'Distress With Which We Cannot Sympathise'

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How could I be amused by another person’s misfortune? Easy, I thought but didn’t say. Our newly jobless friend had been earning an enormous annual salary, more than I made in my three or four best years. But that wasn’t what triggered my laughter. Rather, it was his spendthrift ways. He’s the sort of guy who will penny-pinch and complain about the small, essential expenses and spend extravagantly on wine and resort vacations. He’s always griping about money. My laughter was karmic. I laughed because I sensed he was getting his just comeuppance. Happy ending? he quickly got another lucrative job. In his lecture “On Wit and Humour” (1818), William Hazlitt roots laughter in incongruity, “the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.” The unexpected makes us laugh. The simplest, flattest most commonplace statement…