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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates 
 
 https://archive.org/details/senseofhumorOOeast 
 
THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 BY 
 
 MAX EASTMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF “ENJOYMENT OF POETRY,'* “COLORS OF LIFE— POEMS AND 
 SONGS AND SONNETS,” ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
 1922 
 
Copyright, 1921, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 Published November, 1921 
 
2oW 
 
 £ a 1 s 
 
 \ O Ql Si 
 
 l S UN 
 
 NJ 
 
 
 TO FLORENCE DESHON 
 
 v£ : 
 
 1 V 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Although I have tried to make this book enjoy- 
 able, and keep it alive to the qualities of its subject, 
 my prevailing purpose has been scientific. So far as 
 the present technique of psychology permits of solu- 
 tions, I have tried to solve the problem of humorous 
 laughter. And if I have taken one valid step toward 
 that solution, it will please my purpose better than 
 any amount of the success that might be called literary. 
 
 The relation between science and the literature of 
 generalities seems to me to be one of the great prob- 
 lems of the future. For science is developing so tech- 
 nical and special a body of knowledge upon every sub- 
 ject under the sun, that only an expert can know any- 
 thing substantial of what is to be known about it. 
 And yet literary men with no real training in science 
 continue to pretend that they know something, if not 
 everything, about all subjects. They write essays 
 upon general problems with the same free joy of self- 
 expression with which they write stories or poems 
 about particular things or experiences. And these 
 essays, while they may stimulate the reader and give 
 him a fine sense of mental companionship, are very 
 likely to be in flat contradiction to some method or re- 
 sult that scientific men have already humbly and con- 
 scientiously verified — in which case they certainly be- 
 long to the second and not the first order of human 
 values. The attitude of Carlyle toward Darwin’s dis- 
 
 vii 
 
Vlll 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 coveries is an example in point, and Nietzsche’s ama- 
 teur views on heredity at the very basis of his gospel 
 of the Superman, and the light manner in which men 
 like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, and at one time 
 Maxim Gorki, while professing to be scientific social- 
 ists, have dismissed or miscomprehended the Marxian 
 theories of history. 
 
 This may seem a remote opening for a book about 
 humor, but it happens that the problem of humor has 
 always been a special field of play for the irresponsible 
 essay-writer, and the literature that adorns it is no- 
 toriously inconsequential. When I told Bernard Shaw 
 that I was writing this book, he advised me to go to 
 a sanitarium. “There is no more dangerous literary 
 symptom,” he said, “than a temptation to write about 
 wit and humor. It indicates the total loss of both.” 
 And with a proper emphasis upon the word literary, 
 that is entirely true. But if technical science con- 
 tinues to develop as it has in the last half-century, and 
 men of letters continue not to develop, it will soon be 
 true that there is no more dangerous literary symptom 
 than a temptation to write about any problem of gen- 
 eral knowledge. People will take our Plays seriously, 
 but not our Prefaces — not our essays, epigrams, and 
 immortal disquisitions. These they will glance 
 through with an indulgent smile, and then go look the 
 thing up in a laboratory report and find out what the 
 truth is. 
 
 The problem of scientific as opposed to “literary” 
 knowledge will have to be solved. And in as much as 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ix 
 
 scientific knowledge happens upon the whole to be cor- 
 rect, I can see no way to solve it, except for the literary 
 people to go to work. Of this gentle revolution I have 
 tried to give a small example in the present book. 
 
 In the First Part I have stated my own theory as to 
 what humor is, and I have shown its application to 
 the various kinds of things we laugh at. In the Second 
 Part I have given an account of the historic attempts 
 of mankind to explain humor and state the causes of 
 laughter. I have classified these attempts and criti- 
 cised them from the standpoint of my own theory, but 
 I have tried to make my account generous enough so 
 that the reader who wishes to experiment or think 
 further can find here all the leading ideas that others 
 might contribute to his effort. In the concluding 
 chapter I have treated my own theory in somewhat 
 the same way as the rest, showing its relation to them 
 and to the existing psychology of the emotions. 
 
 The Second Part is written mainly for purposes of 
 historic reference and technical argument, and will 
 not perhaps interest the general reader. It is folly, 
 at any rate — in this day of the newspaper, the maga- 
 zine, pamphlet, sign-board, prospectus, and the general 
 onward rush for nowhere — for an author to pretend 
 that people are really going to sit down and read his 
 book. I therefore extend my benediction and gratitude, 
 and the permission to say that he has read my book, to 
 any one who will finish Part I and read the last chapter 
 of Part II. He will know all the affirmative things I 
 have to say about humorous laughter. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Laughter of Pleasure 3 
 
 II. Laughter of Playful Pain 11 
 
 III. Elementary Humor 20 
 
 IV. Jokes with a Point 27 
 
 V. Humor and Hostility 32 
 
 VI. Humor and Sexuality 38 
 
 VII. Humor and Truth 42 
 
 VIII. The Humor of Quantity 49 
 
 IX. Practical Humor 58 
 
 X. Poetic Humor 72 
 
 XI. Good and Bad Jokes 86 
 
 PART II 
 
 THEORIES OF HUMOR 
 
 I. The Greek Philosophers 123 
 
 II. The Agnostic Attitude 130 
 
 III. The Derision Theory 136 
 
 xi 
 
Xll 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 IV. The Disappointment Theory 152 
 
 V. The Discovery of Benign Humor .... 165 
 
 VI. The Mechanical Theory 175 
 
 i 
 
 VII. Laughter as Liberty 184 
 
 VIII. Freud’s Contribution 190 
 
 IX. The Discovery of Merry Laughter . . . 206 
 
 X. Conflict-Mixture Theories 211 
 
 XI. Humor as Instinct 224 
 
 Notes and References 237 
 
PART I 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 

 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 
 
 With almost every new system of philosophy there 
 comes a magical explanation of laughter as a kind of 
 side-show. A portion of the apparatus is removed 
 from the main tent, a slight relaxation of intelligence 
 is permitted, and a number of tamed witticisms are 
 ushered in, and go through their paces in a mechani- 
 cal way, or simply slink around and refuse to be humor- 
 ous upon exhibition. The result is a mood of strained 
 mercy and embarrassment very little akin to the sym- 
 pathy of true understanding. I think the error in this 
 procedure is to regard the explanation of laughter as 
 a side-show, and not a main part of the explanation 
 of man. Perhaps there is no room for fun and friendly 
 merriment in that small cerebral habitation which 
 philosophers call the universe, and so naturally to 
 them the problem of laughter appears trivial and 
 external, a “pert challenge” to their great powers of 
 speculation. But to the more humble observer who 
 simply looks out of his window at the daily stream of 
 behavior, inquiring of its course, it seems as though 
 men and women were always seeking for something or 
 anything at which they might smile. And those ex- 
 planations which make laughter a mere by-product, of 
 
 3 
 
4 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 other enterprises — a mechanical accident, a condition 
 of release or overflow — seem to give small justice to 
 this continual and very dexterous accomplishment that 
 distinguishes man and raises him a little above the 
 less amiable animals. 
 
 Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds 
 society together. It seems to be an intrinsic part of 
 the gregarious instinct in men, signifying that they are 
 something more than merely restive in solitude, and 
 desirous to stand alongside of their kind and chew, 
 signifying that to be with others is for them action and 
 vivid employment of their nature. A smile is the uni- 
 versal welcome, and laughter is a greeting that we may 
 give to any arriving friend. It is a definite affirma- 
 tion of hospitality and delight. To laugh is to say 
 “Yes.” It is to say “Good !” “I agree to your emo- 
 tion!” “I am happy to see you!” A smile is the 
 path along which two selves approach, and not to 
 smile is to declare off the meeting explicitly. 
 
