Tickling – Its Serious Side
In On The Parts of Animals, Aristotle considered tickling to be one of the defining and unique qualities of a human being. “When people are tickled”, he wrote, “they quickly burst into laughter, and this is because the motion quickly penetrates to this part, and even though it is only gently warmed, still it produces an independent movement in the intelligence which is recognisable”. Other animals might have more advanced senses of smell or hearing, but due to the delicate nature of our skin man’s sense of touch is the most fine-tuned, he argued.
Later scientific research has demonstrated that Aristotle rather exaggerated the uniqueness of homo sapiens’ response to tickling. Monkeys have been found to be ticklish, rats make a laughter-like, ultra-sonic chirping when tickled, and many pet owners are gratified by the response of their cats or dogs to time spent tickling them. Famously, the trout falls into a trance-like state when their underbelly is lightly rubbed making it easier to catch, something Maria remarked upon while preparing to trick Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c1601); “lie thou there; for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling”.
The paradox of tickling, a delightful sensation that can soon turn into something excruciating, offered some philosophers a way to differentiate between different forms of pleasure. In the 17th century Spinoza, for example, drew a distinction between hilaritas, an overall sense of joy and well-being, and titillatio, which was localised to a specific part of the body. Tickling a sensitive part of the body sends a dopamine rush to the brain, offering the sensation of excitement and titillation, even sexual excitement.
The use of tickling as a prelude to sexual arousal was taken to extremes in the Muscovite palaces where many of the Czarinas employed eunuchs and women as full-time foot ticklers. Anna Leopoldovna (1718 – 1746) is reputed to have had at least six ticklers attending to her feet, telling bawdy tales and singing obscene songs as they went about their duties. Seeming strange to modern sensibilities, nevertheless like the English monarchs’ Groom of the Stool, it was a prestigious and influential role.
Tickling has its darker side, though. The idiom “tickled to death” first appears in English in the early 19th century, a fate which Nietzsche, perhaps ironically, considered to be “the best life”, echoing a sentiment expressed a couple of centuries earlier by John Selden in Table-Talk (1689). “To him that dies”, he wrote, “it is all one whether it be by a penny halter, or a silk garter; yet I confess the silk garter pleases more; and like trouts, we love to be tickled to death”.
In Innuit folklore the Mahaha is a thin sinewy creature, ice-blue in colour, cold to the touch, with white eyes protruding through long stringy hair. Always smiling and giggling it wanders around the Arctic regions taking delight in tickling its victims to death. The faces of its victims all have a twisted, frozen smile on their faces.
Tickling was used as a form of torture in the courts of the Chinese Han Dynasty. It was a punishment reserved for the nobility as it left no marks and the victim would recover relatively quickly. In Japan one of the punishments that could be inflicted on those found guilty of a crime that fell outside of the criminal code was kusuguri-zeme, merciless tickling.
Amongst the indignities that those consigned to a spell in the stocks suffered, according to an article entitled England in Old Times published in the New York Times on November 13, 1887, was an assault by “small but fiendish boys”, who would remove the miscreants’ shoes and tickle “the soles of their defenceless feet”.
The Illustrated Police News carried the strange story of Michael Puckridge in its edition of December 11, 1869. Claiming to have found a cure for his wife’s varicose veins, strapped her to a plank and proceeded to tickle her to the point of insanity. The poor woman spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum, varicose veins and all. The French physician Laurent Joubert reported in Traité du Ris (1579) that a young man was so enthusiastically tickled by two young girls that he seemed to swoon and rendered incapable of speech. To their horror they found that he had died of asphyxiation.
While the examples of people being tickled to death are mercifully rare, the areas of the body that are most sensitive to tickling, such as the stomach, under the ribs, armpits, neck, and feet, are also the most vulnerable in combat. This observation led the psychiatrist Donald Black to opine that children, when engaging in tickle fights or responding to someone tickling them, are actually learning to protect those parts, a vestige of a survival technique.
