SOURCE: Weinsheimer, Joel. “Shaftesbury in Our Time: The Politics of Wit and Humor.” Eighteenth Century 36, no. 2 (summer 1995): 178-88.

[In the essay below, Weinsheimer compares the criticism of Shaftesbury's satire with prohibitions against certain forms of “offensive” humor in contemporary American culture.]

“The main problem is we live in a world with no sense of humor or irony.” Such was Art Spiegelman's response to the outrage ignited by his New Yorker cover depicting a Hasidic Jew kissing an African-American woman. “We are stunned that you approved the use of a painting that is obviously insensitive,” wrote the director of the Anti-Defamation League. Likewise Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a black activist, called the artwork “crude and offensive” to both blacks and Jews, saying it “trivializes the problems” between the two communities. “A tasteless publicity stunt,” asserted Rabbi Abraham Flint, and so on.¹

Instances of the humorlessness Spiegelman complains of are not hard to come by. Here is one from Minnesota.

A T-shirt sold by law students to raise money for a graduation party is being revamped. … The shirt compares characteristics of the University of Minnesota Law School and the Minnesota School of Bartending and jokingly suggests students might be better off working behind the bar, rather than before it. One item contrasts a “sexy Scandinavian blonde” on a TV commercial for the bartending school with a “sexy diversity cover girl” pictured on the cover of the law school bulletin. … “It's an objectification of women,” said Robin Ann Williams, a third year [law] student. “Making fun of diversity is unacceptable.”²

Further examples of the attempt to curb humor and ridicule are unnecessary, being so common nowadays, and I cite these instances only to indicate the immediate occasion of my return to Shaftesbury, especially to part two of the Characteristics. For it must have been something like the present-day climate of prescribed gravity that impelled Shaftesbury to write Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. The subjects then and now differ of course, though less than one might expect. In the Letter concerning Enthusiasm, Shaftesbury ridicules certain French religious fanatics, with their zealotry and martyr complex. These were Protestant émigrés who had sought relief from French barbarity in the more tolerant climate of England.

But how barbarous still, and more than heathenishly cruel are we tolerating Englishmen! For, not contented to deny these prophesying enthusiasts the honour of a persecution, we have delivered them over to the cruellest contempt in the world. … They are at this very time the subject of a choice droll or puppet-show at Bart'lemy Fair. There, doubtless, their strange voices and involuntary agitations are admirably well acted, by the motion of wires and manipulation of pipes. … However awkwardly soever a puppet-show may imitate other actions it must needs represent this passion to the life.

(21)³

“Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter,” Nietzsche remarks.⁴ For Shaftesbury too the truly effectual means of repression is not persecution but ridicule. He goes on to intimate that the Bart'lemy Fair method, so successful with French enthusiasts, might have worked on Germans such as Luther as well: “Many of our first reformers … were little better than enthusiasts,” and had not Rome preferred blood to ridicule and merriment, the whole Reformation might have dissolved in peals of laughter. Indeed, Shaftesbury concludes, if the Jews had confined themselves to puppet shows instead of crucifixions, “they might possibly have done our religion more harm than by all their other ways of severity” (22).

For John Brown, author of Essays on the Characteristics, this was going too far.⁵ Here Shaftesbury had overstepped the line. Brown allows that French fanatics, perhaps, are fair game for ridicule, but the great Reformation and indeed the Passion itself—these are no laughing matters. Making fun of Christianity is unacceptable, tasteless, offensive, and insensitive. Admittedly, few today are much concerned to protect the solemnity of Christianity. (I recall a recent cartoon depicting Christ on the cross, with the caption T.G.I.F.) But as Brown indicates, Shaftesbury is raising questions that are nevertheless very current: does the province of humor have its limits? Are there subjects too grave for laughter?