 Perhaps some mechanical accident might explain 
 why this instinct flows out in just these good wrinkles 
 and gusts of amiability, and not in some other mode 
 of action. We can imagine that we might have ac- 
 complished the same thing more quietly with our ears, 
 as we see that dogs accomplish it with their tails. But 
 if we consider the handicap they suffer in conversation, 
 and observe how they fold themselves half-double in 
 a vain effort to bring forward that rear-end cordiality 
 into the main scene of action, we shall be inclined to 
 acknowledge a social utility even in the forms of human 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 
 
 laughter. The need for an expression which should be 
 luminous, and should mingle readily with speech and 
 vision, may well have been the determining factor in 
 its evolution. A smile is a moving summary of the 
 chief points of personality. It is so complete and so 
 delicate an employment of the features that medical 
 doctors rely upon it to reveal the least trace of a facial 
 paralysis when all the other expressions appear normal. 
 And laughter is but an addition of breath and voice 
 and gesture to this already complicated act. The two 
 can not be distinguished either physically or in the fun- 
 damental qualities of feeling involved. Those who have 
 attempted this have neglected to observe that every 
 one who laughs is still smiling. The celebration is 
 single and continuous as it is complex and delicate. 
 It is a celebration of social pleasure, a blessing without 
 which our lives would be but the spare outline of what 
 they are. 
 
 In Charles Fourier this pleasure was so dominant 
 that he believed a law of “social attraction” could play 
 the same role in political science as the law of gravi- 
 tation in physics. And as a natural symptom of that 
 excessive state of feeling, we learn that Charles Fourier 
 never smiled. It is usually through such an inhibition 
 of our actions that our passions are intensified. And 
 that, I suppose, is why we feel so warm a trust in the 
 friendliness of those who smile gently, and mostly 
 through their eyes, while those who “laugh with the 
 lips ” we think are of more use in luck than trouble. All 
 the famous moralists of Greece and Rome, and the 
 
6 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 Hindu sages too, were of the opinion that unrestrained 
 laughter is not characteristic of the wise and strong. 
 But for my part I think the surest sign of a healthy 
 spirit is to see friendly joyfulness pour all over his fea- 
 tures, and down into his throat and the muscles of his 
 body without bound or hindrance. The smile that fills 
 my imagination is one that begins with a flash, because 
 the motion of the upper lip comes first and so strongly, 
 and yet that lip broadens a little as it rises so that 
 while all the teeth shine the mouth is only redder than 
 it was — the cheeks curve, and the eyes gather light 
 and attract the brows and lashes toward them just 
 infinitesimally, warming their vivid glitter with those 
 radiant soft lines of good nature and good-will. Such 
 living motions are more beautiful than any wine or 
 flower or colors in the clouds of heaven, and they are 
 almost the source of the light in which men struggle 
 through so much pain and blind anxious endeavor to 
 the goal of darkness. 
 
 A reason why this so obvious thing has escaped the 
 philosophers is that they have not clearly distinguished 
 laughter from the curling of the lip in scorn. And 
 yet the temper of these two acts is opposite and their 
 neural machinery distinct, as may be seen in the fact 
 that we laugh with both sides of our face, but most of 
 us can sneer only with one. To unflesh an eye-tooth 
 and emit short breaths or ha-ha’s against a man’s 
 presence, is as far from laughter as the fangs of a 
 canine animal are from his tail. It is therefore upon 
 good biological and bodily grounds, as well as upon 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 
 
 7 
 
 grounds of feeling, that we dismiss from the topic of 
 laughter at the outset the topic of scorn. Not only 
 the sneer itself, but all of its disagreeable children, 
 dwelling in the words gibe, leer, jeer, scoff, flout, hoot, 
 gird, niggle, taunt, the sardonic or cynic probe, and the 
 lash of sarcasm, are to be got out of our way at the 
 beginning. The word sarcasm means in its origin a 
 tearing of the flesh like dogs, and may well be considered 
 a function of the teeth rather than of the lips. The 
 cynic attitude of wit derives its name ultimately also 
 from the dog. And even the word sardonic is plausi- 
 bly derived from the Greek, aatpco, used originally 
 of animals, and corresponding to our phrase “show 
 your teeth.” Deride also, although in origin a word 
 of laughter, has gone over to the wolf’s breed, and 
 does not describe any of the true family of the smile. 
 It is possible, of course, that the feelings indicated in 
 these words may mingle with laughter, as may a great 
 variety of the moods of men, and give rise to new 
 flavors of emotion, but they are none of them involved 
 in the essence and generation of laughter itself, which 
 is not an act of rejection but of acceptance. It is not 
 pain, but pleasure. It is not derision, but delight, as 
 any one may convince himself by observing it in the 
 cradle at about the fortieth day. For that is the day 
 of its birth — and on that day a companion is born. 
 And the smile of dawning welcome, there so eventful, 
 and so clearly demonstrated to be essential to the very 
 warmth and existence of social communion, is the 
 native original of all smiles and all laughter. 
 
8 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 The variety of uses to which this expression is 
 subsequently put, may be understood, if we realize how 
 profoundly the social instinct and emotion enter into 
 and pervade our whole conscious existence. We may 
 almost say they are the receptacle in which human 
 nature is compounded. It is only in relation to others 
 that our own miraculous selves ever could have been 
 created. And therefore it is not surprising if these 
 selves continue a social bearing even in complete soli- 
 tude, and grin into their beer, or chuckle upon the 
 arrival of an idea in their minds, or make merry with 
 the winds and wild roses blowing over the hill. In- 
 deed anything that drops pleasantly and well ripened 
 into the lap, having been expected long enough, or 
 being sufficiently unexpected to possess an eventful 
 character, wffil usually be greeted laughingly by people 
 not sitting under the incubus of some dull ideal of 
 decorum. And in times of true positive happiness 
 almost any stimulus whatever that is not painful will 
 awaken a smile. People who are happy laugh oftener, 
 indeed, and upon a less special provocation, than do 
 people who are sorrowful cry. x\nd therefore it is 
 possible to say that laughter, from being a means for 
 the communication of social pleasure , has, by a natural 
 economy in evolution, become a means for the social 
 communication of pleasure, and has acquired almost a 
 kind of identity in our nervous systems with the state 
 of joy or satisfaction in general. It is a manifestation 
 of success and plenitude of life, and has been so under- 
 stood, not only in the songs of poets — “The fields did 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 
 
 9 
 
 laugh, the flowers did freshly spring” — but also in the 
 rituals of religion. For it is only in our own too Chris- 
 tian times that laughter was banished out of the 
 church, and tears alone established as an appropriate 
 approach to the deity. At the sacrificial altar, during 
 the Roman festival of the Lupercalia, two young men 
 would be touched with a bloody knife, and when the 
 blood had been wiped from their foreheads with a 
 handful of wool dipped in milk, the ritual required that 
 they should laugh. It was a symbol of their deliver- 
 ance into life, like that of Isaak under the knife of 
 Abraham. And we are told that the name Isaak it- 
 self in its origin means “he who laughs.” For thus 
 in all primitive and naive religions, which are not so 
 tinctured as ours is with death and negation, and 
 whose believers actually believe in the reality of their 
 deities, laughter has played its part. Not only have 
 men laughed before God in thanksgiving for the bless- 
 ing of life, but the gods themselves — the eight hundred 
 myriads of gods — in whom life is immortal, have 
 laughed immortally together. 
 
