Topical Guide 646
Mark Dorset
Laughter and Ridicule: Attitudes Underlying
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 1:
The first time she heard herself called Koochikov, in the first grade, she thought that the little girls who said it, an adorable bunch, cute kids in mary janes and pinafores, with their hair in pigtails, were calling her to join them, so she bounded over, smiling and eager, and that made them break out all over in hysterical giggling, which made Ariane feel very amusing and popular and welcome for about three seconds before she realized that it had been a joke. She pretended that she didn’t mind, pretended even to herself, because she didn’t want to spoil their fun.
After that, she never quite heard them call her Koochikov. She heard it whispered as she walked by, and she soon discovered the trick of pretending that she hadn’t heard it or had misheard it. It might have been a sneeze. It might have been Lodkochnikov. Very early on she understood and appreciated the convenience of pretending that it was a sneeze or Lodkochnikov—pretending, when she turned and looked at the giggling girls, that she didn’t get the joke, didn’t even see that there was a joke, didn’t have the faintest idea that she was a joke.
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 4:
The academics go through some animated confusion over the check, gather their coats, and make their way out. As they leave, one of the hockey players makes a joke at their expense. Matthew, Liz, and Belinda can’t make it out, but when all the hockey players, American and Russian, laugh in the way that only young men who think they have the world by the balls laugh, Matthew understands.
“You hear that laughter?” asks Matthew.
“Are you kidding?” asks Belinda.
“What did they say?” asks Liz.
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Matthew. He doesn’t say what he wants to say, because it would diminish him in their eyes; he wants to say: “I mean, do you hear what kindof laughter that is? It’s cruel. It’s the cruel laughter of big, stupid guys, and it turns out to be international.”
The unnamed “anti-hero” [Dostoevsky’s term] in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground:
In our school everybody’s face seemed to acquire gradually a peculiarly stupid and degenerate expression. How many boys came to us handsome! In the course of a few years they had become revolting to look at. Even at sixteen I was morosely amazed at the triviality of their ideas and the stupidity of their pursuits, their games, and their talk. They had so little understanding of the most essential things, so little interest in the most inspiring subjects, that I could not help looking on them as my inferiors. […] Everything honorable, but humble and downtrodden, they greeted with disgraceful and unfeeling laughter. […] They were monstrously lewd. Even in this of course, there was mostly outward show and obviously artificial cynicism; youth and a certain freshness gleamed even through the vice; but even their freshness was unattractive, taking the form of a sort of childish naughtiness. I abominated them […]. They repaid me in my own coin, and made no secret of their loathing for me.
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