INTRODUCTION
The Oxford Dictionary defines humour as that quality of action, speech or writing which excites amusement, oddity and comicality; the faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing or of expressing it. The essence of humour is contrast. Humour arises from the perception of the incongruities of life, from the writer’s awareness of the discrepancy between what is and what ought to be. Humour arises when anything in thought; word or action falls below the normal level. It may also arise from incongruities of character or incongruities of situation.
George Bernard Shaw is one of the greatest humourists in English Literature. The other great humourists are Shakespeare and Dickens. However, Shaw’s humour is different from that of both Shakespeare and Dickens in as much as it arises from the discrepancy between instinctive conduct and reason and intellect, or social institutions and social codes of conduct. Shaw had a natural gift of laughter. He was a comedian at heart. He wrote plays only to convey his ideas to the public. But if he had delivered serious sermons nobody would have listened to him. In spite of the fact that all the time he was proving the spectators and readers guilty of all the crimes under the sun, they only listened to him only because of his wit and humour. Arms and the Man is a play rich in humour. It illustrates every shade and variety of Shavian humour. Below is the description of different aspects and techniques of creating humour in the play.
DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT
Humour of character is the highest kind of humour. There is enough of humour of character in the play. A number of characters are definitely humorous in conception. Major Petkoff, Catherine Petkoff, Sergius and Captain Bluntschli are all humorous creations as in their thoughts, words or actions; they are below the normal or the expected level. The Petkoff’s with their pride in the electric bell, in their two staircases and their library, are rich sources of humour. We are amused at the discomfiture of Catherine, as Bluntschli decides to stay with them as their guest, while Catherine wants her to go away immediately to prevent a disclosure of their having sheltered Bluntschli, says Sen Gupta, is a masterpiece of comic characterization and the source of much fun and humour in the play, with his carving for chocolate creams and with his shying like a frightened horse. He is nervous like a mouse. Later on, he creates loud laughter when he judges Raina to be a, “school-girl of seventeen”, or when he enumerates the various items of his enormous wealth.
Farce is humour arising from situation, and it is marked by exaggeration. It arises loud laughter, and does not require intelligence of any high order to be appreciated. The keynote of a farce is exaggeration to arouse broad horse laughter. Shaw’s plots are full of sudden inversions, exaggerations and comic situations. Arms and the Man begins as a comedy of emotion but it soon becomes a string of farcical situations. There is, for example, the very first scene in the bedroom of Raina. The humour arises from the confrontation of the instinctive conduct of Bluntschli with the conventional conduct and beliefs of Raina. He is an intruder, a fugitive and an enemy, and she is the daughter of the most influential man in Bulgaria. It is expected that he would be perturbed, while she would remain self-possessed. But the contrary happens. The instinctive man, Bluntschli, is self-possessed, while the lady, who has nothing but romance and convention to depend upon, is perturbed. Finally, the intruder is able to convert the lady to her own point of view. More over we are told that a Cavalry charge succeeds because the leader’s horse runs away. A battery of machine-gun is captured because it is discovered at the last moment that they had received the wrong ammunition. Nicola is supposed to be engaged to Louka, the maidservant. But he suddenly realizes that she is too ambitious for her station in life. Sergius suddenly jumps down from his higher love for Raina to marry Louka. Sergius and Bluntschli bid for Raina by enumerating the number of forks, knives, blankets, table covers and horse that each one has. These are all farcical situations. The coat-episode, the photograph-episode, and the chocolate-cream episode are all source of farcical humour. Shaw’s habit of deflating big names or giving people nicknames is another source of broad humour in his plays. Thus in this play Raina nicknames Bluntschli as, “chocolate-cream soldier”, because he eats chocolates. “The higher love of Raina and Sergius, the military heroism of Sergius, the servility of Nicola, and his looking a fool and taking all the blame on himself, are overdone and verge on the farcical.”