“Perhaps so,” Shaftesbury admits (10). Some of his contemporaries and successors subscribed to the universal proscription of laughter that we associate with Chesterfield's remark that there is “nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter,” or with Fontenelle's reply when asked if he had ever laughed: “No, I have never made ha ha.”⁶ Shaftesbury was certainly not one of these agelasts, these non-laughers (to borrow Rabelais's term). He does concede, however, that humor is sometimes improper. Some things are not in themselves ridiculous, for the very function of ridicule, on Shaftesbury's account, is to determine what they are. Though his emphasis assuredly lies on the “freedom of wit and humor,” by affirming the existence of “true gravity,” he acknowledges that this freedom is not unrestricted: laughter at certain things and on certain occasions is out of place; and it is not at all clear that Shaftesbury would have objected in principle to, say, “the University of Connecticut [policy that] forbids not only speech deemed offensive but also ‘inappropriately directed laughter.’”⁷

The question is a relative one, as Chinua Achebe writes. “Earnestness and its opposite, levity, may be neither good nor bad in themselves but merely appropriate or inappropriate according to circumstance. I hold, however, and have held from the very moment I began to write, that earnestness is appropriate to my situation … because I have a deep-seated need to alter things in that situation.”⁸ To be sure, the reformer's personal zeal almost always metamorphoses into an impersonal political or ethical imperative. As Bergson says, “It is but one step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the misogelos, the laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike as an objection in morality.”⁹ At this point the relative question receives an absolute answer.

The prohibition of laughter has always contained a moral and thus absolutistic element; levity in matters that call for sympathy is never appropriate. As early as the Poetics, we find pain specifically excluded from the province of ridicule, and Cicero extends the nonridiculous a step further: “the orator should use ridicule with a care not to let it be … aimed at misfortune, lest it be brutal; nor at crime, lest laughter take the place of loathing.”¹⁰ This prohibition remained largely unchanged well into the eighteenth century. “What,” asks Fielding, “could exceed the absurdity of an author, who should write the comedy of Nero, with the merry incident of ripping up his mother's belly? or what would give a greater shock to humanity, than an attempt to expose the miseries of poverty and distress to ridicule?”¹¹

Misery is no fit subject for laughter, we can agree, but such laughter does occur, and it is not limited to banana peel humor. “To mock the heaviest of human afflictions is neither charitable nor wise,” Imlac says, and yet the “princess smiled” at the astronomer's lunacy, “and Pekuah convulsed herself with laughter.”¹² The impulse to charity or wisdom is no match for the urge to laugh. Consider the ultimate example. “I do not see how the Holocaust can be comical,” Norman Holland avers.¹³ However laudable this sentiment, it is unquestionably mistaken. The holocaust can be funny, as the anthropologist Alan Dundes shows in his article “Auschwitz Jokes,” which collects dozens of examples: “Nothing is so sacred, so taboo, or so disgusting that it cannot be the subject of humor,” Dundes writes. “Quite the contrary—it is precisely those topics culturally defined as sacred, taboo or disgusting which more often than not provide the principal grist for humorous mills.”¹⁴ The “anesthesia of the heart”¹⁵ that for Bergson explains humor has no inherent limits.

When the anesthesia wears off, all laughter is suspect of being callous and unfeeling. It is presumably for this reason that the prohibition of sex and gender jokes figures so conspicuously in the Minnesota code which defines sexual harassment in part as “callous insensitivity to the experience of women.”¹⁶ Similarly, University of Michigan officials, according to Roger Fisher, “defined as a transgression punishable by expulsion the joke” “How many men does it take to scrub a floor? None; it's women's work.”¹⁷ As insensitivity goes, this is pretty tame stuff, of course, compared to Swift's most famous line: “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.”¹⁸ This is not anesthesia but moral coma.

