“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.