 For these reasons it seems strange that tears and 
 moanings and the piteous short wrinkles of grief in the 
 forehead should be accepted by philosophers as justi- 
 fied through their expressive value, while laughter, as 
 though it were some kind of slip or misdemeanor on 
 the part of nature, should always have to be explained 
 away. I will not try to explain laughter away, but 
 assuming it to be one of the most necessary gifts we 
 have, and wholly to be taken for granted even if there 
 
10 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 were no funny thing in the world, I will explain why 
 it was carried beyond its original domain, and employed 
 in the appreciation of humor and jokes. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 
 
 The condition in which joyful laughter most con- 
 tinually occurs is that of play. And this is because 
 the satisfactions enjoyed in play are strong and fre- 
 quent, without being passionate enough to produce a 
 more specific expression. Play is an attitude in which 
 we exercise our instincts and experience our emotions 
 superficially, as though tasting or smelling of them, but 
 not drinking them down. We arrive at the point of 
 satisfaction sooner and with less organic disturbance. 
 We do not have to hack and slay an enemy in order 
 to appease our fighting thirst; we are contented to 
 win on points. We do not have to produce and cher- 
 ish the flesh of a baby; we satisfy our parental instinct 
 upon a puppy or a bundle of rags. And so it is with 
 all our instincts — we fight, we hunt, we conduct court- 
 ships, we construct houses and cities, acquire property, 
 incur dangers, we lord it over our fellows, we demean 
 ourselves before them, all in a miniature or mimic 
 way, and yet with a pleasure that is altogether real. 
 It is as though nature, realizing how strenuous and 
 difficult a thing it is to live, had provided for us this 
 faery-shadow life, in which we might prepare and exer- 
 cise ourselves without suffering too much or perishing 
 in strong passion, for the more genuine achievement of 
 
 11 
 
12 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 satisfactions — and in which again we might refresh and 
 restore ourselves, when the strain of achievement is 
 great, and genuine satisfactions are too long withheld. 
 Play is the school of nature, and also it is her device 
 of recreation. And we can easily believe that with- 
 out such a device she could never have created any- 
 thing so complex, agile, intelligent, and resolute as 
 some of the animals are, which play much and have a 
 long period of youth. 
 
 Philosophers have been accustomed to define play 
 as any activity that is undertaken for the pleasure in- 
 volved in it, and not for the sake of an end to be 
 achieved. And we do, of course, naturally call such 
 deliberate pursuits of pleasure in action playful. But, 
 although it is natural to call them playful, it is not good 
 science to define play as consisting of this pursuit. 
 For play in its elementary form is not deliberate but 
 instinctive. It is not a conscious undertaking but a 
 spontaneous attitude. It is not distinguished by the 
 idea of getting pleasure, but by the fact that pleasure 
 is so easily got. When we put our hand between the 
 teeth of a young puppy of the fighting breed in a rough 
 mimic of battle, we do not rely upon his understand- 
 ing that the object of the engagement is amusement 
 and not bloodshed; we rely upon his instincts. We 
 know that he will perceive and adopt the play-attitude 
 without previous instruction, and with hardly the 
 possibility of error. He can play at fighting just as 
 early and just as mysteriously well as he can fight. 
 He does not have to keep up any mental reservation, or 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 
 
 13 
 
 have it explained to him that it is “all in fun,” that we 
 are “only fooling.” It is not an idea, but a fact, that 
 he is fooling; and he can be relied upon never to sink 
 his teeth home, for the reason that in that state of 
 fact he gets a full satisfaction without it. In our own 
 mature and intellectual life a conscious purpose seizes 
 and develops this hereditary gift, a serious thought de- 
 vises games and sports and dances to increase the 
 harvest of its pleasure. But at the root and centre of 
 the whole perennial circus of our fun, there remains 
 the same fact — the same definite condition of the in- 
 stincts. And however it may be ultimately explained, 
 this condition is characterized by the accessibility and 
 predominance of pleasure, rather than by the pursuit 
 of it. 
 
 We do not know much in a scientific way about 
 pleasure and displeasure, or what it is within us that 
 makes us satisfied or unsatisfied. But we know at 
 least that a deep and general activity of our instincts 
 entails them both. The instinct of fear and that 
 called “disgust” seem to be painful in their very be- 
 ginning, and all the instincts hurt us when they are 
 aroused and then baffled so that we feel the lack of 
 their fulfilment. For this reason the predominance 
 of pleasure in their playful exercise is more remark- 
 able, and implies a more complex adjustment of our 
 organs, than we who are so accustomed to the fact 
 have ever thought. For if real and solid satisfaction 
 comes in the play-attitude from mimic or superficial 
 achievement, we should expect dissatisfaction to be 
 
14 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 real and solid whenever this slight achievement fails. 
 If we shout so joyfully in play’s victories why should we 
 not sob desperately in its pains ? It seems to me just 
 here that nature, in her necessity to make us happy 
 when we play — by what interior means we can hardly 
 guess — has triumphed over the very terms of life. 
 For she has ordained it in the inmost structure of our 
 minds that playful failures have a peculiar interest for 
 us, and playful dreadfulness instead of hurting makes 
 us laugh. Indeed it is the first sure sign of play in 
 babies when they giggle instead of looking troubled 
 at our gargoyle faces, and when they find amusement 
 in our snatching away a thing they have reached out 
 to grasp. That feeling of amusement is a new, unique 
 one, and that giggle is a different act from the smile of 
 gratification which greets a friendly look. It is an 
 act of welcoming a playful shock or disappointment — 
 an act for which our nervous systems are arranged 
 at birth as perfectly, and with as specific an accompani- 
 ment of interest and emotion, as they are arranged to 
 greet with anger and pugnacious effort a more serious 
 blockage of our wills. It is an instinct. And this 
 instinct is the germ and simple rudiment of what we 
 call the sense of humor. 
 
 We can make credible to our minds the develop- 
 ment of such an instinct, if we consider what a delicate 
 balance is kept up in many circumstances between 
 pleasure and pain. Even when we are seriously 
 shocked and horrified, a spasm of mad laughter 
 not infrequently occurs; and in great moments of 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 
 
 15 
 
 delight, on the other hand, and often at the very 
 tip-top of laughter, we fall to weeping. It is almost 
 a custom for one or two to dissolve in tears around 
 the Christmas-tree and on birthdays; and the sobs 
 of happy love and of sudden rescue, the strong 
 weeping at the prodigal’s return, are among the most 
 natural manifestations of healthy human nature. In 
 unhealthy states the interchange of these expressions 
 is even more pronounced. A chronic habit of violent 
 laughing at sad news has been observed; and the acute 
 confusion of hot tears with hilarious laughter is almost 
 the commonest form of hysteric seizure. In young 
 children such confusions are not called hysterical, but 
 are assumed to be normal to the undeveloped. They 
 make it evident that in our fine mechanism of nerves 
 some rather slight interior accident can divert a po- 
 tential state of feeling from one of these channels of 
 act and reality into the other. And although the 
 ability to sob and thus droop down with joy, could 
 hardly have been cherished as an advantage in the 
 development of our species, we need not be surprised 
 if the opposite accident — the ability to smile and even 
 outrageously to laugh when we are shocked or disap- 
 pointed — has been crystallized and, for the purposes of 
 play at least, made fast in our endowment as a mode 
 of regular response. 
 
 The most crude and elementary form of play, the 
 only one which has a physiological basis of its own, is 
 tickling. And since much of the laughter that occurs 
 in tickling is accompanied with a humorous emotion. 
 