Laughter directed at suffering belongs to a larger category of inappropriate humor, namely jokes that occur in the context of a “power differential,” to use the recent phrase, though it is no recent idea. Hobbes seems to have been among the first to call attention to the hierarchy implicit in laughter when he notoriously described it as a “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others” (Human Nature 9.13). Those infirmities can be of the most various kinds, physical or mental. George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) lists them as “awkwardness, rusticity, ignorance, cowardice, levity, foppery, pedantry, and affectation.”¹⁹ But whatever the immediate object, Campbell adds, “contempt always implies a sense of superiority. No wonder then that one likes not to be ridiculed or laughed at.”²⁰

This contemptuous or top-down humor, directed at the inferior by the superior, clearly has political implications, particularly when it expresses or magnifies existing power differentials. Top-down jokes typically reinforce the status quo. As Virginia Woolf is said to have remarked, “one of the nice things about having settled morals … is that at least one knows what to laugh at.”²¹ So too Christopher Wilson concludes that “reactions to satire, and to ridicule generally, reflect pre-existing sentiment. … Joking is essentially conservative, and ridicule shows an unattractive face of conservatism, funneling malice and abuse downwards through the social pyramid. People ridicule deviants, subordinates, those with mental or physical abnormalities, members of minority and out-groups.”²² It can come as no surprise that left-wing attempts to sanction humor characteristically focus on the top-down variety and tend to equate politically unacceptable ridicule of inferiority with ethically unacceptable ridicule of pain and suffering.

Yet these sanctions never reach the point of blanket condemnation because the very force of humor that can be marshaled to defend pre-existing power relations can also be deployed to overturn them and create new ones. The politics of this second kind of humor—in low burlesque, for example—are the reverse of the top-down variety we just considered. Here the big is made small, the high is brought low, and the status quo is subverted. “Laughter and jokes,” Mary Douglas writes, “attack classification and hierarchy, [and] are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in the sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations. … Whatever the joke, however remote its subject, the telling of it is potentially subversive.”²³ Such jokes exist in a political context, a context of power differentials, to be sure; but here the joker is on the bottom, in the position of powerlessness. “Jokes,” as Freud says, “are especially favoured in order to make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then represents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressure.”²⁴ Through such subversive jokes, the mean overcome the mighty. This is what justifies Orwell's quip: “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”²⁵

The plot of Eco's The Name of the Rose memorably hinges on the revolutionary impulse implicit in comedy. The monk Jorge suppresses the second part of the Poetics, on comedy, because it tacitly justifies the peasant's laughter and its subversive implications: “When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the villein feels he is master, because he has overturned his position with respect to his lord; this book … could legitimize the reversal.”²⁶ “The serious aspects of class culture,” Bakhtin explains, “are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation. … Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations.”²⁷ For these reasons, conservative sanctions against laughter typically concentrate on bottom-up, revolutionary humor that threatens to reverse existing power differentials.

This revolutionary laughter is undoubtedly the kind of wit and humor Shaftesbury means to defend, because he identifies laughter above all with freedom, both cognitive and political. Shaftesbury calls for an emancipatory, “skeptical kind of wit” directed at the “systems and schemes imposed by authority” (65). Whatever his disagreements on other matters, John Brown concurs with Shaftesbury that “the very being of knowledge depends on the exercise of freedom. For whatever some may fear from an open and unlimited inquiry, it seems evidently the only means vouchsafed us for the attainment of truth.” Brown applauds the “generous spirit of freedom which shines throughout the whole” of the Characteristics; and with Shaftesbury he stigmatizes the “unnatural and cruel separation between truth and liberty” as “equally impolitic, irrational, and unchristian.”²⁸ For Shaftesbury unlike Brown, however, all genuine thinking is free-thinking. Laughter is the very manifestation of open inquiry. The cognitive freedom to “question everything” (49) Shaftesbury describes as the freedom to seek “in everything what justly may be laughed at” (85). To circumscribe laughter is to circumscribe thought. “Wit can never have its liberty where freedom of raillery is taken away: for against serious extravagances and splenetic humours there is no other remedy than this” (15). This self-correcting quality of thought is the very cornerstone of the laissez-faire epistemology that Shaftesbury espouses: “Wit is its own remedy. Liberty and commerce bring it to its true standard. … Wit will mend upon our hands, and humour will refine itself, if we take care not to tamper with it, and bring it under restraints, by severe usage and rigorous prescriptions” (45-46).²⁹

