“Man is the animal who laughs at himself”

“Man is the animal who laughs at himself” is Jubal Harshaw’s provisional definition of humanity: not a claim that human beings are superior to other forms of life, but a recognition that they can perceive themselves as their own grim joke. Its importance becomes personal when Valentine Michael Smith applies the definition to himself and concludes that, because laughter frightens him and he cannot produce it properly, he must not be human. Jubal answers with patience rather than making laughter a test Smith has already failed: he promises that understanding will come through experience.

The Definition Takes Shape

The conversation begins with doubt about conventional measures of human distinction. Shape, Jubal reflects, is no more essential to defining a person than the bottle is to the wine it holds; even a living brain preserved in a vessel suggests how grotesquely the body can be separated from ordinary assumptions about personhood. Nor does engineering settle the question. From an unprejudiced Martian viewpoint, human constructions such as the Aswan Dam might not be impressive, and human self-awareness is no proof that other earthly beings lack thought or poetic capacity.

Against these uncertain measures, Jubal identifies a less flattering human distinction: people show extraordinary ingenuity in devising more effective ways to kill, enslave, harass, and make life unbearable for one another. The humor in this observation is not simple amusement. Humanity becomes its own grimmest joke, and Jubal condenses that paradox into the statement that man is the animal who laughs.

Smith’s Self-Judgment

Smith takes the definition seriously and applies it literally. Because he does not laugh, he reasons, he is not a man. He explains that laughter once frightened him; after understanding that it did not hurt, he tried to learn it. His attempt produces a harsh, awkward cackle, and Jubal’s immediate request that he stop makes the failure concrete rather than theoretical.

Smith then agrees sadly that he cannot rightly laugh and repeats his conclusion. The exchange exposes a gap between Jubal’s broad, ironic description of humanity and Smith’s effort to use it as a precise rule of membership. Jubal means laughter as a capacity bound up with human self-recognition; Smith hears its absence as evidence that he is excluded from humanity altogether.

Learning Through Experience

Jubal rejects that exclusion. Smith has not learned to laugh yet, he says, and trying to force it will not teach him. Instead, Jubal promises that if Smith lives among people long enough, he will eventually see how funny they are and laugh. The sequence matters: laughter is not a skill acquired by imitation alone, but a response that follows understanding of the people and circumstances around him.

Smith accepts this advice in the language of waiting. Jubal tells him not to doubt that he is a man, describing him as born of woman and born to trouble, and anticipates a future moment when Smith will understand the fullness of that condition and laugh. Jubal leaves the question of the Martians open: he does not claim to understand them, but allows that they, too, may be “man.” The expression therefore unsettles a rigid human boundary even as it gives Smith reassurance. Humanity is neither settled by bodily shape nor secured by a single immediate performance; in Jubal’s account, it is connected to a developing recognition of shared trouble and human absurdity.

Meaning in the Exchange

The phrase holds comedy and pain together. Human beings are laughable not because their suffering is unreal, but because they create so much of their own misery and remain capable of recognizing that contradiction. For Smith, however, laughter first appears as an unfamiliar sound that frightens him, then as an awkward performance that seems to confirm his distance from others. Jubal’s promise changes its meaning: laughter may arrive not through pressure or self-condemnation, but through time spent among the people whose contradictions give the joke its subject.

The conversation does not end with Smith laughing or with a final proof of who qualifies as human. It ends with his calm agreement to wait, while Jubal holds open the possibility that human recognition—and perhaps recognition across species—will grow through experience. The expression is thus both a comic judgment on humanity and a generous invitation to belong before one has mastered the joke.