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.