Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

But today even the unmitigated misanthropy of the camels could not shake Mike’s moodiness; he looked at them without smiling. Nor did the monkeys and apes cheer him up. They stood for quite a while in front of a cage containing a large family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, grooms and swarm aimlessly around the cage, while Jill surreptitiously tossed them peanuts despite “No Feeding” signs.

She tossed one to a medium sized monk; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; be squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knucks against the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage. Mike watched it solemnly. Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered—after which he seemed quite relaxed. The third monk crawled away, still whimpering, and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back. The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.

Mike threw back his head and laughed—went on laughing, loudly and uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, tears came from his eyes; he started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.

“Stop it, Mike!”

He did cease folding himself up but his guffaws and tears went on. An attendant hurried over. “Lady, do you need help?”

“No. Yes, I do. Can you call us a cab? Ground car, air cab, anything—I’ve got to get him out of here.” She added, “He’s not well.”

“Ambulance? Looks like he’s having a fit.”

“Anything!” A few minutes later she was leading Mike into a piloted air cab. She gave the address, then said urgently. “Mike, you’ve got to listen to me. Quiet down.”

He became somewhat more quiet but continued to chuckle, laugh aloud, chuckle again, while she wiped his eyes, for all the few minutes it took to get back to their flat. She got him inside, got his clothes off, made him lie down on the bed. “All right, dear. Withdraw now if you need to.”

“I’m all right. At last I’m all right.”

“I hope so.” She sighed. “You certainly scared me, Mike.”

“I’m sorry, Little Brother. I know. I was scared, too, the first time I heard laughing.”

“Mike, what happened?”

“Jill… I grok people!”

“Huh?” (“!!??”)

(“I speak rightly, Little Brother. I grok.”)

“I grok people now, Jill Little Brother… precious darling, little imp with lively legs and lovely lewd lascivious lecherous licentious libido… beautiful bumps and pert posterior… with soft voice and gentle hands. My baby darling.”

“Why, Michael!”

“Oh, I knew all the words; I simply didn’t know when or why to say them… nor why you wanted me to. I love you, sweetheart—I grok ‘love’ now, too.”

“You always have. I knew. And I love you… you smooth ape. My darling.”

“‘Ape,’ yes. Come here, she ape, and put your head on my shoulder and tell me a joke.”

“Just tell you a joke?”

“Well, nothing more than snuggling. Tell me a joke I’ve never heard and see if I laugh at the right place. I will, I’m sure of it—and I’ll be able to tell you why it’s funny. Jill… I grok people!”

“But how, darling? Can you tell me? Does it need Martian? Or mindtalk?”

“No, that’s the point. I grok people. I am people… so now I can say it in people talk. I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much… because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”

Jill looked puzzled. “Maybe I’m the one who isn’t people. I don’t understand.”

“Ah, but you are people, little she ape. You grok it so automatically that you don’t have to think about it. Because you grew up with people. But I didn’t. I’ve been like a puppy raised apart from other dogs—Who couldn’t be like his masters and had never learned how to be a dog. So I had to be taught. Brother Mahmoud taught me, Jubal taught me, lots of people taught me… and you taught me most of all. Today I got my diploma—and I laughed. That poor little monk.”

“Which one, dear? I thought that big one was just mean… and the one I flipped the peanut to turned out to be just as mean. There certainly wasn’t anything funny.”

“Jill, Jill my darling! Too much Martian has rubbed off on you. Of course it wasn’t funny—it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.”

“But—Mike dear, laughing is something you do when something is nice… not when it’s horrid.”

“Is it? Think back to Las Vegas—When all you pretty girls came out on the stage, did people laugh?”

“Well… no.”

“But you girls were the nicest part of the show. I grok now, that if they had laughed, you would have been hurt. No, they laughed when a comic tripped over his feet and fell down… or something else that is not a goodness.”

“But that’s not all people laugh at.”

“Isn’t it? Perhaps I don’t grok all its fullness yet. But find me something that really makes you laugh, sweetheart… a joke, or anything else—but something that gave you a real belly laugh, not a smile. Then we’ll see if there isn’t a wrongness in it somewhere and whether you would laugh if the wrongness wasn’t there.” He thought. “I grok when apes learn to laugh, they’ll be people.”

“Maybe.” Doubtfully but earnestly Jill started digging into her memory for jokes that had struck her as irresistibly funny, ones which had jerked a laugh out of her… incidents she had seen or heard of which had made her helpless with laughter:

“—her entire bridge club.”

“Should I bow?”

“Neither one, you idiot—instead!”

“—the Chinaman objects.”

“—broke her leg.”

“—make trouble for me!”

“—but it’ll spoil the ride for me.”

“—and his mother-in-law fainted.”

“Stop you? Why, I bet three to one you could do it!”

“—something has happened to Ole.”

“—and so are you, you clumsy ox!”

She gave up on “funny” stories, pointing out to Mike that such were just fantasies, not real, and tried to recall real incidents. Practical jokes? All practical jokes supported Mike’s thesis, even ones as mild as a dribble glass—and when it came to an interne’s notion of a practical joke—well, internes and medical students should be kept in cages. What else? The time Elsa Mae had lost her monogrammed panties? It hadn’t been funny to Elsa Mae. Or the—She said grimly, “Apparently the pratfall is the peak of all humor. It’s not a pretty picture of the human race, Mike.”

“Oh, but it is!”

“Huh?”

“I had thought—I had been told—that a ‘funny’ thing is a thing of a goodness. It isn’t. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery… and a sharing… against pain and sorrow and defeat.”

“But—Mike, it is not a goodness to laugh at people.”

“No. But I was not laughing at the little monkey. I was laughing at you people. And I suddenly knew that I was people and could not stop laughing.” He paused. “This is hard to explain, because you have never lived as a Martian, for all that I’ve told you about it. On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either physically cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen—sweetheart, what you call ‘freedom’ doesn’t exist on Mars; everything is planned by the Old Ones—or the things that do happen on Mars which we laugh at here on Earth aren’t funny because there is no wrongness about them. Death, for example.”