THE LAUGHTER

A story by Heinrich Boll
(Translated by Leila Vennewitz )

When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a mason. I envy barbers, bookkeepers and writers the simplicity of their avowal, for all these professions speak for themselves and need no lengthy explanation, while I am constrained to reply to such questions: I am laughter. An admission of this kind demands another, since I have to answer the second question: ” Is that how you make a living?” truthfully with “Yes”. I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one too, for my laughing is -commercially speaking – much in demand. 

I am a good laughter, experienced; no one else laughs as well as I do, no one else has such command of the fine points of my art. For a long time, in order to avoid tiresome explanations, I called myself an actor, but my talents in the field of mime and elocution are so meager that I felt the designation to be far from the truth: I love the truth, and the truth is that I am a laughter. I am neither a clown nor a comedian. I do not make people gay, I portray gaiety: I laugh like a Roman emperor, or like a sensitive schoolboy, I am as much at home in the laughter of the seventeenth century as in that of the nineteenth, and when occasions demands I laugh my way through all the centuries, all classes of society, all categories of age: it is simply a skill which I have acquired, like the skill of being able to repair shoes. In my breast I harbor the laughter of America, the laughter of Africa, white, red, yellow laughter- and for the right fee I let it peal out in accordance with the director’s requirements.

I have become indispensable: I laugh on records, I laugh on tape, and television; directors treat me with respect. I laugh mournfully, moderately, hysterically, I laugh like a streetcar conductor or like a helper in the grocery business: laughter in the morning, laughter in the evening, nocturnal laughter and the laughter of twilight. In short: wherever and however laughter is required-I do it.

It need hardly be pointed out that a profession of this kind is tiring, especially as I have also-this is my specialty-mastered the art of infectious laughter, this has also made me indispensable to third-and forth-rate comedians, who are scared-and with good reason-that their audiences will miss their punch lines, so I spend most of the evenings in night clubs as a kind of discreet claque, my job being to laugh infectiously during the weaker parts of the program. It has to be carefully timed: my hearty, boisterous laughter must not come too soon, but neither must it come too late, it must come just at the right spot: at the pre-arranged moment I burst out laughing, the whole audience laugh with me, and the joke is saved.

But as for me, I drag myself exhausted to the checkroom, put on my coat, happy that I can go off duty at last. At home I usually find telegrams waiting for me:” Urgently require your laughter. Recording Tuesday,” and a few hours later I am sitting in an overheated express train bemoaning my fate.

I need scarcely say that when I am off duty or on vacation I have little inclination to laugh: the cowhand is glad when he can forget the cow, the brick-layer when he can forget the mortar, and the carpenters usually have the doors at home which don’t work or drawers which are hard to open. Confectioners like sour pickles, butchers like marzipan, and the baker prefers sausage to bread, the bullfighters raise pigeons for a hobby, boxers turn pale when their children have nose bleeds: I find all this quite natural, for I never laugh off duty, I am a very solemn person, and people consider me-perhaps rightly so- a pessimist.

During the first years of our married life, my wife would often say to me: “Do laugh” but since then she has come to realize that I cannot grant her this wish. I am happy that I am free to relax my tense face muscles, my frayed spirit, in profound solemnity. Indeed, even other people’s laughter gets on my nerves, since it reminds me too much of my own profession. So our marriage is quiet, peaceful one because my wife has also forgotten how to laugh: now and then I catch her smiling, and I smile too. We converse, in low tones, for I detest the noise of nightclubs, the noise that fills the recording studios. People who do not know think me that I am taciturn. Perhaps I am, because I have to open my mouth so often to laugh.

I go through life with an impassive expression, from time to time permitting myself a gentle smile, and I often wonder whether I have ever laughed. I think not. My brothers and sisters have known me as a serious boy.

So I laugh in many different ways, but my own laughter I have never heard.

POSTSCRIPT:

This short masterpiece of Heinrich Böll ,  the German writer and Nobel prize winner of 1972, weaves the tale of a laugher–a person whose laughter is required for recordings and live performances. The Laughter may remind you of the touching Hindi movie “Mera Nam Joker” or that professional mourner ‘Shanichari’ in Kalpana Lajmi’s film ’Rudali”. The character Laughter records canned laughter for soap comedy TV serials like “Lucy Show”. I consider this as a little gem, a moving grandiloquent soliloquy. I like this story for its great poignancy and irony of life. I once presented this story as a monodrama before an audience and they loved it.

The story touches the paradox of anything that is done on demand for the gratification of another, instead of for self. Even art can be taxing when it becomes a profession and ceases to be an indulgence by choice , i.e. when it is not pursued at one’s own will and for one’s own need/ pleasure. The persona in The Laugher may be equated to anyone who chooses to put on a cheery countenance for the public to see but is really formal, serious and humorless in his private side. This immediately brings to mind the two contrasting faces of theater–the sad and happy face. It further underscores the idea that it never pays to pretend to be somebody else you’re not.

Life will always have its smiles and frowns–it’s a fact of life. Perhaps, the character fleshed out in the selection may not have used his job (that of a laugher) as an avenue to escape from the silent bond that ties him to his uneventful life, like others do, but he remains to be a metaphor for the modern-day individual.
In short it touchingly portrays the tragedy of being service to others at the expense of personal fulfillment and keeping up pretenses, the tragedy of someone who has mortgaged his laughter forever.

Ref: HEINRICH BOLL 18 STORIES .Leila Vennewitz (Translator)