INTRODUCTION
Speaking exactly, an Outline of the World’s Humor is an impossibility.
For surely the adjectives most applicable to humor are elusive, evasive, evanescent, ephemeral, intangible, imponderable, and other terms expressing unavailability.
To outline such a thing is like trying to trap a sunbeam or bound an ocean.
Yet an Outline of the History of the World’s recorded humor as evolved by the Human Race, seems within the possibilities.
First of all, it must be understood that the term humor is here used in its broadest, most comprehensive sense. Including both wit and humor; including the comic, fun, mirth, laughter, gayety, repartee,—all types and classes of jests and jokes.
The earliest reference to this mental element is that of Aristotle, and the word he uses to represent it is translated the Ridiculous.
His definition states that the Ridiculous is that which is in itself incongruous, without involving the notion of danger or pai
Coleridge thus refers to Aristotle’s definition:
“Where the laughable is its own end, and neither inference nor moral is intended, or where at least the writer would wish it so to appear, there arises what we call drollery. The pure, unmixed, ludicrous or laughable belongs exclusively to the understanding, and must be presented under the form of the senses; it lies within the spheres of the eye and the ear, and hence is allied to the fancy. It does not appertain to the reason or the moral sense, and accordingly is alien to the imagination. I think Aristotle has already excellently defined the laughable, τò γελοíον, as consisting of, or depending on, what is out of its proper time and place, yet without danger or pain. Here the impropriety—τò ἄτοπον—is the positive qualification; the dangerlessness—τò ἀχίνδυνον—the negative. The true ludicrous is its own end. When serious satire commences, or satire that is felt as serious, however comically drest, free and genuine laughter ceases; it becomes sardonic. This you experience in reading Young, and also not unfrequently in Butler. The true comic is the blossom of the nettle.”
Yet, notwithstanding Coleridge’s scientific views on the subject, Humor is not an exact science. It is, more truly, an art, whose principles are based on several accepted theories, and some other theories, not so readily accepted or admitted only in part by these who have thought and written on the subject.
A true solution of the mystery of why a joke makes us laugh, has yet to be found. To the mind of the average human being, anything that makes him laugh is a joke. Why it does so, there are very few to know and fewer still to care.
Nor are the Cognoscenti in much better plight. A definition of humor has been attempted by many great and wise minds. Like squaring the circle, it has been argued about repeatedly, it has been written about voluminously. It has been settled in as many different ways as there have been commentators on the subject. And yet no definition, no formula has ever been evolved that is entirely satisfactory.
Aristotle’s theory of the element of the incongruous has come to be known as the Disappointment theory, or Frustrated Expectation.
But Aristotle voiced another theory, which he, in turn, derived from Plato.
Plato said, though a bit indefinitely, that the pleasure we derive in laughing at the comic is an enjoyment of other people’s misfortune, due to a feeling of superiority or gratified vanity that we ourselves are not in like plight.
This is called the Derision theory, and as assimilated and expressed by Aristotle comes near to impinging on and coinciding with his own Disappointment theory.
Moreover, he attempted to combine the two.
For, he said, we always laugh at someone, but in the case, where laughter arises from a deceived expectation, our mistake makes us laugh at ourselves.
In fact, Plato held, in his vague and indefinite statements that there is a disappointment element, a satisfaction element, and sometimes a combination of the two in the make-up of the thing we are calling Humor.
All of which is not very enlightening, but it is to be remembered that those were the first fluttering flights of imagination that sought to pin down the whole matter; yet among the scores that have followed, diverging in many directions, we must admit few, if any, are much more succinct or satisfactory.
The Derision or Discomfiture Theory holds that all pleasure in laughing at a comic scene is an enjoyment of another’s discomfiture. Yet it must be only discomfiture, not grave misfortune or sorrow.
If a man’s hat blows off and he runs out into the street after it, we laugh; but if he is hit by a passing motor car, we do not laugh. If a fat man slips on a banana peel and lands in a mud puddle, we laugh; but if he breaks his leg we do not laugh.