16 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 we must look to this game for the authentic and first 
 picture of what humor is. It appears that our skin 
 has an exaggerated sensitivity at certain points which 
 in real battle it is of vital importance that we should 
 defend. We dread to be touched at these points, 
 and impetuously protect ourselves against the playful 
 assaults of a companion. We thus learn and exercise 
 the art of self-defense. But although we have so vio- 
 lent an impulse to protect these points from contact, 
 we are not violently aggrieved when they are touched, 
 but on the contrary we are uproariously amused. We 
 find this thing which we had fought off with horror to 
 be not horrible at all but comic. And for that reason, 
 although we continue to fight it off, we still continue 
 to invite it. We experience thus a confused sense of 
 pain combined with pleasure, or at least the dread of 
 pain with humorous delight, which since the day of 
 Plato the psychologists have vainly taxed their science 
 to explain. 
 
 Whether the pleasure is on the surface and the 
 pain, as Plato seemed to think it, “underneath,” or 
 whether the sensation is painful and the pleasure lies 
 in some conceptual or perceptive contribution of the 
 brain, or whether there are two kinds of sensation 
 deserving each a long new serious Greek name, as a 
 modern scientist proposes, the question never has 
 been put to rest. Only that something which is or 
 ought to be painful, is also or sometimes manages to 
 be pleasant, they are all agreed. And we can, by 
 means of the concept of a humorous instinct, give at 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 
 
 17 
 
 least a simple and not illogical description of the point 
 of their agreement. 
 
 Tickling is unpleasant when we “take it seriously.” 
 And for that reason to some sober adults it is always 
 unpleasant, and even merry children cannot enjoy 
 tickling or respond with laughter unless they are dis- 
 tinctly in a mood of play. For that reason also, even 
 where the skin is sensitive enough, we cannot very 
 well enjoy tickling ourselves. We cannot regard our 
 own attacks as playful. And they are not playful — 
 for the essence of this fighting game, if not perhaps in 
 some degree the essence of all play, is social. But 
 when we are attacked by a playmate, toward whom 
 we are “ in fun,” we find at just those points where we 
 should experience a disagreeable sensation if we were 
 serious, the experience of a peculiar and pleasant emo- 
 tion. It is a true description of this fact to say that 
 those otherwise unpleasant contacts, and those other- 
 wise intolerable dismays and disappointments, awaken 
 through our central nervous systems in the state of 
 play, an instinctive laughter whose interior feeling we 
 enjoy. And it is an explanation at least of the bio- 
 logical development of such laughter, to say that with- 
 out it this most useful form of play could never have 
 acquired its peculiar character — the character of mor- 
 tal combat without suffering. 
 
 In common English speech we recognize this critical 
 position of the humorous instinct in the mind’s me- 
 chanics, for we are agreed now upon the word funny as 
 a generic name for all the situations which arouse it. 
 
18 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 And funny stands in a mid-position between play and 
 perplexity. It appears that some northern cousin of 
 the Gaelic word for pleasure, fonn, was so full of pure 
 and fair delight that in the seventeenth century it was 
 simply ravished and carried away home by these lit- 
 erary English — who have always been word-robbers of 
 the most delicate and voluptuous taste — and there it 
 absorbed into its meaning, as fun, all that there is of 
 affirmative enjoyment in the mood of play. But this 
 enjoyment is so evidently related by proximity and 
 dependence to a sense of humor, that wdthin another 
 century the word funny was found to be a name for 
 the situations in which that instinct is appealed to. 
 And these situations, again, are so clearly of a baffling 
 or a lightly troubling nature, that this same word 
 funny is now in another century employed to describe 
 things in sober life that perplex us, and give pause, not 
 too distressing, to our serious wills. 
 
 The development of language has thus been wiser in 
 our time than any philosopher. But once long ago 
 the great unharnessed eye of Rabelais perceived and 
 named this same connection of qualities. It was in 
 his celebration of Pantagruelism, “wdiich you know,” 
 he said, “is a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the 
 scorn of fortune.” That was a description of humor 
 in its first as well as its last essence. And Rabelais 
 is the sovereign of the world’s humor, exactly because 
 all his jests and vagaries are conceived, born, and bred 
 to flourish in their native home and atmosphere, the 
 attitude of play. With that gigantic mental and 
 
LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 19 
 
 poetic equipment which we attribute besides only to 
 Plato and Shakespeare, this genius of exuberance sim- 
 ply romped and gambolled all over the universe. It 
 is well that he should speak the last word here. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 ELEMENTARY HUMOR 
 
 Play, then, is a preliminary or divertive surface- 
 life in which success is fun, but failure funny. And 
 it is natural enough, and will seem entirely proper to 
 those who have ever tasted the dregs of hard work and 
 deep passion, that we revert to this elysian condition 
 very frequently in the midst of our serious lives. There 
 may be a tincture of it in the most solemn efforts. 
 
 The happy are they 
 Whose work is play. 
 
 And it seems certain that in any just and genially 
 composed society a good many people will be able to 
 be happy a good deal of the time, and there W'ill be at 
 least a hearty effort toward the propagation of those 
 “ jolly fools of ease and leisure,” who, like Rabelais 
 himself, could be happy all the time if they did not 
 have to settle the account. 
 
 Even in our own fallen state of moral bondage and 
 pecuniary anxiety there is a development of the nega- 
 tive or defensive side of playful happiness, the sense 
 of humor, which alters the entire color of our lives. 
 It goes with us into the most severe and head-weary- 
 
ELEMENTARY HUMOR 
 
 21 
 
 ing and humdrum pursuits, protecting us with its 
 shield of fine amusement against what would otherwise 
 be a continual series of trivial but irritating stings of 
 disappointment. It enables us to be experimental and 
 persistent in our efforts and perceptions. It makes 
 our impulses elastic. It is a very inward indispensable 
 little shock-absorber — an instinct, as we might call it, 
 for making the best of a bad thing. 
 
 For in every case in which a man laughs humor- 
 ously there is an element which, if his sensitivity were 
 sufficiently exaggerated, would contain the possibility 
 of tears. He is a man who has suffered or failed of 
 something. And although in the humor of art he 
 usually arrives at something else, and that often better 
 than he had expected, in the humor of every-day life 
 he frequently arrives nowhere at all. And the true 
 agility of his comic sense is proven, not in the clever- 
 ness with which he detects the point of pleasure in a 
 jocular confection, but in the alert twinkle of welcome 
 with which he greets any genuine and definite void 
 appearing where a pleasure was expected. When a 
 man intends to drive a tack into the carpet, and drives 
 his thumb in instead, he may be said to have failed 
 of a pleasure, and if he is not too remote from the 
 mood of play, and did not intend to drive the tack in 
 too far, it should be possible for him to smile. It was 
 upon such occasions at least that nature intended him 
 to smile. For her purpose in making humor accessible 
 to him in sober life was to preserve his digestion, and 
 defend the ears and lives of his immediate family, no 
 
22 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 matter into what extremities of small pest and disaster 
 her restlessness might drive him. 
 
 Humor is thus the most philosophic of all the emo- 
 tions. It is a recognition in our instinctive nature of 
 what our minds in their purest contemplation can in- 
 form us, that pleasure and pain are, except for the in- 
 cidental purpose of preserving us, indifferent — that 
 failure is just as interesting as success. Good and bad 
 are but colored lights rayed out upon the things around 
 us by our will to live, and since life contains both good 
 and bad forever, that very will that discriminates them 
 practically, gives a deeper poetic indorsement to them 
 both. Let us not take the discrimination, then, too 
 seriously. So speaks the sense of humor with a gay 
 wisdom among our emotions. 
 
 x^nd when gaiety fails, and those in whose tempera- 
 ment this sense predominates give their serious esti- 
 mate of the values they have played wdth, it is apt to 
 be the same. Their estimate is sceptical. There is 
 a sorrow in the seriousness of humorous people. They 
 do not easily find among ideals or purposes a place of 
 rest. The courage in their eyes is wistful. They are 
 superior to this world, not as the saint who fastens 
 upon some more-than-earnest faith to raise him out 
 of it, but as a child is superior to his toys. He looks 
 about upon them for a moment, knowing them for 
 what they are. He is not disillusioned; he is simply 
 aware of the fact that all their values derive from his 
 own w r hims. 
 
