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4. WHEN YOU’RE SNARLING

In Phantoms in the Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who is listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in the World, speculates on the evolutionary origins of smiling. Smiling, he says, evolved from an aborted snarl. He bases this theory on no evidence. Instead he advances the following fantasy scenario:

When one of your ancestral primates encountered an individual coming towards him—

And right there, by the way, isn’t that a curious and rather telling choice of phrase? Not ‘one of our ancestral primates’, but one of yours. Clearly Ramachandran is cut from superior cloth. We may have come down from the trees, but he descended from the mezzanine on a spiral staircase to proclaim:

When one of your ancestral primates encountered an individual coming towards him, he would have bared his canines in a threatening gesture on the fair assumption that most strangers are potential enemies. Upon recognizing the individual as friend or kin, however, he might abort the threatening grimace halfway, thereby producing a smile, which evolved into a ritualized human greeting.

It is desperately sad that someone could look around the world in which we live, and in every expression of joy, gladness, fellow-feeling and goodwill see only a snarl, like some kind of upside-down, inside-out, back-to-front Louis Armstrong.

I see friends shaking hands,

Saying ‘how do you do?’

They’re really saying,

You stupid bastard look at you in your fucking tassel loafers, you ghgnnrghfcckgg!’

Well, you may not like Ramachandran’s conclusion, Newman. It may upset your happy-clappy, eco-hippy worldview, but it just so happens to be what the science says …

Well, it’s certainly not what comparative anatomy tells us. Because if you want to talk about ancestral primates, it so happens that when chimpanzees laugh top lip covers upper teeth. Baring the canines doesn’t come into it. When chimps laugh they expose only their lower teeth while swinging their jaw form side to side. (How do I know this? Let’s just say I don’t always play my first choice of venue.)

But don’t take my word for it. Charles Darwin noticed the same thing in the course of his own investigations into the evolutionary origins of smiling. In The Expression of the Emotions In Man and Animals, Darwin comes to a very different conclusion about the evolutionary origins of the human smile:

Our long habit of uttering loud reiterated sounds from a sense of pleasure [has evolved] into the tendency to contract the orbicular and zygomatic muscles whenever any cause excites in us a feeling which, if stronger, would have led to laughter.

So where Ramachandran says that a smile is halfway from a snarl, Darwin says that smiling is – to quote a recent review of my standup – halfway to a laugh.

If Ramachandran’s fantasy about the evolutionary origins of smiling doesn’t come from comparative anatomy, ethology, zoology or evolutionary biology, then where does it come from?

It has its roots, I believe, in that most tenacious of philosophical stowaways, Romanticism.

‘Laughter’, wrote mid-nineteenth-century French Romantic poet Charles Baudelaire, ‘is a man’s way of baring his fangs.’ Baudelaire’s idea of comedy, commented Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘is entirely of a piece with his frigidity, sterility, and complete lack of empathy.’

Sounds like a description of each and every privately-educated stand up comedian now dominating our cultural landscape, all doing variations on the same theme: ‘Is it me, or is everything shit? Have you noticed? I mean, is it me? Or is everything shit? Is it me? Or is everything shit?’

It’s both, and there’s a connection.

Now, I don’t want the fact that I have just quoted Jean-Paul Sartre to be taken as any kind of endorsement of either him or the Existentialists. Not least because Existentialism is partly to blame for such bizarre notions as We Are Our Brains – which entails that our bodies are somehow not really part of us, as if we are not part of nature at all, just isolated entities floating around, too good for this earth, not really belonging here, yet not really belonging anywhere else either. It’s this cluster of fallacies that is going through Jean-Paul Sartre’s head when he talks about – and I love this quote – ‘the nauseating sloppiness of the natural world’. Here is a man, you feel, who when he listens to the dawn chorus says, ‘One at a time!’

Sartre displays here only his own nauseatingly sloppy thinking about the natural world, which is, of course, full of animals doing finely calibrated, precision engineering and detailed painstaking work.

