FAUST ENTERS THE study together with his dog, opens the Bible and begins to agonize over the line ‘Im Anfang war das Wort!’ (In the beginning was the Word). He decides that Word does not convey a true meaning, abandons it, and seeks a new concept that effects and creates everything. He bypasses Sinn and Kraft as irrelevant. Then all at once he sees it clearly: Im Anfang war die Tat! (In the beginning was the Deed).

Plini the Elder wondered at what age infants begin to laugh. Watching my new-born daughter parting her lips into a pleased and gentle expression for the first time I suggest, irreverently, that the silent beginning of life, is the smile. Any deed comes after the first smile.

But is the Renaissance smile, forever present in Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, not significant in Greek and Roman culture? Is smiling, as we understand it, an invention of the Middle Ages, emerging in the Renaissance? We can rest assured that the Greek and Roman infants also smiled, even if they grew up without a sense of the cultural significance. Homer gave Odysseus only a ‘grim and angry’ smile.

Jesus must have smiled as an infant and as a child in Nazareth, but the New Testament lacks references to him smiling or laughing, even as teacher and prophet.

The former Danish Prime Minister, Jens Otto Krag, quoted Gladstone in his Diary 1971–1972, ‘politics are like a labyrinth, from the ironic intricacies of which it is even more difficult to find the way of escape, than it was to find the way into them’ then added a significant line, ‘it is as accurate as an evil smile’. A smile can contain and disguise any emotion, it needs interpretation, laughter reveals the emotion more openly, a quiet evil smile is more deadly than cruel laughter, a hidden smile is always secret and may be a concealed, undetected sardonic laughter.

When did I become aware of the spirit and power of the smile and laughter, the culture of humour? To answer that I return to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1961.