I know there’s not a lot to smile about while a pandemic is eating us from the inside out, we have a president who uses the constitution as toilet paper and is ordering secret arrests and your funds are disappearing faster than an ice cream cone at 100 degrees.

But we as a people haven’t exactly been known as the happiest bunch around. If you want to know why we tend to be a somber bunch with little joy, one reason is the history of smiles in photographs and other works of art.

The history of art and photography, until fairly recently, depicted us to be basically a miserable lot that finds nothing to laugh about and only finds solace in debauchery.

I didn’t smile for photos until a few years ago because I wanted to be seen as a serious young man with serious things on my mind. I was on a mission and I didn’t want people thinking, “what’s that idiot smiling about? There’s nothing funny going on here.”

And that is pretty much the history of the anti-smile persona. Problem is that when you look somber you’ll probably feel somber, not a good place to be, particularly as a kid but for an adult, also.

The Mona Lisa smiled but I bet you’ll never find a picture of Leonardo DaVinci smiling.

Someone should have told Beethoven that a smile is just a frown turned upside down. Beethoven was hugely successful in his day but judging by pictures of him, you’d think he was destitute and being tortured.

Granted that Beethoven must have been very weary all the time, having written nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas, one opera, five piano concertos, and many chamber works.

So why don’t famous people of today smile? I know they have fun like the rest of us lumpen proletariat and even more fun than most of us, driving their fancy cars and dining in fancy restaurants and drinking champagne.

Bob Dylan still has to work very hard to keep his brooding demeanor. Those rare Facebook photos of Dylan caught off guard smiling get 2 million hits. I don’t know if Dylan is a million laughs off stage but surely he sees some things that make him smile.

As for Leonard Cohen, I don’t blame him for not smiling, his songs were all suicidal. Look at the early Beatles albums, no smiles, just staring straight ahead with no emotion showing. If anybody had something to smile about it was John, Paul, George and Ringo as they counted the proceeds from their latest albums.

An early Brando; no smiling. James Dean, keep it brooding. Leave the laughter to lightweights like Jerry Lewis or Red Skelton.

Check out old family photos. It was grim, all serious business, the fathers and mothers looking like they just walked out of a coal mine and haven’t had a light moment in all of their lives. I mean, it’s like, why bother living when it all sucks and life is just one moment of toil, strife and disease after another.

Now, I get it as far as photos of soldiers returning from the battles. It’s hard to be a happy Civil War camper when your legs have just been amputated and tossed into a 10-foot high pile of bloody limbs. And I understand why soldiers of any era don’t have a lot to smile about after returning from the horrors of war and seeing their comrades blown to kingdom come and their guts spread over the landscape.

But even the little kids had blank looks on their faces. That’s how I looked in my first grade school, class picture. Maybe I was brooding, like Dylan said, “I hurt easy, I just don’t show it. You can hurt someone and not even know it.”

Look at old high school yearbooks and I challenge you to find more than a few smiling faces. They are generally devoid of any joy and look like their faces will crack if they smile because they’re preparing for prison. The same with the humorless teachers.

There’s been a few explanations for the lack of smiles. In old photos, the cameras needed long exposure times and people had to remain perfectly still or the picture would be blurry. It’s easier to keep a blank look on your face for a while but smiling for a prolonged time is hard and also can definitely hurt and even cause your facial muscles to cramp up in a never-ending smile.

Poor dental work in past years is considered another reason that people didn’t want to smile broadly and show their rotted and missing teeth, especially in close-up pictures.

Others explain that early photography took its lead from classical painting, where grinning was flat out uncouth and an inappropriate way to be memorialized on canvass. You could find a few faint smiles but long ago, wider smiles were a sign of madness, lewdness, loudness or drunkenness.

Add to that the fact that smiles might have implied happiness, something that was considered shallow and uncouth and definitely against the Victorian creed of suffering and sacrifice. So, following suit, studio photographers directed subjects on how to maintain staid expressions.

The thing was that so many of the photos did not fairly depict their subjects. People have been smiling and laughing for many years. Probably the cave man laughed out loud uncontrollably the first time he cracked another cave man over the head.

Did you hear the one about the priest, the Jew and the Buddhist who walked into a bar?