 There was indeed a note of disillusion in those sad 
 
ELEMENTARY HUMOR 
 
 23 
 
 documents that Mark Twain left after him. His 
 sublime and yet rather feebly philosophic declaration 
 of the worthlessness of all the myriads of human lives 
 — “a mistake, a failure, and a foolishness,” as he called 
 them — was a too negative reaction against the ethico- 
 deific atmosphere of puritan and presbyterian America. 
 
 “Another myriad takes their place,” he says, “and 
 copies all they did, and goes along the same profitless 
 road, and vanishes as they vanished — to make room 
 for another, and another, and a million other myriads, 
 to follow the same arid path through the same desert, 
 and to accomplish what the first myriad and all the 
 myriads that came after it accomplished — nothing!” 
 
 The great child was sick of the mythical pretenses 
 of his elders; but it was only from the standpoint of 
 those pretenses that his own perceptions could acquire 
 so purple and pessimistic an eloquence. Stated affirma- 
 tively the clear-eyed sceptic’s view of human life — 
 life’s transitory arrogant self-constitution of the ends 
 for which it shall be lived — however sadly it may an- 
 swer some pale longings of the heart, is not so loftily 
 disheartening. It is heroic rather than sublime. 
 Montaigne is the humorist’s philosopher. His brave, 
 cool, undeluded assumption that life is no more than 
 what it is or makes itself in any instance, and that 
 the values we impute to things have no external or 
 transcendent sanction, is but a development of the 
 natural implications of the humorous sense. I do not 
 see how any one habitually in the play-attitude, and 
 whose very genius lies in the subjective transmutation 
 
24 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 of these values, could well hold to an opposite opinion. 
 And I doubt if the world ever saw a great inevitable 
 humorist who had not, in his inmost metaphysics, 
 something of this same noble and intrepid sceptic. 
 
 Humor is of all things most unlike religion. It fills 
 a similar function in our moral economy, relieving us 
 of the intolerable poignancy of our individual wills. 
 But it does this by a simple emotional mitigation, 
 whereas religion seems to require a great and heavy 
 process in the heart. Religion magnifies the serious- 
 ness of our passions, but finds an object which is im- 
 personal, or merely ideal, or in some other way su- 
 perior to the vicissitudes of fortune, to which it may 
 attach them — binding them all, or many of them, to- 
 gether into one fixed habit of indefeasible satisfaction. 
 From this great habit the mystic derives his fortitude. 
 He declares that all the failures and imperfections in 
 the bitter current of time’s reality are a part of God’s 
 eternal perfection, and so he makes himself happy to 
 suffer them. The humorist declares that they are 
 funny, and he accomplishes the same thing. They 
 both depart in some sense from the poet’s pure experi- 
 ence of life, but they depart in contrary directions. 
 And so it is not surprising that the mystics should seem 
 wanting in the sacred gift of humor, and that humor- 
 ists should be not often of a prayerful turn. 
 
 A prayer is indeed the intense opposite of a comic 
 laugh, and the assertion of Lamennais, of Johann 
 Erdmann, and other pious philosophers, that they 
 could not imagine the Christ laughing, is a true index 
 
ELEMENTARY HUMOR 
 
 25 
 
 of the condition toward Him of their own nerves. 
 Humor is not, as they thought, necessarily malign or ir- 
 reverent, but it is of a quality incompatible with that 
 fixed concentration of serious feelings which we call 
 devout. Its essence is flexibility instead of fixation. 
 Its food is not unity, but variety. It is superior to 
 religion in its hospitality toward the continual arrivals 
 of truth. It is a more congenial companion of science. 
 Not only is humor independent of any particular be- 
 lief or intellectual commitment, and so not hostile to 
 the mood of inquiry, but in softening the rigor of the 
 passions it removes the chief obstacle to the process 
 of verification. Is not pure science in fact a kind of 
 arduous play among the meanings that have been de- 
 vised by the applied sciences for the purposes of work ? 
 I remember that Isaac Newton described his discov- 
 eries as those of a child at play among ideas. And at 
 any rate it is the continual effort of pure science to 
 get rid of human valuations where it can. Humor is 
 the very act of taking those valuations lightly. It is 
 an act of aggressive resignation. 
 
 Mahomet boasted that with faith and prayer he 
 could make a mountain get up and come to him. And 
 when a great crowd of his followers had assembled, 
 and all his incantations failed, he said: “Well, if the 
 mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will 
 go to the mountain.” And so we strive with all our 
 energy and ingenuity to make the course of things do 
 us pleasure, and as the course of things continually 
 disappoints us, we say: “Very well — I will find a special 
 
26 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 pleasure in the disappointment!” That is our sense 
 of humor. Humor is Mahomet going to the moun- 
 tain. Its very existence is a kind of joke at the ex- 
 pense of destiny. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 JOKES WITH A POINT 
 
 This little interior line of self-defense may seem a 
 slender ground upon which to explain all the aggres- 
 sive revels of wit and humorous fancy among the joys 
 of existence. It seems both too negative and too sim- 
 ple a thing. But we must remember that in every 
 prolonged laughing tale or entertainment there are 
 many objects of delight as well as of humor. In the 
 comic theatres our merry laughter is often pure of 
 any admixture from this instinct. And the word 
 comedy itself, although so closely related to the word 
 comic, does not mean a humorous drama. It means, 
 if I may add one more opinion to this ancient subject 
 of dispute, a drama in which the play-attitude prevails 
 — a “play,” in short, as properly so called, and so dis- 
 tinguished from that intenser drama in which although 
 we know it is illusive our passions are seriously en- 
 gaged. And in these “plays,” even when they are 
 very boisterous, and make us laugh in chorus like a 
 flock of hungry geese, it is pleasure half the time, ex- 
 cited pleasure and not humor, that we feed upon. 
 
 There is a further reason, too, why this defensive 
 instinct seems too simple to explain the forms of 
 humor. And that is that in our adult and calculating 
 years the things that we call humorous are not often 
 
 27 
 
28 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 purely so. We do not laugh loudly, except at times 
 of rare hilarity, at the mere negation of our own ten- 
 dencies. We are not playful enough for that. We 
 think it is a little “ foolish 5 ' to take so much pleasure 
 as children do in all kinds of jerks, pranks, monkey- 
 faces, and absurd nonsense. Playing children enjoy so 
 indiscriminately every kind of shock or balk or failure 
 of anything to be quite what it should, that we with 
 our egregious wisdom have almost decided that they 
 lack the sense of humor altogether. Their sense of 
 humor is more primed and violent than ours, more 
 close to its true purpose; and that is why they laugh 
 so lavishly, and without the slight restraint which 
 might intensify their inward feeling of the laughter. 
 They laugh at anything that is really nothing; but 
 we require a hint of the delivery of real values to warm 
 up our interest in nothing, and make it seem intelli- 
 gent to laugh. We laugh at jokes. And a joke is a 
 little node, or gem-like moment in our experience, 
 created by the exact coincidence of a playful shock or 
 disappointment with a playful or a genuine satisfaction. 
 
 Our brain is just balancing, as we might imagine, 
 upon that fine edge between pain and pleasure at the 
 failure of what it had momently desired, when there 
 looms into the void some unexpected ripe apple of a 
 thing desired more, or desired at least deeply and con- 
 tinually, and with a hunger that can be relied on to 
 be glad. And by this means that arbitrary trick of 
 turning loss into gain, which was our humorous in- 
 stinct, is actually warranted and borne out by the facts. 
 
