e, asserts itself
in what appears to the onlooker to be an unseemly, an unfeeling laugh.
It is recorded that one of the entombed French coal miners, who two
years ago were imprisoned without food or light for twenty days a
thousand feet below in the bowels of the earth, burst into a ghastly
laugh when he was rescued and brought to the upper air once more. The
Greeks and Romans in some of their festal ceremonies made the priest
or actor who represented dead nature returning to life in the spring,
burst into a laugh--a ceremonial or "ritual" laugh. Our poets speak of
the smiles, and even of the laughter of spring, and that is why
laughter is appropriate to New Year's Day. It is the laughter of
escape from the death of winter and of return to life, for the true
and old-established New Year's Day was not in mid-winter, but a
quarter of a year later, when buds and flowers are bursting into life.
It is recorded by ancient writers that the "ritual laugh" was enforced
by the Sardinians and others who habitually killed their old people
(their parents) upon their victims. They smiled and laughed as part of
the ceremony, the executioners also smiling. The old people were
supposed to laugh with joy at the revivification which was in store
for them in a future state. So, too, the Hindoo widows used to laugh
when seated on the funeral pyre ready to be burnt. So, too, is
explained (by Reinach) the laughter of Joan of Arc when she made her
abjuration in front of the faggots which were to burn her to death.
Her laugh was caused by the thought of her escape from persecution and
of the joyful resurrection soon to come. It was not an indication that
she was not serious, and that her abjuration of witchcraft was a
farce, as her enemies asserted.

More difficult to explain is the laughter excited by scenes or
narrations which we call ludicrous, funny, grotesque, comic; and still
more so the derisive and contemptuous laugh. Caricature or burlesque
of well known men is a favourite method of producing laughter among
savages as well as civilised peoples. Why do we laugh when a man on
the stage searches everywhere for his hat, which is all the time on
his head? Why do we laugh when a pompous gentleman slips on a piece of
orange-peel and falls to the ground, or when one buffoon unexpectedly
hits another on the head, and, before he has time to recover, with
equal unexpectedness hooks his legs with a stick and brings him
heavily to the ground? Why