The lights were hot. The theatre was in a hushed silence. As minor actors, we had hung onto every word of our Romeo and Juliet performance from the wings. We had watched Romeo fall in love, get drawn into his family feud, and experience an unthinkable thing: the death of his best friend, Mercutio. This was our first day bringing Shakespeare to secondary schools around Wales, as part of an outreach programme by the Jesus College Shakespeare Project.
With his last words, “A plague o’ both your houses! / They have made worms’ meat of me…” Mercutio, the innocent victim, crumpled on stage. Tybalt, trying to kill Romeo, had accidentally hurt Mercutio; Romeo could not help but think that it should have been him. As Romeo held his dying friend, it was a touching moment.
That was when we heard it. A smattering of laughter.
We uneasily met eyes with the other actors across the stage; smiles sprang up on our faces, breaking our masks of seriousness. The play went on, but the students’ laughter replayed in our heads, a needling earworm.
Afterwards, in our makeshift dressing room, we consoled each other over sandwiches and juice. “They weren’t really laughing.” “They’re just kids.” “I mean, that is not Shakespeare’s best moment.” But we didn’t know what to say. What was it about these tragic deaths which made those children laugh?
In Terence Cave’s Recognitions, a study of anagnorisis, or the moment of critical discovery in a play (as defined by Aristotle’s Poetics), he writes that the sudden revelation of new information can turn “the most hallowed tragic instances” in fiction into “parody”. We all know what he is talking about: it’s the soap opera reveal; the “He’s your long lost son!”; the K-drama school bus that wipes out a character as they’re crossing the street. When such things happen, laughter often bubbles up amongst viewers: hushed, guilty, uncomfortable.
In my experience, the same uneasy smiles come from sudden revelations in life. As I heard the students laugh, I was reminded of one of my own sad moments. It was the day that the news of Jonghyun’s death – a pop star who I cherished – was splashed across the newspapers.
My sister came into my room that morning.
“I have some news for you,” she said, in a strange voice. “It’s about him.”
I tried to guess what it was, to make her smile. A world tour? A surprise visit to my home town? Would he whisk me away on a special fan experience?
“Don’t guess,” she said, interrupting me.
As she explained the tragic news, we both had the strangest feeling: we were trying not to smile. We were children in detention, lips pursed with an uneasy grin that refuses to go away. The tears came afterwards. Later still would come the confusion from the fact that the first grief of our lives had been the death of a stranger. But before all these things unfolded, there was the uneasy smile.
As I would later discover, there is a theory of laughter known as the ‘relief theory’, developed, amongst others, by psychologist Herbert Spencer in his ‘The Physiology of Laughter’ (1860). According to ‘relief theory’, laughter comes from pent-up nervous energy escaping the body, like steam from a whistling kettle. Similarly, the ‘incongruity theory’ attributes laughter to disappointed expectations. In poet John Dryden’s ‘Essay of Dramatick Poesie’ (1668), he argues that the comedies of Aristophanes are laughable due to their “odd conceit[s]” which have something “unnatural or obscene” in them. Thinkers throughout the centuries have remarked that laughter comes as much from pain, as it does from pleasure.
I will experience that uneasy smile many more times in life. However, when I do so, I will not think of any of these theories. I will think of that strange morning in my teenage life. And I will remember that there is a surprisingly fine line between tragedy and laughter.