JOKES WITH A POINT 
 
 29 
 
 The loss is gain; reality imitates our instinct; the laugh- 
 ter of pleasure flows in to reinforce the laughter of play- 
 ful pain, and we experience not only a humorous feel- 
 ing, but a feeling of aptness that is not like anything 
 else under the sun. We call this fine moment of co- 
 identity the "point” of a joke. And it is by cherish- 
 ing the quality of these points — perfecting the playful 
 negations and sliding into the hearts of them all kinds, 
 degrees, and shades, and tones of life’s real value, that 
 the comic artist gets the whole world tinctured with a 
 humorous emotion, and builds such varicolored struc- 
 tures as he does. 
 
 He tells us of a terrible fighting man of his neighbor- 
 hood who has been offended by a gang of bums, and 
 proposes to go over to their saloon and clean them 
 out. 
 
 "You come along,” he says to his friend, "and you 
 can stand outside the door and count them as they 
 come through.” 
 
 The friend goes along — and our perennial anticipa- 
 tion of a riot goes too. We take up our position in 
 the entrance with his friend. There is a moment of 
 silence, then a great bump through the door, and the 
 voice of the terrible fighting man: "Stop counting — 
 it’s me!” 
 
 Without analyzing all the delights that we receive 
 here in lieu of the grand scene of which we have been 
 deprived, we can say that these delights are more ex- 
 quisite, and, lusty as our taste is for massacres, just 
 as satisfying to the prevailing appetites of our nature. 
 
30 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 We have lost a conquering hero, but gained the abase- 
 ment of a braggart, and that is the way in which our 
 grown-up wishes like to be fooled. 
 
 Humor in its adult state is thus seen to be some- 
 what like electricity, and to possess two currents — a 
 negative and a positive. The negative current is a 
 discommoding of some light or playful interest that 
 has been specifically aroused, the positive a gratification 
 of some interest which, if it has not been specifically 
 aroused, may at least be assumed to have a general 
 existence in the hearts of those w T ho are to laugh. And 
 from this it appears how very precarious an explosive 
 a joke is, and in how many different ways it can man- 
 age to miss fire. For one may fail to arouse any in- 
 terest in the first place, or he may arouse a too serious 
 interest, in the matter which is to supply the negative 
 current — or perhaps an interest badly proportioned to 
 that which is to supply the positive current; and then 
 he may have miscalculated on the positive side, and 
 thought that his audience would like something to 
 which they can hardly offer a moment’s attention or 
 which they may heartily oppose, and so he will find 
 he has given them only a double disappointment for 
 their pains. 
 
 A joke is not a thing to be mauled and tinkered and 
 revamped and translated about like an old trunk, 
 from one nation, race, tribe, family, generation, or 
 language, into another. It is a chemical gem, a deli- 
 cate and precarious contexture of non-affinitive quali- 
 ties, likely to go off at the touch of a feather in appro- 
 
JOKES WITH A POINT 
 
 31 
 
 priate circumstances, or to lie flat and mute as a pan- 
 cake if discomposed or mismanaged. There is no 
 flower in nature more fragile of transport, more rooted 
 in the specific. Every jest has its season; it flourishes 
 and dies. Every man has some sly chuckle inside of 
 his own teeth. Every two who live together in a 
 house, if they live happily, train up some droll mum- 
 meries mutual to them, but which would seem pretty 
 foolish exposed to the public view. It was a unique 
 genius that Charles Lamb had, to so domesticate his 
 readers and win them to his whims, that these inside 
 familiar fooleries of his became the property of the 
 whole world. For humorists who are less gifted with 
 a very possessing grace of spirit, it is necessary to play 
 upon impulses that are common at least to a consider- 
 able group, and can be relied upon to be in a state of 
 appetite almost all the time. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 
 
 One of the impulses most often relied upon to sup- 
 ply the positive current in a humorous passage is the 
 impulse to fight. It appears that men bring out of 
 their animal past a disposition which, if left uninhibited 
 by reflection or by standards of cultural propriety, 
 would settle most disagreements with a trial by battle. 
 When two roosters cross paths, in no matter how peace- 
 ful a pursuit of summer grasshoppers, they automatic- 
 ally bridle and “pick on” each other. They give a 
 fair picture of healthy but unreflective life, and I sup- 
 pose that if our bodies went along in a semiconscious 
 state of business, they would behave in somewhat the 
 same fashion. For whatever gentle thing our culture 
 may make out of us, we are each born with the brain 
 and nervous system of a timid yet belligerent savage, 
 and we achieve that gentility not without the checking 
 of many little continual impulses of wrath and retalia- 
 tion. These may be imagined to become dammed up 
 in the course of time, into a great reservoir of abstract 
 hostility in the parts of our brain that are not con- 
 scious, and this reservoir can be tapped at any mo- 
 ment by any one who will offer us an opportunity to 
 pick on a fellow savage with propriety and no danger. 
 And humor, because it is upon its negative side play- 
 
 32 
 
HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 
 
 33 
 
 ful, and upon its positive side concealed and secondary 
 and not too straightly spoken, offers such an oppor- 
 tunity in a most engaging form. It is a facile kind 
 of humor, therefore, to arouse in us any light attitude 
 of expectation, and then, in the very act of disappoint- 
 ing that, give us the opportunity to take a good re- 
 sounding crack at some poor fool. 
 
 An individual toward whom we cherish the eternal 
 hope of this opportunity is the professional optimist, 
 the rotund charitable ready talker, who makes a fat 
 living supporting wdth his breath the status quo . A 
 joker will show us the round legs of this gentleman on 
 tour down the middle of an East Side street crowded 
 with hot rubbish and flies and animated children — 
 “ What’s all this talk about the death-rate ?” he shouts. 
 “ These kids are alive!” Is it not clear that while 
 these words cheat us of the slight logical satisfaction 
 they seemed to hold out, they offer in the same instant 
 a more stimulating pleasure, that of scorning the fool 
 who said them ? 
 
 Thomas Hobbes was so much impressed by this joy 
 of the hostile stroke, which he described with true 
 barbaric appreciation as a feeling of “ sudden glory,” 
 that he made it the basis of a general explanation of 
 laughter. And long before Hobbes — indeed, ever 
 since the birth of psychology — philosophers have been 
 informing the world that the essence of humor is 
 ridicule, that laughter is always at somebody, that 
 jokes are always on somebody, that comic emotion is 
 the same thing as scorn or the feeling of one’s own 
 
34 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 superiority. It is a mistake that arises naturally out 
 of the frequent occurrence of this feeling among the 
 positive values that enter into the creation of jokes. 
 But a joke is not a single feeling; it is an emotional 
 process. And the thing that makes a person whom we 
 scorn comic, and not merely contemptible, is that our 
 scorn enters into that process at a point where we 
 ourselves have just been baffled and deprived of some 
 other satisfaction. And usually it will have been our 
 active sympathy with that very person which has been 
 baffled. For we have a tendency to inward imitation 
 so impetuous that, when nothing opposes it, we actu- 
 ally accompany every one whom we see or imagine pur- 
 suing or attempting anything. We look forward to 
 his success, and when he is foiled, we also are foiled. 
 But in the very discomfiture of our sympathy, itself 
 humorous, we find a treat for our antipathy, which 
 waits ready in the background, and so we are twice 
 justified in laughing. It is the peculiar readiness of 
 this antipathy, this repressed genius for hostile com- 
 bat, combined with the inevitable coincidence of its 
 most appropriate occasions with a funny disappoint- 
 ment of our sympathy, that gives it so predominant a 
 place in comedy and wit. Ridicule is not the original 
 or characteristic kind of comedy or wit; it is merely the 
 easiest kind to create. Its prevalence is not due to 
 the nature of the comic, but to the nature of man. 
 