It is the ridiculous discomfiture of another that makes a joke, not the serious accident, and though there are other types and other theories of the cause of humor, doubtless the majority of jokes are based on this principle.
From the Circus Clown to Charlie Chaplin, episodes of discomfiture make us laugh. Every newspaper cartoon or comic series hinges on the discomfiture of somebody. The fly on the bald head, the collar button under the bureau, the henpecked husband, all depend for their humor on the trifling misfortune that makes its victim ridiculous.
An enjoyment of this discomfiture of a fellow man is inherent in human nature, and though there are subtler jests, yet this type has a grip on the risibilities that can never be loosened.
Can we doubt that it was the Serpent’s laughing at the discomfiture of Adam and Eve, caught in deshabille, that caused them to rush for the nearest fig tree? Or perhaps, their eyes being opened, they laughed at one another. Anyway, they were decidedly discomfited, and did their best to remedy matters.
This Derision Theory includes also the jests at the ignorance or stupidity of another. The enormous vogue of the Noodle jokes, some centuries ago, hinged on the delight felt in the superiority of the hearer over the subject of the jest. All laughable blunders, every social faux pas, all funny stories of children’s sayings and doings are based on the consciousness of superiority. Practical jokes represent the simplest form of this theory, as in them the discomfiture of the other person is the prime element, with no subtle byplay to relieve it.
A mild example is the polite rejoinder of the street car conductor when a lady asked at which end of the car she should get off.
“Either end, madame,” he responded, “both ends stop.”
An extreme specimen is the man who told the story of a burning house—“I saw a fellow up on the roof,” he related, “and I called to him, ‘Jump, and I’ll catch you in a blanket!’ Well, I had to laugh,—he jumped,—and I didn’t have no blanket!”
Implied discomfiture is in the story of the agnostic, who was buried in his evening clothes. “Poor Jim,” said a funeral guest; “he didn’t believe in Heaven and he didn’t believe in Hell; and there he lies, all dressed up and no place to go!”
Almost a practical joke is the man who, reading a newspaper, suddenly exclaimed, “Why, here’s a list of people who won’t eat onions any more!” And when his hearer asked to see the list, he handed over the obituary column.
The Disappointment Theory, though overlapping the Derision Theory at times, is based on the idea that the essence of the laughable is the incongruous.
Hazlitt says:
“We laugh at absurdity; we laugh at deformity. We laugh at a bottle-nose in a caricature; at a stuffed figure of an alderman in a pantomime, and at the tale of Slaukenbergius. A dwarf standing by a giant makes a contemptible figure enough. Rosinante and Dapple are laughable from contrast, as their masters from the same principle make two for a pair. We laugh at the dress of foreigners, and they at ours. Three chimney-sweepers meeting three Chinese in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down. Country people laugh at a person because they never saw him before. Any one dressed in the height of the fashion, or quite out of it, is equally an object of ridicule. One rich source of the ludicrous is distress with which we cannot sympathize from its absurdity or insignificance. It is hard to hinder children from laughing at a stammerer, at a negro, at a drunken man, or even at a madman. We laugh at mischief. We laugh at what we do not believe. We say that an argument or an assertion that is very absurd, is quite ludicrous. We laugh to show our satisfaction with ourselves, or our contempt for those about us, or to conceal our envy or our ignorance. We laugh at fools, and at those who pretend to be wise—at extreme simplicity, awkwardness, hypocrisy, and affectation.”
A beautiful definition of the Disappointment Theory is Max Eastman’s, “The experience of a forward motion of interest sufficiently definite so that its ‘coming to nothing’ can be felt.”
