-
背景介绍：
E.B
.
怀特（
1899
－）美国著名散文家
、诗人与记者。出生于纽约，二十年代起
长期在《纽约客》杂志任编辑，他的一些游记文
章写得尤为出色，被广泛转载于
大量课本与文选之中。
Some Remarks on
Humor
(E. B.
White)
点评：
幽默被公认为生活中最重要的部分。
本文第一段：
引出幽默的本质，
讲述分析家
解析幽默之行为引发作者的思考。
第二段：吹肥皂泡表演激发作者的智慧，引出幽默的本质。
第三段：幽默家的辛酸表演折射出生活中的痛苦，引人深思。
第四段：幽默折射出真理的灼人热力。
Analysts have had their go
at humor, and I have read some of this
interpretative literature, but without
being greatly instructed. Humor can be
dissected, as a frog can, but the thing
dies in the process and the innards are
discouraging to any but the pure
scientific mind.
In a
newsreel theatre the other day I saw a picture of
a man who had
developed the soap bubble
to a higher point than it had ever before reached.
He had become the first-class soap
bubble blower of America, had perfected
the business of blowing bubbles,
refined it, doubled it, squared it, and had
even worked himself up into a
convenient lather. The effect was not pretty.
Some of the bubbles were too big to be
beautiful, and the blower was always
jumping into them or out of them, or
playing some sort of unattractive trick with
them. It was, if anything, a rather
repulsive sight. Humor is a little like that: it
won’t stand much blowing up, and it
won’t stand much poking. It has a certain
fragility, an evasiveness, which one
had best respect. Essentially, it is a
complete mystery. A human frame
convulsed with laughter, and the laughter
becoming hysterical and uncontrollable,
is as far out of balance as one shaken
with the hiccoughs or in the throes of
a sneezing fit.
One of the
things commonly said about humorists is that they
are really very
sad
people
－
clowns with a
breaking heart. There is some truth in it, but it
is
badly stated. It would be more
accurate, I think, to say that there is a deep
vein
of melancholy running through
everyo
ne’s life and that the humorist,
perhaps
more sensible of it than some
others, compensates for it actively and
positively.
Humorists fatten on
trouble. They have always made trouble pay. They
struggle along with a good will and
endure pain cheerfully, knowing how
willingly it will serve them in the
sweet by and by. You find them wrestling with
foreign languages, fighting folding
ironing boards and swollen drainpipes,
suffering the terrible discomfort of
tight boots…. They pour out their sorrows
profitably, in a form that is not quite
fiction nor quite fact either. Beneath the
sparkling surface of these dilemmas
flows the strong tide of human woe.
Practically everyone is a manic
depressive of sorts’ with his up moments and
his down moments, and you certainly
don’t have to be a humorist to taste
the
sadness of situation and mood. But
there is often a rather fine line between
laughing and crying, and if a humorous
piece of writing brings a person to the
point where his emotional responses are
untrustworthy and seem likely to
break
over into the opposite realm, it is because humor,
like poetry, has an
extra content. It
plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth,
and sometimes
the reader feels the
heat.
参考译文：
谈幽默
分
析家都曾尝试过解析幽默，
我就曾读过一些这类阐述性的文献，
但无多大益处。
幽默可以解剖，
就如青蛙可以解剖一样，
只是这东西在解剖的过程中会死掉，
而
其内部
结构，除了那些纯粹的科学头脑之外，其他的人都只会感到失望。