How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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human beings. The fact that man is the only laughing animal is neither accidental nor irrelevant. We are not only the weakest mammals that inhabit this crust of earth ; we have also the greatest difficulties in maintaining body and soul together that any living organism must face. Were it not for the saving grace of our apprecia¬ tion of the comic and the saving trait of a sense of humour we should all logically commit suicide. With imagination and the dream, humour is part of our unconscious training toward our individual goal in life. Like the dream, which may degenerate into the day¬ dream (useless wish-fulfilment and escape from reality), and like imagination, which may deteriorate into delusion and hallucination (breaking loose from its essential purpose of testing reality in advance), so humour may be diverted from its common-sense purpose of lightening the burdens of existence, and become an instrument of cruelty and social disintegration. The joke is a method of ego-inflation which is effective in giving one an easily attained sense of subjective greatness, without the consequent responsibility of attaining that greatness and power by the application of common-sense training to the problems of life. Phe Psycho-Dynamics of a Joke Examine any joke and you will find that it requires four people. The hero-protagonist, the villain-victim, the teller, and the listener. The teller of the joke always identifies himself in a position of power with the hero- protagonist which elevates him subjectively above the villain-victim. If the listener thinks it is a good joke he must be able to identify himself with the teller and with the hero-protagonist. Otherwise, he feels hurt, because the position of the villain-victim is his own situation. Under these circumstances he feels that it is a bad joke. An example : A man visits a lunatic asylum and becomes interested in one of the inmates who seems perfectly normal. He tells the inmate, who is the asylum