Mr. Eastman says further:
“It is more like a reflex action than a mental result. It arises in the very act of perception, when that act is brought to nothing by two conflicting qualities of fact or feeling. It arises when some numb habitual activity, suddenly obstructed, first appears in consciousness with an announcement of its own failure. The blockage of an instinct, a collision between two instincts, the interruption of a habit, a ‘conflict of habit systems,’ a disturbed or misapplied reflex—all these catastrophes, as well as the coming to nothing of an effort at conceptual thought, must enter into the meaning of the word disappointment, if it is to explain the whole field of practical humor. The ‘strain’ in that expectation is what makes it capable of humorous collapse. It is an active expectation. The feelings are involved.”
The point of the Disappointment Theory, that of frustrating a carefully built up expectation is exemplified in jests like these.
“Is your wife entertaining this winter?” asks one society man of another. “Not very,” is the reply.
“I have to go to Brooklyn—” says a perplexed-looking old lady to a traffic policeman. “Are you asking directions, ma’am, or just telling me your troubles?”
The incongruity may be merely a collocution of words.
Mark Twain described Turner’s Slave Ship as “A tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
In a newspaper cartoon, a wife says to her husband, “Even if it is Sunday morning and a terribly hot day, that’s no reason you should go around looking like the dog’s breakfast!”
So we see the element of surprise must be combined with the element of appropriate inappropriateness to gain the desired result.
In this story expectation is aroused for a human tragedy. The incongruity and disappointment make its humor.
As Mr. Caveman was gnawing at a bone in his cave one morning, Mrs. Caveman rushed in, exclaiming, “Quick! get your club! Oh, quick!”
“What’s the matter?” growled Mr. Caveman.
“A sabre-toothed tiger is chasing mother!” gasped his wife.
Mr. Caveman uttered an expression of annoyance.
“And what the deuce do I care,” he said, “what happens to a sabre-toothed tiger?”
It must be admitted that a hard and fast line cannot be drawn between the two theories given us by the Greek philosophers.
Cicero subscribed to the Derision theory, and said the ridiculous rested on a certain meanness and deformity, and a joke to be pleasing must be on somebody. But he declared, also, that the most eminent kind of the ridiculous is that in which we expect to hear one thing and hear another said.
Several other Greek and Roman philosophers tackled the subject without adding anything of importance, and some of them, as well as later writers declared that the comic could never be defined, but is to be appreciated only by taste and natural discernment; while many moderns agree that all theories are inadequate and contradictory, however useful they may be for convenience in discussion.
Perhaps the trouble may be that only serious-minded people attempt a definition of humor, and they are not the ones best fitted for the work.
For the discussion goes on still, and is as fascinating to some types of mentality as is the question of perpetual motion or the Fountain of Immortal Youth.
A useful commentary on the matter, and one appropriate at this juncture is the following extract from the works of the celebrated theologian, Dr. Isaac Barrow, an Englishman of the Seventeenth century.
“It may be demanded,” says he, “what the thing we speak of is, and what this facetiousness doth import; to which question I might reply, as Democritus did to him that asked the definition of a man—’Tis that which we all see and know! and one better apprehends what it is by acquaintance, than I can inform him by description. It is indeed a thing so versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended by several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notice thereof, than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of fleeting air. Sometimes it lieth in pat allusion to a known story, or in seasonable application of a trivial saying, or in forging an apposite tale; sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their sense, or the affinity of their sound; sometimes it is wrapped in a dress of luminous expression; sometimes it lurketh under an odd similitude. Sometimes it is lodged in a sly question; in a smart answer; in a quirkish reason; in a shrewd intimation; in cunningly diverting or cleverly restoring an objection; sometimes it is couched in a bold scheme of speech; in a tart irony; in a lusty hyperbole; in a startling metaphor; in a plausible reconciling of contradictions; or in acute nonsense. Sometimes a scenical representation of persons or things, a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth for it. Sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it riseth only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange; sometimes from a crafty wresting obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language. It is, in short, a manner of speaking out of the simple and plain way (such as reason teacheth and knoweth things by), which by a pretty surprising uncouthness in conceit or expression doth affect and amuse the fancy, showing in it some wonder, and breathing some delight thereto. It raiseth admiration, as signifying a nimble sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of invention, a vivacity of spirit, and reach of wit more than vulgar; it seeming to argue a rare quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote conceits applicable; a notable skill that he can dexterously accommodate them to a purpose before him; together with a lively briskness of humour not apt to damp those sportful flashes of imagination. Whence in Aristotle such persons are termed επιδéξιοι, dexterous men, and ευτροποι, men of facile and versatile manners, who can easily turn themselves to all things, or turn all things to themselves. It also procureth delight, by gratifying curiosity with its rareness or semblance of difficulty (as monsters, not for their beauty but their rarity—as juggling tricks, not for their use but their abstruseness—are beheld with pleasure); by diverting the mind from its road of serious thoughts; by instilling gaiety and airiness of spirit; by provoking to such dispositions of spirit in way of emulation or compliance; and by seasoning matter, otherwise distasteful or insipid, with an unusual and thence grateful tang.”—Barrow’s Works, Sermon 14.