 Aristophanes created a great deal of satiric laughter 
 along the sides of the Acropolis at the expense of the 
 poet Euripides, and we may recall one of his fine gibes 
 
HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 
 
 35 
 
 as a sufficiently classic example of this humor that 
 laughs with the pale ghost of a sneer. The scene was 
 laid in the next world, where a trial was in progress 
 as to which of the two poets, iEschylus or Euripides, 
 should sit by the throne of God as the Master of 
 Tragedy. Euripides was found to have an extraor- 
 dinary advantage in this trial because he had his 
 tragedies right on hand, they all having died with him ! 
 
 No audience, I am sure, could fail of a taste of 
 sudden glory in this joke on Euripides. And yet both 
 the suddenness and the glory might be there, if it 
 were simply stated with sufficient force and gesture 
 that the tragedies of Euripides are dead. To state 
 that Euripides has an advantage, and when our appe- 
 tite is just reaching out with his to grasp that advan- 
 tage, suddenly to present in the very heart of it the 
 most square and overwhelming disadvantage — that is 
 a joke. That gives us the pleasure, not only of en- 
 joying Euripides’s discomfiture, but of enjoying it with 
 comic laughter and emotion. 
 
 It is true — as Horace and Cicero and Moliere and 
 George Meredith and Henri Bergson and many other 
 thoughtful men have set forth — that this kind of laugh- 
 ter plays a great part as a social corrective, and that 
 derisive humor is a fine weapon. So much more sheer 
 and startling a weapon it is than scorn, that I find it 
 surprising any one should ever have been content to 
 identify the two. We bring a certain instinctive 
 neural mechanism into play when we scorn a person, 
 and if that person succumbs a little and not too much. 
 
36 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 we derive a strong satisfaction from our success. The 
 onlookers, if our scorn is magnetic and the occasion 
 appropriate, may be led along with us to that satis- 
 faction. But if, in addition to our scorn, we bring 
 also another instinctive mechanism, the sense of humor, 
 giving ourselves and them the opportunity to draw 
 from a new source a far more agreeable and tonic satis- 
 faction, it is plain that our ascendancy over the vic- 
 tim is greatly enhanced. His state of debasement has 
 now become the source of a dear and infectious pleasure 
 to the whole company, who are at play, and he will 
 have a hard time making them let go of it. Is not 
 that an explanation that really explains the superior 
 power of ridicule and satire over scorn? 
 
 I suspect that the reason why so many philosophers 
 have deemed all laughter to be of the derisive flavor 
 is that they dreaded the prick of it. What we learn 
 from their theories of “ sudden glory” and the “ feel- 
 ing of superiority,” is that they hated to be laughed 
 at. Hobbes hated to be laughed at, I am sure, and 
 so did Plato, for he was always advising his friends 
 that it is not philosophic to laugh very loud. And 
 the reason why we hate to be laughed at, is that we 
 experience a feeling of inferiority on such occasions, 
 that is indeed logical and involved in the essence of 
 the case. For no matter how truly the laughers may 
 hasten to assure us that they are not hostile, but only 
 happy — they feel no scorn but rather a delighted love 
 of our natural blunder — still there remains the fact 
 that we are inferior. We have supplied that stumbling 
 
HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 
 
 37 
 
 which alone could cause their humorous recoil, and 
 we know it, and only a very active humorous instinct 
 of our own can make us enjoy that in their presence 
 which we might well have enjoyed if they were away. 
 Men are not so extremely avid of sudden glory, but 
 they have a sensitive distaste for the sudden descent 
 from glory, and this modest trait has helped much to 
 make Hobbes’s erroneous theory live after him. 
 
 We are almost as timid as we are belligerent by 
 hereditary nature. And although our timid impulses 
 find freer vent in the conditions of modern life than 
 our belligerent ones, still they too are repressed and 
 dammed up by culture and opinion, and will seek a 
 vent with relief if occasion offers. No doubt there 
 are people wdio possess a more acute military fervor 
 than I do, but when I first heard of that brave soldier 
 who was always to be found where the bullets are thick- 
 est — in the ammunition wagon — I can well remember 
 how the fine march of heroic meaning and emotion was 
 suddenly exploded, and there flowed in to fill up the 
 vacuum another meaning and a feeling of most happy 
 and concrete relief. It would be folly to tell me that I 
 was scorning the soldier. I was with him in the am- 
 munition wagon. And there are others, I venture to 
 believe, who, no matter how heroically they may be- 
 have in the circumstances where social opinion de- 
 mands it, will gladly avail themselves of the little 
 opportunity that a joke offers to crawl into a hole 
 and behave naturally. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 HUMOR AND SEXUALITY 
 
 It seems especially surprising that any one should 
 have thought to identify humor with hostile and ego- 
 istic emotion, when another passion of our nature 
 stands at least equal to these in supplying the joy ends 
 of the most popular jokes, and that is the passion of 
 sex. Just as Hobbes long ago drew the attention of 
 cultivated men to that fine heritage of the bloody and 
 barbaric in their bosoms, Sigmund Freud now com- 
 pels them to confess that their bodies are great surging 
 tanks full of lust and suppressed carnal hungers, which 
 they draw up into their minds and transform into this 
 strong energy of interest that plays forth upon a 
 variety of things, but never exhausts its source. We 
 are always ready to be happy in a taste of those poign- 
 ant parts of life that for life’s sake we conceal, and 
 the swift sharp force with which these imprisoned 
 hungers will seize upon any least gap or stumbling of 
 speech or idea, to rush in and declare that they have 
 been implied, is the one thing upon which every hu- 
 morist in every company can rely. He can so fully 
 and so fatuously rely upon it, that we shall have to 
 retract here the statement that ridicule is the easiest 
 kind of joke to create. The easiest kind of joke to 
 create is one in which there is no crux or quality what- 
 
 38 
 
HUMOR AND SEXUALITY 
 
 39 
 
 ever in the negation — no interesting playful recoil — 
 but just a sniggering intimation that there might be, 
 and that if there were, some sexual act or exhibition 
 might come in to take the place of what had been in- 
 tended. One need say nothing indeed, but merely 
 dwell with a persistent eye, as Uncle Toby does in 
 “ Tristram Shandy,” upon some feature of the chimney- 
 piece, in order to get a witless laugh out of people who 
 are all filled up with unsatisfied curiosity as to things 
 of similar conformation. The Anglo-Saxons are more 
 commonly in this condition, I think, than the southern 
 races of Europe, and it is only among them and the 
 Germans that the humor of the naughty kitten variety 
 has enjoyed a very high popularity. The furtive 
 smirk is absent from a Frenchman’s enjoyment of 
 sex wit, and playful humor the more present. Rabe- 
 lais swings open the doors and marches in like an 
 orphan giant, where Sterne sits lurking at a peep- 
 hole in fear of his parents. And people of Rabelaisian 
 license, people who feel free at least to experience in 
 reality the things that they desire to experience, are 
 capable of a more fastidiously humorous taste, as well 
 as a more playful pleasure in sexual jokes, than people 
 who are too thirsty for implications. For them it 
 remains to hold up some standard of the real art of 
 humor even upon this topic, and not rush like a flock 
 of spinster hens with indiscriminate cackling after the 
 least flicker of a sexual sensation. 
 
