Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s Film The Man Who Laughs (1928)

It all started in the elevator to the Trader Joe parking lot. Two odd women first commented that I looked like the actor Wilford Brimley, and then asked me why I didn’t smile. That set me off: I don’t particularly like to go around with a smile on my face, and I don’t think much of people who do. Were these frustrated dental assistants to go around accosting strangers for not airing their teeth?

Then I thought of one reason I didn’t like being all smiley. I remembered Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs (1869), which was turned into a 1928 silent film by Paul Leni starring Conrad Veidt, better known as Major Strasser “of the Third Reich” in the film Casablanca (1942).

Well, anyway, the novel and film were about people called comprachicos who, as children, were mutilated to look pathetic so that their handlers can could use them for begging:

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequefios, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. They traded in children, buying and selling them, but not stealing them. They made of these children monsters. The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The montebank is wanted in the street, the jester at the Louvre; the one is called a clown, the other a fool. By the artificial production of teratological cases the Comprachicos developed a science and practiced an art. They kneaded the features, stunted growth, and fashioned hunchbacks and dwarfs; the court fool was their specialty.

The Conrad Veidt character in the film was a child who was kidnapped and had a permanent smile carved on his face, which made him look pathetic. And that’s what comes to mind when people tell me to smile. I just don’t care to oblige them.

Wilford Brimley (1934-2020)

By the way, I look almost exactly like Wilford Brimley, except that his mustache was a little bigger than mine. Of course, I would prefer that strangers think I am a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, or some other dolicocephalic heartthrob. But then, so it goes.