control the aberrant. (15) This conception of laughter has been drawn on by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who argued that laughter promotes both strong intra-group affinity and aggressiveness against outsiders so that "laughter forms a bond and simultaneously draws a line." (16) In contrast, as Billig has shown, the "Incongruity theory" of laughter sees the source of a sense of the comic in the incongruity between the fluidity and plasticity of life and imposed rigidities--a cerebral chortle rather than a belly laugh. As mentioned above, some theorists have considered humor a biological force, contending that laughter is built in to the nervous system because it serves an adaptive evolutionary function. These theorists maintained that the comic trigger was neither superiority nor incongruity, but something closely akin to the former: humor follows an abrupt release from control. Laughter, in this view, is thus a small (somatic) insurgence against social constraint. In this evolutionary contention lie the foundations of the Freudian model. (17)

For Freud a joke was not just a joke. Both he and Henri Bergson, like Hobbes before them, distrusted humor. (18) Freud maintained that laughter is a channel for nervous energy, allowing the individual to touch proscribed areas like sex, violence and bodily functions. (19) He perceived a Hobhesian conflict between an individual's desires (be they disguised as yearnings, dreams or anxieties) and social order. Repression (of sexuality or aggression) was seen as indispensable for social stability: the Ego and the Id wage constant combat and jokes form part of the Id's armoury. (20)