The pleasure found in hostile laughter soon led to practical jokes.
Although now discountenanced, they were anciently very common, and
formed the first link between humour and the ludicrous. They were not
imitative, and did not show any actual power to invent what was
humorous, but a desire to amuse by doing something which might cause
some ludicrous action or scene, just as people unable to speak would
point to things they wish to designate. These early jokes had severer
objects coupled with amusement, and were what we should call no joke at
all. The first character in the records of antiquity that seems to have
had anything quaint or droll about it is that of Samson. Standing out
amid the confusion of legendary times, he gives us good specimens of the
fierce and wild kind of merriment relished in ancient days; and was fond
of making very sanguinary "sport for the Philistines." He was an
exaggeration of a not very uncommon type of man, in which brute strength
is joined to loose morals and whimsical fancy. People were more inclined
to laugh at sufferings formerly, because they were not keenly sensitive
to pain, and also had less feeling and consideration for others. That
Samson found some malicious kind of pleasure and diversion in his
reprisals on his enemies, and made their misfortunes minister to his
amusement, is evident from the strange character of his exploits. "He
caught three hundred foxes, and took fire-brands, and turned tail to
tail, and put a fire-brand in the midst between two tails, and when he
had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the
Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks and also the standing corn of
the Philistines, with the vineyards and olives." On another occasion he
allowed himself to be bound with cords, and thus apparently delivered
powerless into the hands of his enemies; he then broke his bonds "like
flax that was burnt with fire," and taking the _jaw-bone of an ass_,
which he found, slew a thousand men with it. His account of this