Logic of Laughter.
Laughter is the best medicine.
Let us have wine woman mirth and laughter,
sermons speech and soda water, the day after.
They win who laugh.
When her lovely laughter show
Is like rose buds filled with snow.
Success is a relative term, it brings many relatives.
Marriage is not a joke. It is adding salt to injury.
It is not your fault if your father was not rich,
But it is your fault if your father-in law was not rich.
Your future depends upon your dreams, so go to sleep.
Hard work never killed anybody, agreed, but why take the risk?
Every man must marry. After all happiness is not every thing in life !
The wise never marry. After marriage they be other-wise.
The range of laughter-provoking experiences is enormous, from physical tickling to mental titillations of the most varied kinds.. A few examples will help to unravel that pattern.
1. A masochist is a person who likes a cold shower in the morning so he takes a hot one.
2. An English lady, on being asked by a friend what she thought of her departed husband's whereabouts: "Well, I suppose the poor soul is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."
3. A doctor comforts his patient: "You have a very serious disease. Of 10 persons who catch it, only one survives. It is lucky you came to me, for I have recently had nine patients with this disease and they all died of it."
4. Dialogue in a French film:
Lover:- "Sir, I would like to ask for your daughter's hand."
Father:- "Why not? You have already had the rest."
5. A marquis of the court of Louis XV unexpectedly returned from a journey and, on entering his wife's boudoir, found her in the arms of a bishop. After a moment's hesitation, the marquis walked calmly to the window, leaned out, and began going through the motions of blessing the people in the street.
Wife:- "What are you doing?" cried the anguished wife.
Husband: "Mon seignior is performing my functions, so I am performing his."
Laughter is a form of rebellion against the mechanization of human behaviour and nature, and Freud's concept of laughter as repressed sexual feeling. The writer Arthur Koestler regarded laughter as a means of individual enlightenment, revelation, and subsequent freedom from confusion or misunderstanding concerning some part of the environment.
Man's vocal instrument as a device of communication represents an apex of physical and intellectual evolution. It can express the most basic instinctual demands as well as a range of highly intellectual processes, including the possible mastery of numerous complex languages, each with an enormous vocabulary.
Because of the imitative capacity of the vocal mechanism (including its cortical directors), suitably talented individuals can simulate the sounds of nature in song, can communicate in simple ways with animals, and can indulge in such tricks as ventriloquism and the mimicry of other voices. Recent tape recording techniques have even extended this flexibility into new domains, allowing singers to accompany their own voices in different keys to produce effects of duets or choruses composed electronically from one person's voice.
Laughter has been described as the "Ha-ha reaction"; the discoverer's Eureka cry as the "Aha! reaction"; and the delight of the aesthetic experience as the "Ah . . . reaction." But the transitions from one to the other are continuous: witticism blends into epigram, caricature into portrait; and whether one considers architecture, medicine, chess, or cookery, there is no clear frontier where the realm of science ends and that of art begins: the creative person is a citizen of both. Comedy and tragedy, laughter and weeping, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum, and a comparison of the physiology of laughter and weeping yields further clues to this challenging problem.
The outstanding political commentator of the first half of the 20th century is RK Laxman who worked for the Times. He was perhaps the best all-around man in the field of caricature since Daumier. His brush drawing was of an Oriental economy, his invention of analogy gleeful without being really outside the classic British educated tradition, and his hatred reserved for a few needful occasions. Like many before him, he employed hackneyed devices (e.g., the heads of a pack of British politicians on dogs' bodies) but by slyness of expression always managed an original twist. There was almost no one in the political field to touch RK His ‘You Said It” and portrayal of the Common Man was a
superb piece of satire on present day politicians.
Nehru said that first thing he looked for every morning
in the Times Of India was RK’s column “You Said it”.
"The veil of Maya", characteristic of much Indian religion, went hand in hand with a philosophy of embodiment (karma), which gave a distinctive role to art both as an instrument of worship and as an earthly delight. The legends of Krishna abound in exaggerated fantasies of erotic and physical power; the art of the temples testifies to a sensuality that belies the mystical gestures of renunciation which form the commonplaces of Hindu morality.
In providing theories of such art and of the natural beauty that it celebrates, Indian philosophers have relied heavily on the concept of aesthetic flavour, or rasa, a kind of contemplative abstraction in which the inwardness of human feelings irradiates the surrounding world of embodied forms.
The theory of rasa is attributed to Bharata, a sage-priest who may have lived about AD 500. It was developed by the rhetorician and philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. AD 1000), who applied it to all varieties of theatre and poetry.
The principal human feelings, according to Bharata, are delight, laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, disgust, heroism, and astonishment, all of which may be recast in contemplative form as the various rasas: erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, terrible, odious, marvellous, and quietist. These rasas comprise the components of aesthetic experience. The power to taste rasa is a reward for merit in some previous existence.
When the human capacity for amazement, thrill, and suspense approaches its limits, the circus unleashes its clowns to freshen the atmosphere, lighten the emotional load, and recondition the spectator's mind for the next turn.
By tradition, there are several varieties of clowns, from the elegantly costumed whiteface clown, favoured in many European circuses, who appears rather severe and domineering; to the happy-go-lucky grotesque variety, whose exaggerated makeup and costumes are more outrageous and less predictable; to the woebegone, down-and-out "tramp" character, as popularized above all by the American Emmett Kelly. In 19th-century one-ring circuses it was usual for clowns to entertain audiences with songs and long monologues, in which they sometimes offered words of wisdom on politics and current events or quoted Shakespeare.
More recently, especially in Russian circuses, a number of clowns have attempted to strike out in new directions, abandoning traditional costumes and makeup and developing more natural characters. The great Russian clown Oleg Popov became well known not only in the Soviet Union but also in Europe and America through his tours with the Moscow Circus.
Wearing a minimum of makeup, he appeared in the ring with little to set him apart from the others except a slightly unconventional wardrobe. Like other great comedians of the world, his mere appearance brought anticipatory laughter from the audience.
Popov impersonated a rube character who is forever trying to mimic the legitimate performers. Frequently he almost succeeded, but only after sufficient bungling to make his performance a comedy. Actually, in areas such as balancing on the slack wire and juggling, he demonstrated professional abilities.