On this view, cognitive is inseparable from political emancipation. Laughter for Shaftesbury is the sound of freedom, the voice of liberty resisting oppression: “If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously on certain subjects, they will do it ironically. … ‘Tis the persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one” (50). Ridicule is the weapon of the victim against the persecutor, and the freedom of wit and humor is the unerring test, because it is the condition and consequence, of political freedom. “'Tis only in a free nation, such as ours, that imposture has no privilege; and that neither the credit of the court, the power of a nobility, nor the awfulness of a Church can give her protection, or hinder her from being arraigned in every shape and appearance” (9).

Thus, from Shaftesbury's libertarian point of view, joking is not at all “essentially conservative,” as Christopher Wilson would have us believe. Consider “the laugh of the Medusa.” Despite their reputation for being dour and morose, it is not true, as Nancy Walker has shown, that “feminists never laugh”—though some refuse to laugh at what we have called top-down or condescending humor.³⁰ But there is also an unsettling, oppositional, antiauthoritarian humor of the kind that Shaftesbury was among the first to describe and defend, and this humor can be employed to emancipatory ends. From a progressive vantage point, then, the question of appropriate ridicule can be answered thus: bottom-up ridicule alone is permissible, while top-down humor is to be avoided or, more radically, prohibited.

This radical solution supposes, of course, that the two categories of humor are as distinguishable in fact as they are in theory, but that is not always the case. One reason is that in our time, when so many groups lay claim to the privileged status of victim, the relative positions of center and margin, powerful and powerless are becoming confused. It is much more difficult to differentiate proper, bottom-up satire from improper, top-down condescension. In parody, for example, the two almost always overlap, because parodists by definition employ the very values they ridicule, even if only to inflate and explode them.

Consider an example from Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws (1748): “Were I to vindicate your right to make slaves of the Negroes, these should be my arguments. … These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose, that they can scarcely be pitied. It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise Being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black ugly body. … It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians.”³¹ Let us allow that this is a parody of common pro-slavery arguments, and a pretty good one (Voltaire described it as written in the spirit of a Molière). Yet, though the author has his heart in the right place, it does not take a “flat nose” to detect a whiff of residual racism here.

Two modern jokes illustrate variant problems in differentiating politically acceptable and unacceptable humor. The first, from Lenny Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, describes his frustration with the obscenity trial: “I was so sure I could reach those judges if they'd just let me tell them what I try to do. It was like I was on trial for rape and there I was crying, ‘But, Judge, I can't rape anybody, I haven't got the wherewithal,’ but nobody was listening, and my lawyers were saying, ‘Don't worry, Lenny, you got a right to rape anyone you please, we'll beat ‘em in the appellate court.’”³² The political complexity of this scene is what interests us here. First, the whole evidently consists of bottom-up satire that attacks puritanical obscenity laws which repress free speech. This is fairly straightforward, ACLU-authorized humor. Second, however, Bruce also satirizes the civil-libertarian lawyers who coerce him into claiming unlimited freedom to “talk dirty.” And, third, he couches the latter satire in a rape joke that could easily be construed as offensive and insensitive to the very victims whom obscenity laws are in part designed to protect. Often cited to prove the existence of left-wing humor, Bruce's jokes here at least are politically ambivalent.

For an example of right-wing humor that evidences a similar ambiguity, we can turn to the Republican banquet where Oliver North and others “cracked jokes in after-dinner remarks that made light of President Clinton's order to the military to admit homosexuals. … Mr. North's remarks included a line about how he had repeatedly tried to place a telephone call to Mr. Clinton but could not get through until he lisped to the operator, ‘Excuse me!’”³³ The charge against North was, of course, that he was belittling homosexuals; the defense, of course, was that he was belittling Clinton. The truth is that he was belittling both, and for us the point is that North's witticism, no less than Lenny Bruce's, illustrates how ridicule of the authorities and ridicule of the disenfranchised can easily coexist in the same joke.

