How soon in man’s history any such laughter became {265} possible, it would be hard to say. In the simpler types of community, the severe restraints laid on youths by the men of the tribe must, one supposes, have been fatal to any indulgence by sons in laughter at the expense of fathers, such as is illustrated in comedy both ancient and modern. The penalties attached to breach of ceremonial rule must have stifled any impulse of laughter, if it happened to arise. It is said that when the chief of a certain tribe chanced to stumble, his subjects were bound to pretend to stumble in order to cover up his defect.[235] The utility of this quaint custom may have lain in its effectual suppression of the risible impulse. This theory, however, postulates a kind of courtier widely removed from the modern, of whom it seems safe to say that he might be trusted to see stumblings and worse without feeling an over-mastering temptation to laugh. One can only conjecture that men began to discern and enjoy the amusing side of authority and its solemn ways of asserting itself, in their free moments, at a safe distance from tell-tale eyes. What is known of the hard-worked slave of antiquity is suggestive not merely of play after toil, but of a safe turning on task-masters. When, as we read, the Egyptian workman got fun “out of the smallest incident in the day’s work—an awkward apprentice cutting his finger, a comrade sleeping over his task whom the overseer lashes to awaken him,” and so forth, did not something of a spirit of malicious crowing over the overseer express itself too? The analogy of the judiciously half-smothered laughter of the English schoolboy in playground or dormitory suggests the answer. We must not wonder if these dangerous excursions of the spirit of fun have failed to be recorded. {266} Still more significant is another picture from the same hand, representing a tussle between overseer and workmen in which “the stick vainly interferes,” so that “at least an hour elapses before quiet is re-established”.[236] This looks like the rollicking laughter of schoolboys at the spectacle of an orderly ceremony suddenly turned to disorder. The interpretation is borne out by the fact that these same Egyptians were able to enter into the fun of a loss of dignity in a solemn function, for example, the upsetting by a collision of the richly supplied table in the funereal boat, and the falling of a mummy on a priest during the ceremony of conveying it to its resting-place.[237]