One characteristic of this savage jocosity is so frequently referred to by travellers that I cannot pass it by. We have seen that the teasing of the women is apt to take {235} on an indecent form. We are told, again and again, that savage jokes are commonly low and immoral. The coarser the joke, we are informed, the better it is liked by the natives of the Gold Coast.[177] The jests of the natives of the islands in the Pacific are said to be “low and immoral to a disgusting degree”.[178] Possibly the European is not permitted to know the worst of this aspect of savage mirth. It is easy, however, to give it too serious a significance. To the simpler feeling of savages, untrammelled by the laws of decency as civilised people know them, there may be no suggestion here of a delight in the immoral as such. Their laughter may well indicate the fact that for them an undisguised reference to what we insist on hiding up has in it nothing improper; that they are just within sight of the stadium of culture at which convention begins to brand such references as obscene. Young children among ourselves will, I believe, often laugh at such open and direct mention of unmentionable things and much in the same way. It is hardly more in many cases, I surmise, than a little bravado, a glorying in doing something unusual which they are beginning to suspect is forbidden, though this is no doubt apt to be accompanied by a perception of the indignity done by this uncovering to the person involved.[179] We may now turn to those forms of savage laughter which involve a more disinterested contemplation of things, and a rudimentary sense of their ludicrous phases. There {236} is no doubt that the enjoyment of the droll side of their world fills a large place in the life of savages. One may conjecture that it is a larger pastime in their case than in that of most boys; for though the intellect of a savage may not surpass that of a boy, his experience and matured good sense enable him to judge of the unseemly and the incongruous with considerable skill and quickness, and to derive much mirth from the contemplation of them.