This is why it is so tricky to design proscriptions against one kind of levity without encroaching on the other. The powerful, let us agree, have a moral obligation to enact policies on behalf of the powerless, but it is in precisely this situation that permitted ridicule merges with prohibited: bottom-up ridicule of official policies will simultaneously be top-down ridicule of the powerless. Consequently, privileging certain groups by protecting them from supercilious laughter actually serves to protect the powerful from subversive ridicule as well. The bureaucracy wraps itself in the flag of the victim.

These examples do not represent exceptional or peripheral phenomena, for the political predicament they illustrate is inherent in circumscribing the freedom of wit and humor: somehow encroachments on the liberty of laughter always turn out to protect the interests of the powerful. “'Tis true,” Shaftesbury admits, “this liberty may seem to run too far. … So every one will say, when he himself is touched, and his opinion freely examined. But who shall be judge of what may be freely examined and what may not?” (9). Whoever assumes the role of judge, prohibiting ridicule for even the best of reasons, creates a sacred cow. They provoke laughter at the very object they want to protect and incite bottom-up ridicule by precisely those whom they would disempower from laughing. “'Tis the persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one,” Shaftesbury proclaims. “The greater the weight is, the bitterer will be the satire. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery” (50-51). The very act of stifling laughter arouses it.

If the “freedom of wit and humour” is indivisible from the freedom of thought, we ought to emphasize in conclusion that for Shaftesbury ridicule expresses the “sensus communis” as well. By his definition, common sense is moral, aesthetic, and political in nature. It signifies “a sense of the public weal, and of the common interest; love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species” (70). As a matter of fact, however, Shaftesbury recognizes full well that the sense of community virtually never embraces all members of the species or even extends to the boundaries of the nation state.

Universal good, or the interest of the world in general, is a kind of remote philosophical object. That greater community falls not easily under the eye. Nor is a national interest, or that of a whole people, or body politic, so readily apprehended. In less parties, men may be intimately conversant and acquainted with one another. They can … enjoy the common good and interest of a more contracted public. … To cantonize is natural when the society grows vast and bulky. … ‘Tis in such bodies as these that strong factions are aptest to engender.

(75-76)

Common sense is a sense of a community, to be sure, but it operates only within the limits of a clan, club, or clique small enough to have a sense of fellow-feeling that Shaftesbury does not hesitate to call love. Balkanization, faction, and party, he contends, are due not to a centrifugal, isolationist impulse but, just the opposite, to “that social love and common affection which is natural to mankind” (77), but cannot be indefinitely extended. Neither individualist nor universalist, then, Shaftesbury claims to be writing “in defense only of the liberty of the club, and of that sort of freedom which is taken amongst gentlemen and friends who know one another perfectly well” (53). This particular club is limited to powerful white men, of course, but the point is that good humor reigns only within the club, and every club is exclusive.

Among gentlemen and friends, knowing what is rude is a matter as intuitive as knowing what is beautiful—or what is funny. A sense of humor requires no weighing of evidence, no deliberation, no decision. Like all common sense, knowledge of what is ridiculous and false, no less than what is beautiful and true, comes from communal life, not critical reflection. Commonsensical judgments, thus understood, cannot ultimately be distinguished from prejudices, prejudgments. Brown is surely right to describe ridicule as “an engine which tends to fix mankind in their preconceived opinions.”³⁴ It is an expression of group solidarity, shared judgments, and sense of community—but all among a finite group. It certainly makes sense to minimize the provinciality of prejudice by maximizing the club's inclusiveness as far as possible. As we have seen, however, only limited extension is possible before the bonds of “social love” are stretched to their limits and the inevitable process of Balkanization sets in. Ridicule exhibits no “sense of partnership with human kind [as a whole]” (72); it confirms regional or local, not universal, opinion precisely because it is exclusionary. In large part, fellowship within the club is maintained—indeed, the club is itself brought into existence—by ridiculing those outside it.