Also in the Seventeenth century there sprang into being a definition that has lived, possibly because of the apt wording of its phrase.
It is by Thomas Hobbes, who declared for the Derision Theory, but with less sweetness and light than it had hitherto enjoyed.
“Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called Laughter,” said Hobbes in the “Leviathan,” “and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a signe of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper workes is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves onely with the most able.”
and, also from Hobbes:
“The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the follies of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any present dishonour.”—Treatise on Human Nature, chap. ix.
There is small doubt that the vogue of Hobbes’ definition of this theory rests on the delightfully expressive, “Sudden Glory,” for those two words beautifully picture the emotion caused by the unexpected opportunity to laugh at the discomfiture of another.
Locke followed with a dry and meaningless dissertation, and Coleridge wrote his discerning but all too brief remarks.
Many German writers gave profound if unimportant opinions.
Addison wrote pleasantly about it, and George Meredith, while accepting the Derision Theory, modified its harshness thus:
“If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied. It has the sage’s brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels without any fluttering eagerness. Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually, or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.”
With Kant, however, the other theory of Aristotle came into notice. Kant declared, “Laughter is the affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”
This was dubbed by Emerson, “Frustrated Expectation,” and describes the Disappointment Theory as Sudden Glory describes the Derision Theory.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets of the World of Humor.
There are many other theories and sub-theories, there are long and prosy books written about them, but are outside our Outline.
A general understanding of the humorous element is all we are after and that has now been set forth.
A question closely akin to What is Humor? is What is a Sense of Humor?
The phrase seems self-explanatory, and is by no means identical with the thing itself. Nor are the two inseparable. Humor and the sense of humor need not necessarily lie in the same brain.
Two erudite writers on this subject have chosen to consider the phrase as a unique bit of terminology.
Mr. Max Eastman says; “The creation of that name is the most original and the most profound contribution of modern thought to the problem of the comic.”
While Professor Brander Matthews says; “Ample as the English vocabulary is today, it is sometimes strangely deficient in needful terms. Thus it is that we have nothing but the inadequate phrase sense of humor to denominate a quality which is often confounded with humor itself, and which should always be sharply discriminated from it.”
Now it would seem that the phrase was simply a matter of evolution, coming along when the time was ripe. Surely it is no stroke of genius, nor yet is it hopelessly inadequate.
It must be granted that a sense of the humorous is as logical a thought as a sensitive ear for music, or, to be more strictly analogous, a sense of moderation or that very definite thing, card sense.
Sense, used thus, is almost synonymous with taste, and a taste for literature or for the Fine Arts in no way implies a productive faculty in those fields. A taste for humor would mean precisely the same thing as a sense of humor, and the taste or the sense may be more or less natural and more or less cultivated, as in the matter of books or pictures.
A taste for music is a sense of music, and one may appreciate and enjoy music and its rendition to the utmost without being able to sing a note or play upon any instrument whatever.
