“To make people laugh is to make them forget”

“To make people laugh is to make them forget” describes both the benefit and the danger of Gwynplaine’s public role: his performances offer an audience relief from sorrow, but the laughter attached to him can also obscure his own feelings and silence what he is trying to say. The phrase’s companion formulation, “What a benefactor on earth is he who can bestow forgetfulness!”, presents that relief as a real gift without making it a remedy for the conditions that cause suffering.

Meaning and context

The expression occurs as the narrator corrects Gwynplaine’s belief that, being only an atom, he can do nothing for the poor. His ability to make people laugh is already a way of helping them: laughter lets them forget, if only for a time. The benefit is framed as an act of giving, not as a change to the social order. Gwynplaine can ease distress through performance, even though he has neither power nor means to remove its causes.

The narrator’s language gives the phrase a moral weight. To bestow forgetfulness is to offer something valuable to people burdened by care; the claim does not say that their hardship has vanished. Its force rests instead on the distance between temporary respite and lasting relief, a distinction made especially sharp when Gwynplaine later tries to speak about poverty before the House of Lords.

The performer who makes others laugh

Gwynplaine’s success rests on a division between his face and his inner life. He is a mountebank who appears on a platform, and the sight of him provokes laughter so powerful that even the executioner laughs. People in mourning avoid him because they cannot preserve the gravity their circumstances require; others laugh when he speaks and roll on the ground. His comic effect reaches people in very different states, including the melancholy and those burdened by troubled consciences.

But Gwynplaine does not laugh. His face has been permanently shaped into an irresistible expression of mirth, and he cannot remove it. Astonishment, anger, pity, suffering, and even tears intensify the appearance of laughter rather than contradict it. The phrase therefore describes a gift that depends on a cruel separation: the audience receives comic relief, while the performer’s own emotions remain unreadable beneath a face that seems to promise joy.

When laughter becomes a weapon

The contradiction becomes public when Gwynplaine speaks to the House of Lords about the poor. Emotion rises in his throat as he describes his entrance into society as an abandoned child; the sobs instead provoke an uncontrollable fit of laughter. The assembly catches the laughter at once. What might have broken into terror breaks into delight, and the lords clap, sneer, and insult him as he tries to address them.

His words appeal for compassion, but his face appears to say something else. The narrator makes the resulting humiliation explicit: Gwynplaine is comic in appearance and tragic within, and the growing laughter deepens the injury of the mismatch. Here laughter no longer works simply as relief from sorrow. It overwhelms the speech that names suffering, converting a plea for justice into entertainment for its audience.

The expression’s double edge

The phrase is not disproved by the House of Lords scene; rather, the scene reveals the limits of the gift it describes. Gwynplaine can make others forget through laughter, but he cannot control what they forget, or whether their laughter will ease sorrow or suppress its recognition. In his performance, laughter briefly lifts an audience from grief. In the Lords, it diverts the powerful from hearing an indictment of the conditions beneath their privilege.

That double action links the expression to Gwynplaine’s fixed grin. His face generates a public meaning that does not correspond to his inward state, and the crowd responds to the appearance rather than the person. Laughter can be a benefaction when it offers respite; when it drowns out his appeal, the same force becomes an instrument of humiliation. The expression thus holds together the novel’s two sharply contrasting possibilities: people may be given a moment’s forgetfulness, while the suffering that made such forgetfulness desirable remains.