Consider Cyclosa tremula, a black and white striped Guyanan spider. Cyclosa builds replica spiders with which she populates her web. Because she makes these replicas out of prey debris, the husks of insects she has devoured, they do not have her vivid black and white stripes but are a dull grey colour, which the local birds soon learn not to bother eating. And so, when Cyclosa sees an orange-bellied sparrow swooping overhead she bounces up and down on her web, blurring her lines, blending black and white to make grey and the sparrow flies away. It seems, then, that Cyclosa is building her replica spiders as a cunning decoy, in much the same way as during the World War II the British Army built thousands of dummy cardboard tanks. Their turret guns were made from the long cardboard tubes inside wallpaper rolls. They were painted in green and brown camouflage colours and dotted around the fields of Kent alongside hundreds of full-size papier-mâche Spitfires. There were even two entire dummy barracks made from crepe paper stretched between willow hurdles with a felt roof. The reason for all this activity was because we knew that German spy planes were flying overhead taking photographs. The hope was that when these photographs were developed in Berlin, the German High Command would take one look at them and say: ‘There’s no point trying to invade Britain, the whole country’s made out of craft materials.’

Smiling was big in the Enlightenment. Humphry Davy and Thomas Paine, Diderot and d’Alembert can be seen smiling in their portraits. Julien Offray de la Mettrie is not only grinning but also wearing what appears to be a shower cap. To the sculptor Houdon, the twinkle in Voltaire’s eye was so intrinsic that it inspired a piece of witty improvisation when he came to do a bust of him. Houdon cemented a tiny stone onto each eye of his Voltaire bust. You’d think nothing could be further from a glint in the eye than a bit of gravel, but amazingly it works. Most people see the twinkle and not the grit of which it is made. And then of course there’s the famous oil painting of Volatire used on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Candide, bare-legged under his white cotton nightdress, grinning from ear to ear.

Come the Romantics, however, and smiling was out. In Paris’s new photographic studios, Baudelaire was determined to make a decisive break with those grinning Enlightenment loons. No-one was going to catch him smiling at the birdie as the flash-gun whoompffed. No way. Not wanting to smile for the photographer or the oil painter doesn’t automatically make someone a poseur of course. Perhaps Baudelaire was more aware of life’s ugly reality than the Enlightenment optimists. Perhaps he had seen the world for what it really was, and not spent his life hopping excitedly around an air pump. Perhaps that was why he saw the fang beneath the smile. That’s certainly the pose Baudelaire strikes in his most famous poem Flowers of Evil (a title, you feel, that even Iron Maiden would reject), but there is a problem with the argument that Baudelaire is pessimistic because he has been around the block a few more times than those shallow Enlightenment optimists. The problem is that cock-a-hoop Julien ‘Is it all right if I keep my shower cap on for the picture?’ de la Mettrie was a battlefield surgeon in the War of Austrian Succession, whereas Baudelaire lived with his mum.

As did Jean-Paul Sartre – for forty years! – which I think goes a long way in explaining the macho tone of his philosophising. If you are afraid of the dark, he says, it is because you choose to be afraid of the dark. Not Sartre. His last words every night, after being tucked up in bed, were: ‘Eteins la lumiere, Maman. J’ai choisi une vie sans peur!’

‘Are you sure, mon petit? Shall I leave the landing light on in case you don’t make it to the toilet in time and have a little ‘accident’ again like last night?’

‘I chose to wet myself. I enjoy the sensation of wet pyjama.’

‘Not in my house you don’t. When you move out and get a place of your own, you can piss all over it to your heart’s content, Jean-Paul, but as long as you live here the landing light stays on. And that’s final!’

The Romantics and Baudelaire were by no means the first people ever to entertain strange ideas about smiling and laughter. For seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for instance, laughter came from a sense of ‘sudden glory arising from a feeling of superiority.’ Well, that is one sort of laugh. But do we crow like that when our child takes her first steps? Surely the laugh we laugh then comes from delight, not from a sudden sense of how immeasurably better at walking we are than her? We tend not to snap our fingers in her face, and say, ‘Call that walking? Hah! Oh dearey me! Woeful! Oh my sides!’

Thomas Hobbes enjoyed the tremendous luck of getting to hang out with both Galileo and Ben Jonson. You’d think somewhere between Padua and Eastcheap, Hobbes might have noticed different kinds of laugh than the triumphant snort.

So, there is a long history of curious ideas about smiling and laughing, yet none so strange as our new notion that smiling is an aborted snarl. Since Ramachandran is one of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in the World Today, then it is worth paying close attention to the specifically neuroscientific roots of this extraordinary notion.

To this end we must unpick a tangled web that includes a famous industrial accident, a Gothic melodrama about a crazy scientist, and Bumpology, ‘The One True Science of The Mind.’