San Francisco is both a place of study and the setting for Mike’s breakthrough in understanding human laughter. After an impossible attempt to consume a whole library’s contents in one vast intake, he begins a more systematic search through religious traditions; amid that continuing effort, the city’s zoo supplies the encounter that finally makes him laugh. The movement from books and churches to the capuchins gives San Francisco a particular significance: here, understanding is not only sought in doctrines but also arrived at through watching living creatures.

Study and Religious Search

Mike and Jill reach San Francisco after stopping in Palo Alto, where Mike tries to take in the entire Hoover Library in mammoth gulps. The attempt fails for material reasons: the scanners cannot spin fast enough, and he cannot turn bound pages quickly enough. Even with hours of solitary contemplation while the library is closed, he is accumulating raw data faster than he can grok it. Jill moves them on to San Francisco, where he replaces this unworkable attempt at total intake with a systematic search.

That search takes visible form in the books surrounding Mike when Jill returns to their flat one day. They include the Talmud, the Kama Sutra, several Bibles, the Book of the Dead, the Book of Mormon, the New Revelation, the Koran, the Golden Bough, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and many other sacred writings, as well as Crowley’s Book of the Law. The range suggests an effort to examine religions side by side rather than rely on a single tradition. The books represent an accumulating inquiry, not a completed answer: Mike has already acknowledged that collecting information does not mean he can yet understand it.

The search extends beyond books into San Francisco’s religious life. Mike says he has tried and tried, and Jill recalls attending all the kinds of churches she can think of in the city, as well as seekers’ services. Their visits have a personal purpose as well as an intellectual one: Mike continues them because he believes Patty needs to know they have not given up. The repeated attendance makes the city a landscape of ongoing inquiry, where neither reading nor visiting churches has yet yielded the understanding he hopes to use in helping her.

The Zoo and Its Animals

The zoo at Golden Gate Park places the couple’s search in a different kind of setting. It is cold and windy outdoors, but Mike does not notice; Jill has learned she need not be uncomfortable if she does not wish it. She can relax that control in the warm monkey house, though the monkeys and apes trouble her because their resemblance to people makes them seem depressingly human. Her response has changed: once fastidious about the animals’ public copulations and evacuations, she now regards the captive creatures as having no privacy and as not being at fault. The discomfort is less about their bodies than about the human likeness she sees in their looks and actions.

Jill prefers the Lion House, with its confident males, placid females, Bengal tigers, and swift little leopards; Mike also enjoys the Aviary, Reptile House, and seals. His attention to animals has a history. During his first zoo visit, he was distressed by their confinement and was about to free them. Jill urged him to wait and understand that animals released into unsuitable climates might not survive, and that a zoo could be a kind of nest. After a period of withdrawal, Mike stopped proposing to remove every barrier. He also came to understand that the bars and glass protected the animals from people as well as keeping the animals in. Thereafter, he made a point of visiting zoos wherever he went.

On this visit, the animals do not immediately relieve Mike’s mood. The camels’ misanthropic appearance cannot shake it, and neither can the monkeys and apes. He and Jill stand watching a large family of capuchins eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom, and move about their cage. Despite the signs prohibiting it, Jill quietly tosses them peanuts. The scene begins as ordinary observation but turns on a small, specific transfer of harm: a large male takes a peanut from a smaller monkey and beats him, and the victim, rather than pursuing the aggressor, later attacks a still smaller monkey.

The Laughter and Its Significance

The sequence continues through the monkeys’ responses. The first victim pounds his knuckles against the concrete and chatters in helpless rage; after retaliating against a smaller animal, he appears relaxed. The third monkey crawls away whimpering and finds shelter with a female carrying a baby, while the other monkeys pay no attention. The cage’s routine of feeding, grooming, courtship, and care has abruptly revealed a cycle of injury and displaced violence, set beside the vulnerable animal seeking refuge.

Mike watches solemnly, then throws back his head and laughs. The laughter becomes loud and uncontrollable: he gasps for breath, tears come to his eyes, and he trembles and sinks toward the floor while still laughing. This is the moment San Francisco’s earlier searching has been moving toward. Mike had told Jill that if he could grok human laughter, he might grok people and be able to help Patty, either by teaching her what he knows, learning what she knows, or both. The encounter does not arrive as a lesson in a book or a church service. It arises from watching animals whose behavior has made a recognizable pattern of human cruelty and vulnerability visible to him.

The zoo therefore joins San Francisco’s two modes of seeking: deliberate study and direct observation. Mike’s failed attempt to absorb a library, his examination of many religious texts, and the repeated church visits all show how urgently he wants understanding, but none alone resolves his difficulty. At Golden Gate Park, the capuchins’ small drama provokes a bodily response before it is reduced to an explanation. The city’s significance lies in that turn from gathering knowledge to an encounter that makes laughter possible.