“To cantonize is natural.” We are in no position to dispute Shaftesbury's assertion. Especially now, when individualism is as much in retreat as universalism—when special interest groups on the national level, and cultural centers on the university level, have become the standard form of political organization—it is once again manifest that ridicule functions both commonsensically and critically, to unite and divide. Unlike invective (“Shut up, you water buffalo!”) which merely distances, humor binds together those who are “in on” the joke, as well as segregates them from pariahs who “just don't get it.” Laughing-at always involves laughing-with because good humor within the group is achieved in large part by means of outward-directed ridicule.

Attempts to prohibit such ridicule, however understandable, are therefore unlikely to succeed. Hostile laughter performs too much important work; and though ridicule may even be described as war by other means, it is well to remember they are infinitely preferable means. Laughter, however aggressive, is not violence but a substitute for it. In our present cantonized state, there is no reason to believe that we will live together without ridicule, but with Shaftesbury it is perhaps not too much to hope that we can learn to take a joke.

Notes

1. All quotations cited from Toby Axelrod, “Valentine Controversy: Crown Hts. Abuzz over Cover Kiss,” The Jewish Week (Feb. 12-18, 1993), 39.

2. Saint Paul Pioneer Press (April 10, 1993), 2B.

3. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robinson, 2 vols. in 1 (Indianapolis, 1964). Page references are to volume 1 unless otherwise noted.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York, 1966), 153.

5. John Brown, Essays on the Characteristics (1751; New York, 1970), 80.

6. Both cited in Richard Boston, An Anatomy of Laughter (London, 1974), 68.

7. Cited in Gary Saul Morson, “Weeding In,” Academic Questions 6 (1992): 68.

8. Chinua Achebe, “Colonialist Criticism” (1975), rpt. in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. ed., (Fort Worth, 1992), 1196.

9. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy (Garden City, NY, 1956), 4.

10. Cicero, Orator (xxvi.88), trans. H. M. Hubbell, in Brutus and Orator (London, 1971), 371.

11. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. M. C. Battestin (Boston, 1961), 10.

12. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, ed. Warren Fleischauer (Woodbury, NY, 1962), 162.

13. Norman Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, 1982), 22.

14. Alan Dundes and Thomas Hauschild, “Auschwitz Jokes,” in Humour in Society: Resistance and Control, ed. Chris Powell (New York, 1988), 56.

15. Bergson, “Laughter,” 64.

16. Sexual Harassment (n.p., n.d.), 3.

17. Roger Fisher, “Salem in Minnesota, II: Northern Exposure,” Minnesota Scholar 1 (1993): 12.

18. Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1958), 173.

19. George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric (Carbondale, 1963), 21.

20. Ibid., 29.

21. Cited by Aristides, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Conscious,” American Scholar 47 (1978): 306.

22. Christopher Wilson, Jokes: Form, Content, Use and Function (London, 1979), 230.

23. Mary Douglas, “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception,” Man 3 (1968): 370.

24. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1960), 105.

25. Cited by John Oldani, Humour in Society, ed. Powell, 40.

26. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1984), 577.

27. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984), 90.

28. John Brown, Essays, 3-5.

29. I cannot do justice here to the epistemological side of the Characteristics. For a fuller exposition, see A. Owen Aldridge's “Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth,” PMLA 60 (1945):129; and David Marshall, The Figure of Theater (New York, 1986), chapter 1.

30. Nancy Walker, “Do Feminists Ever Laugh? Women's Humor and Women's Rights,” International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1981):1-9.

31. Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, ed. David Wallace Carrithers (Berkeley, 1977), 262.

32. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (Chicago, 1966), 195.

33. New York Times (March 19, 1993), A8.

34. John Brown, Essays, 72.