One may be a music critic or an art critic, or even a critic of literature, without being able to create any of these things.
Why, then, put forth as a discovery that one may have a sense of humor without being humorous and vice versa?
Humor is creative, while the sense of humor is merely receptive and appreciative.
Many great humorists have little or no sense of humor. Try to tell a joke to an accredited joker and note his blank expression of uncomprehension. It is because he has no sense of humor that he takes himself seriously.
Such was the case with Dickens, with Carlyle, with many renowned wits. The humorist without the sense of humor is a bore. He tells long, detailed yarns, proud of himself, and not seeing his hearers’ lack of interest.
The man with a sense of humor is a joy to know and to be with.
The man who possesses both is already an immortal.
Now as the sense of humor is negative, recipient, while humor is positive and creative, it follows that a sense of humor alone cannot produce humorous literature.
These mute, inglorious Miltons, therefore, have no place in our Outline, but they deserve a passing word of recognition for the assistance they have been to the humorists, by way of being applauding audiences.
For humor, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One with an acute sense of humor will see comic in stones, wit in the running brooks,—while a dull or absent sense of humor can see no fun save in the obvious jest.
The lines,
“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him who hears it. Never in the tongue
Of him who makes it.”
in Love’s Labour’s Lost proves that Shakespeare understood the meaning and value of a sense of humor.
Although it was at a much later date that the word humor came to be used as now, to mean a gentle, good-natured sort of fun.
All types of humor are universal and of all time. But the first definitions were arrived at by the men of Greece and Rome, who were scholarly and analytical, hence the hair-splitting and meticulous efforts to treat it metaphysically.
Humor today rarely is used in a caustic or biting sense,—that is reserved for wit.
Which brings us to another great and futile question,—the distinction between wit and humor.
There is not time or space to take up this subject fully here. But we can sum up the decisions and opinions of some few of the thinking minds that have been bent upon it.
As the best and most comprehensive is the dissertation by William Hazlitt, most of this is here given.
“Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. Humour, as it is shown in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation, and character; wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view. Wit, as distinguished from poetry, is the imagination or fancy inverted and so applied to given objects, as to make the little look less, the mean more light and worthless; or to divert our admiration or wean our affections from that which is lofty and impressive, instead of producing a more intense admiration and exalted passion, as poetry does. Wit may sometimes, indeed, be shown in compliments as well as satire; as in the common epigram—
“‘Accept a miracle, instead of wit:
See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ.’
But then the mode of paying it is playful and ironical, and contradicts itself in the very act of making its own performance an humble foil to another’s. Wit hovers round the borders of the light and trifling, whether in matters of pleasure or pain; for as soon as it describes the serious seriously, it ceases to be wit, and passes into a different form. Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference, or an ingenious and striking exposition of those evanescent and glancing impressions of objects which affect us more from surprise or contrast to the train of our ordinary and literal preconceptions, than from anything in the objects themselves exciting our necessary sympathy or lasting hatred.
“That wit is the most refined and effectual, which is founded on the detection of unexpected likeness or distinction in things, rather than in words.
“Wit is, in fact, a voluntary act of the mind, or exercise of the invention, showing the absurd and ludicrous consciously, whether in ourselves or another. Cross-readings, where the blunders are designed, are wit; but if any one were to light upon them through ignorance or accident, they would be merely ludicrous.
“Lastly, there is a wit of sense and observation, which consists in the acute illustration of good sense and practical wisdom by means of some far-fetched conceit or quaint imagery. The matter is sense, but the form is wit. Thus the lines in Pope—
“’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike; yet each believes his own—’
are witty rather than poetical; because the truth they convey is a mere dry observation on human life, without elevation or enthusiasm, and the illustration of it is of that quaint and familiar kind that is merely curious and fanciful.”
Thus Hazlitt: yet it is not necessary to be so verbose in the matter of discriminating wit from humor.
