English Literature - Reading Comprehension Passages

English Literature
English Literature - Reading Comprehension Passages

Why do listeners laugh even when the stories are not funny ?

Read the following passage and answer the question:

Of all bores the most repellent specimen is the one who comes close up: the buttonholing bore. This is the kind described by a friend of mine with a vivid sense of phrase as ‘the man who spreads birdlime all over you’. A bore who keeps a reasonable way off can be dealt with; but when they lean on you, you are done. It is worst when they fix your eyes, only a foot away, and tell a funny story that isn’t funny. Nothing is so humiliating as to have to counterfeit laughter at the bidding of a bore; but we do it. The incurable weakness and benignancy of human nature once again! Then there is the bore who begins a funny story, and although you tell him you have heard it, doesn’t stop. What should be done with him? Another of the worst types of bore is the man who says ‘Where should we be without our sense of humour?’ He is even capable of saying ‘Nothing but my unfailing sense of humour saved me.’ There is also the man who says ‘“Live and let live,” as my poor dear father used to say.’

There was once an eccentric peer — I forget both his name and the place where I read about him — who had contracted, all unconsciously, the habit of thinking aloud; and in this world of artifice, where society is cemented and sustained very largely by a compromise between what we think and what we say, his thoughts were very often at variance with his words. One of the stories in the Memoirs in which I found him describes how he met an acquaintance in St James’s Street, and, after muttering quite audibly to himself for a few minutes as they walked side by side, ‘Confound it, what a nuisance meeting this fellow. I’ve always disliked him. But now that we have met I suppose I must ask him to dinner,’ he stopped and said with every appearance of cordiality, ‘You’ll dine with us this evening, won’t you?’

Options:

  1. Out of antipathy
  2. Out of beneficence
  3. Out of love
  4. Out of ignominy

Right Answer: Out of beneficence

After saying that nothing is so humiliating as having to counterfeit laughter at the bidding of a bore, the writer admits that we do it all the same and exclaims at the incurable weakness and benignancy of human nature. Benignancy means kindliness or good-natured tolerance, so the false laughter springs from an instinctive unwillingness to hurt the speaker’s feelings. It is thus an act of beneficence, however reluctant. Antipathy would produce silence or rebuff rather than laughter, and neither love nor a sense of disgrace is offered anywhere in the passage as a motive.

This question is part of English Literature - Reading Comprehension Passages, which has 8 practice questions with answers.

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