No laughing matter.(Book Review)

F. H. Buckley The Morality of Laughter. University of Michigan Press, 240 pages, $29.95

Frank Buckley is a professor of law at George Mason University. He has a theory about how laughter works. So let's have a joke to try it out. Any joke will do. Here's one of my old favorites.

 
   Pope John the XXIII dies and goes to paradise. 
   Or, at least he gets to the gates of paradise. 
   "Who are you?" "I'm Pope John the XXIII." 
   "You are not on the list, go away." "Don't be 
   silly, I must be on the list, I'm Pope John the 
   XXIII." "Never heard of you." "But I'm Pope 
   John the XXIII, a good man and much beloved 
   of the ordinary, people." "You're not on the list 
   and I've never heard of you." "There's been 
   a mistake, go and ask a Principality or 
   Dominion, they'll know me." "The Principalities 
   and Dominions are busy." "Well, 
   what about an Archangel or Seraphim?" 
   "They're even more busy, go away." 

Now this is a joke which can go on and on with all sorts of side matters about the bureaucratic organization of paradise. But we must get on and cut it short. At length Pope John, "good" Pope John, insisting on the affection in which ordinary people hold him, demands that the Holy Spirit be consulted. This is at first refused then eventually but reluctantly accepted. The Holy Spirit tells the official to go away, "I've never heard of this Pope John the XXIII." Then, just as the official is closing the door and setting off down flights of solid gold steps, the Holy Spirit turns round,

 
   "Wait, hold it, John? John, the xxIII, you say. 
   Ah, yes, there is something, What is it? ... 
   Was he? Wasn't that the chap who invited me 
   to his Council and I couldn't go?" 

The Buckley theory is twofold. The Positive Thesis is that laughter reveals the laugher's sense of superiority to a butt who is thereby degraded. I suppose the butts here are liberal Catholics and, to an extent, the listeners who are fooled by all the talk about paradise when the joke is nothing essentially to do with that. Moreover the joke teller shows off a sort of superiority by playing at doing one of those gates of heaven jokes, but then making an unexpected theological put-down.

Thesis Two is that not only is superiority felt and displayed by the teller, but that "the message of superiority is more often than not correct." This is what Mr. Buckley calls the Normative Thesis. Those who laugh are moralists. Humor sets the world to rights, tells truths, reveals comic virtues, teaches us how to extract joy from life by holding up the joyless to ridicule. Buckley suggests that laughter is part of morality, then suggests that we need more sources of order than morality: laughter supplements, enlarges, and humanizes morality.