Wit, is humour arising from the clever use of language, and its appeal is to the intelligence or intellect. Countless examples of Shavian wit too are scattered all up and down the play. As Joad puts it “Shaw reveals in pun paradoxes, retorts and repartees.” He has a knack of saying fine sparkling things. Sometimes, Shaw’s wit is light and innocent’ it being merely humour arising from the use of words; and at other times it has a rapier-like thrust and is sharp and biting. For example, when Petkoff returns from the front, Catherine proudly tells him that she has got fitted an electric bell in their home, because civilized people do not shout for their servants. At this Petkoff retorts, “civilized people do not hang out their washing to dry where visitors can see it, so you would better have all that put some where else.” But it is he who gets the worst of it for Catherine silences him with her clever repartee, “I do not think really civilized people notice such things.” When Sergius asks Louka, “If you were in love with me, would you spy out of windows on me”. Louka wittily replies, “Well you see, Sir, since you are half a dozen gentle man all at once, I shall have a great deal to look after”, and Sergius is obliged to praise her, “Witty as well as pretty”. Louka’s wit is sharp and biting when she retorts to Sergius, “What ever clay I am made of, you are made of the same”. Shaw is never witty for the sake of being witty. As Chesterton suggests, “Shaw makes jokes, epigrams and aphorisms in order to startle and capture attention. His wit is an expression of his intellectual judgment of life; it is the handmade of his philosophy, an instrument of his social purpose”. Numerous examples of Shavian wit, both in a gentler vein and a sharp, pungent vein, can be cited from the play.
Humour grows satiric when there is moral indignation and a desire to reform and correct. Shaw was the biggest iconoclast of his age. He condemned all the conventions of society. He shocked the public by showing that all their ideals were false sentiments, their heroes were monsters in reality, their gods were only idols and their religion was only superstition. He did not distinguish between crime and punishment, between marriage and prostitution and between financier and a burglar. He opposed Britain’s war effort at a time when she was involved in a life and death struggle against Germany. And yet nothing happened to him. That was because he sugarcoated his bitter pills with buoyant laughter. B. Ifor Evans has rightly said, “Without humour the vision of life as he saw it would have led him to the scaffold as a revolutionary”. It was humour that saved him. He wanted to reform the society. For this purpose he adopted the weapon of satire. In Arms and the Man he satirises the heroic conception of war and soldiering. He shows that every soldier is at heart a coward. Bravery in battle is proved to be the coward’s art of attacking when is strong and retreating, when he is weak. The romantic idea about soldiering is knocked off when Bluntschli, a professional soldier, says, “Nine soldiers out of ten are born fools”. Officers call their wives to maintain discipline in the army. At the end it is proved that the finest officer like qualities are the qualities of a typical businessman.
Bathos or anti-climax is technical device in which the action instead of moving upwards towards a climax, moves downward towards an anti-climax, and the effect is comic and laughter provoking. It may be defined as, “a ludicrous descent from the elevated and the noble to the mean and the low in speech or writing.” Shaw has made extensive use of this device in Arms and the Man. According to Chesterton, “Arms and the Man is a play which is built not on pathos, but on bathos.” For example, Sergius in the beginning of the play is vested with full military glory. He has led a cavalry charge against the battery of the foe and has won the battle of Slivnitza. The result is that his praises are sung loudly in the town and Raina, his betrothed, is wild with joy. But Bluntschli, The matter of fact man, comes in contact with her and proves that her hero is a mere fool and that the art of fighting is a coward’s art. The result is that her faith in his heroism is rudely shaken.
Her romantic notions of love have also been shown to be equally hollow and worthless. Sergius, the apostle of higher love, adored by Raina, carries on secret flirtation with her maid-servant, Louka, and ultimately marries her. On the other hand, Raina who was engaged to the renowned soldier (Sergius) ultimately marries Bluntschli, amere professional soldier. Raina and Sergius come down to the level of Louka and Bluntschli; Louka and Bluntschli do not rise to the level of Sergius and Raina. The play in this way ends in bathos. The very technical originality, bathos, is indicated by the title of the play. The name itself is meant to be a bathos; Arms and the Man. It indicated a comic-ironic treatment of the theme of Virgil’s Aenied. Instead of glorifying war and soldiering, the dramatist has shown its hollowness. Soldiers are shown not as heroes but as cowards.
CONCLUSION
The pith and marrow of above said is that Shaw was a past-master in all the aspects of humour. When Tolstoy remarked that Shaw treated life as a joke, he replied that life was indeed a joke. He had the true humorist’s gift of being able to laugh at himself. The big scoundrel in The Doctor’s Dilemma, Louis Dubedat, says that he is a disciple of Shaw. Other writers of the problem plays discuss the problems seriously and we are bored by them. But Shaw amuses us even while he discusses a problem. His humour is highly intellectual so he wants the spectators to take their brains to the theatre. He grips their attention by his amusing situations and his wit and humour. He has been very appropriately called “a laughing philosopher”.
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