They are intrinsically different though often outwardly alike.
Wit is intensive or incisive, while humor is expansive. Wit is rapid, humor is slow. Wit is sharp, humor is gentle. Wit is intentional, humor is fortuitous.
But to my mind the great difference lies in the fact that wit is subjective while humor is objective.
Wit is the invention of the mind of its creator; humor lies in the object that he observes. Wit originates in one’s self, humor outside one’s self.
Again, wit is art, humor is nature. Wit is creative fancy, more or less educated and skilled. Humor is found in a simple object, and is unintentional.
Yet in these, as in all definitions, we must stretch a point when necessary; we must make allowances for viewpoints and opinions, and we must agree that the question is not one that may be answered by the card.
Nor is it necessary in the present undertaking.
An Outline of Humor is planned to include all sorts and conditions of fun, all types and distinctions of wit and humor from the earliest available records, or deductions from records, down to the dawn of the Twentieth Century.
Man has been defined as the animal capable of laughter. Although this definition has been attacked by lovers of quadrupeds, it has held in the minds of thinkers and students. Aristotle, Milton, Hazlitt, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Bergson and many other distinguished scholars hold that the playfulness seen in animals is in no way an indication of their sense of humor.
The Laughing Hyena and the Laughing Jackass are so called only because their cry has a likeness to the sound of raucous human laughter, but it is no result of mirthful feeling.
Hazlitt says man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
The playfulness of dogs or kittens is often assumed to be humor, when it is mere imitative sagacity. The stolid, imperturbable gravity of animals’ faces shows no appreciation of mirth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of the large brown eyes of oxen as imperfect organisms, because they may show no sign of fun.
Yet it is, in a way, a matter of opinion, for the instinct of humor was among the latest to evolve in the human race, and rudimentary hints of it may be present in other animals as in our own children. A monkey or a baby will show amusement when tickled, but this is mere physical reflex action, and cannot be called a true sense of humor.
Many animal lovers assume intelligences in their pets that are mere reflections of their own mental processes or are thoughts fathered by their own wishes.
It is, however, of little importance, for however appreciative of fun an animal may be, it cannot create or impart wit or humor, and most certainly it cannot laugh.
Bergson goes even farther. He declares the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.
He states: You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.
This is easily proved by the recollection of the fun of Puss In Boots or The Three Bears, and the gravity of a Natural History.
Therefore, Bergson argues, man is not only the only animal that laughs, he is the only animal which is laughed at, for if any other animal or any lifeless object provokes mirth, it is only because of some resemblance to man in appearance or intent.
So, with such minor exceptions as to be doubtful or negligible, we must accept man as the only exponent or possessor of humor.
And it is one of the latest achievements of humanity.
First, we assent, was the survival of the fittest. Followed a sense of hunger, a sense of safety, a sense of warfare, a sense of Tribal Rights,—through all these stages there was no time or need for humor.
Among the earliest fossilized remains no funny bone has been found.
Doubtless, too, a sense of sorrow came before the sense of humor dawned. Death came, and early man wept long before it occurred to him to laugh and have the world laugh with him. Gregariousness and leisure were necessary before mirth could ensue. All life was subjective; dawning intelligence learned first to look out for Number One.
Yet it was early in the game that our primordial ancestors began to see a lighter side of life.
Indeed, as Mr. Wells tells us, they mimicked very cleverly, gestured, danced and laughed before they could talk!
And the consideration of the development of this almost innate human sense is our present undertaking.
The matter falls easily,—almost too easily,—into three divisions.
Let us call them, Ancient, Middle and Modern.
This is perhaps not an original idea of division, but it is certainly the best for a preliminary arrangement. And it may not be convenient to stick religiously to consecutive dates; our progress may become logical rather than chronological.
As to a general division, then, let us consider Ancient Humor as a period from the very beginning down to the time of the Greeks. The Middle Division to continue until about the time of Chaucer. And the Modern Period from that time to the present.