 There is no doubt that a great deal of our pleasure 
 in the most casual humor is flavored with an emotion 
 
40 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 from the sphere of sex — our conscious attention being 
 at play with the negative, while our unconscious takes 
 its fill of a positive satisfaction we do not attend to. 
 Persons of very maidenly mind will often laugh loudly 
 at a break in meaning which without its sexual im- 
 plication would hardly provoke a smile, and yet if 
 that implication were consciously apprehended would 
 make them blush and not laugh at all. Freud likes 
 to tell us that all the really hilarious satisfactions in 
 humor, even those of the sudden glory kind, can be 
 induced by his science of psychoanalysis to come in 
 and declare themselves fundamentally sexual. But 
 this does not seem very generous toward the com- 
 panionable variety of nature. Like the statement of 
 Hobbes, instead of defining the general character of 
 humor, it seems to define the sphere of his paramount 
 interest in it. Freud has made himself a wise and 
 wonderful scientist of sex, and has given a gift of illu- 
 mination to the world not second to that which Hobbes 
 gave, and so we can forgive him if he somewhat over- 
 strains the generalization, and tends to carry us back 
 to a contemplation of oneness almost as bad as that 
 of the sickly mystics whom he knows how to cure. 
 He has at least lifted a great incubus of shame from 
 the shoulders of humanity, and given the boon of 
 candor to a poor animal desperately endeavoring to 
 become a man. 
 
 A little girl who was just waking to the existence of 
 a problem in these matters composed a love-story 
 which proceeded somewhat as follows: “Once upon a 
 
HUMOR AND SEXUALITY 
 
 41 
 
 time there was a boy and girl who loved each other, 
 and they wanted to get married, but they couldn’t 
 afford it, so they decided to be good until he could 
 earn some money. Well, on his way home, he found 
 a purse containing a million dollars, and they got mar- 
 ried, and the next day they had twins, which proves 
 that virtue brings its own reward.” 
 
 We share, of course, the conviction of this author 
 that virtue brings its own reward — we have known at 
 least that it gets none from any other source — and we 
 feel the same wonderful law of necessity by which the 
 hero and heroine of every tale that is told must be 
 good. We are naturally somewhat taken aback, there- 
 fore, to learn in the same words in which we are being 
 told of the goodness of these two, that they were not 
 good. It is a shock to our sensibilities, but then, 
 after all, we are not sorry — we have been good our- 
 selves, or tried to, and that is enough! And so our 
 laughter is a little more joyful than seems appropriate 
 to the author even in so extraordinary a triumph of 
 what is right. It is a joy of released impulse from the 
 unconscious, blowing up from that cavern to swell the 
 sails of a laugh that is already on its way. That is 
 the fact which Freud has so well compelled us to 
 understand. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 HUMOR AND TRUTH 
 
 Laughter has perhaps a more elementary — or at 
 least a more strong and spasmodic — connection with 
 states of triumphant lust and battle cruelty than with 
 any other satisfactions except those of the social in- 
 stinct itself. And hence that peculiar loon-like, hys- 
 terical, crying giggle that comes out of some people 
 whenever in joking either of these springs is touched. 
 It is not humor, but glee, that makes them whoop so 
 loud at cruel gibes and obscene quips and mimicries. 
 And glee, while it may be a rank and ringing kind of 
 pleasure, is of no more special pertinence to the art of 
 joking than any other pleasure toward which we have 
 a commonly unsatisfied hunger. So much indeed of 
 what is real and strong and tasting of good earth in 
 every direction is pressed down and out of our con- 
 scious or conversational selves by various acquired 
 tricks of virtue and decorum, that we may properly 
 place Truth herself beside sex and sudden glory as a 
 chief source of the joy motive in popular jokes. We 
 are always hungry for the simple truth. 
 
 Not only the proprieties of civilization but the more 
 inward postulates of self-consciousness — consistency 
 and good faith and loyalty and emotional stability 
 
 42 
 
HUMOR AND TRUTH 
 
 43 
 
 and resolute adherence — all these excellent presump- 
 tions insulate us from the flux of reality even through 
 the portals of our own hearts. We are not free to 
 experience the world’s being, or even our own beings 
 within it. We are prisoners in a mist of pretense. 
 And to shock us with the playful precipitation of that 
 mist, and yet in the very shock to warm us with a 
 clear serious glimpse of the naked movement of life, 
 is a universal and joyful way of joking. We can all 
 be honest playfully and for half a second. And to 
 be honest without fear is an experience that may 
 fitly be placed in comparison with the ecstasies of the 
 saints. It is a most wholesome way to be redeemed 
 — to be purged, in these forever-recurring quick flashes, 
 from the original sin of self-consciousness. I can say, 
 for instance, that if there is one thing I cannot endure 
 about the learned, it is the information they possess. 
 And I offer you there a little absurdity conjoined with 
 the glimpse of a considerable interior truth. But to 
 set down in serious and cold visibility the substance 
 of that truth — which is certainly of the color neither 
 of sex nor sudden glory — would exceed the strength of 
 my candor. 
 
 Aristophanes, the slap-stick comedian of the Acrop- 
 olis, boasted that he was after all “the best of poets, 
 the one who was reckless enough to speak truth among 
 the Athenians.” He spoke truth among the Athe- 
 nians to such point of uproar that he was arrested 
 during the Peloponnesian War and tried for sedition. 
 We do not know what the charge was in that early 
 
44 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 misadventure, but we have the copy of a later play in 
 which his comic hero negotiated for himself and family 
 a “ separate peace ” with Sparta, his reason being that 
 he was not interested in international politics, and 
 wanted to go home. That was an absurd performance, 
 to be sure, a shattering of all the tragic prepossessions 
 of the hour — but was not half the value of that ab- 
 surdity its truth to what lay covered up through all 
 those dark days in the hearts of the Athenian people ? 
 One of our own comedists, Art Young, was arrested 
 and tried for the same crime as Aristophanes during 
 our own war of the worlds. And when he was put 
 upon the witness-stand and asked in a terrible voice 
 of accusation, “What did you mean, Mr. Young, by 
 those pictures?” he who had so long delighted us 
 with the originality of his humor, could only look 
 down with a kind of bewildered belligerence in his 
 good gray eyes and answer: “I meant nothing but 
 what everybody knows!” 
 
 It is not usually, indeed, a new truth, or truth as 
 the result of any high intellectual analysis, whose force 
 the humorist calls in to help us enjoy a playful shock. 
 It is just the simple reality of feeling or sagacity of 
 judgment that was already lurking in us. He may have 
 no motive to instruct us, or improve our morals, or 
 try to mix honesty with politics. His motive may be 
 only to make good, strong, enduring, universal jokes. 
 But the opportunity afforded by this contrast between 
 the simple and eternal things in our hearts, and the 
 grand procession of hysterical and temporary banner 
 
HUMOR AND TRUTH 
 
 45 
 
 and flapdoodle parading through our minds as thoughts, 
 he cannot possibly resist. As an artist he is compelled 
 to drop bombs of honesty in that procession. 
 
 It is not a correct statement, however, of the rela- 
 tion between these two things to say that “humor is 
 truth.” Humor is often the last weapon in the hands 
 of those who are menaced by a truth. Lacking the 
 force or shamelessness to stand off truth’s champions 
 in sober combat, these skulking jokers — among whom 
 I am afraid we often find the celebrated Doctor John- 
 son — have the trick of getting behind a joke and disap- 
 pearing. What they do is to meet a serious thrust 
 with a flatly frivolous and irrelevant rebuff, which 
 would not be tolerated at all if it did not conceal also 
 the serious satisfaction of some other interest than the 
 one involved — perhaps an interest in some other 
 truth — and thus permit the listener’s attention to slide 
 off in a new direction and find rest. That is what Cic- 
 ero meant when he advised his pupils in oratory that 
 joking “very often disposes of extremely ugly matters 
 that will not bear to be cleared up by proofs.” And 
 for those orators who may find themselves on the side 
 of the proofs, I offer this corresponding advice : Do not 
 try to match wits with a Ciceronian joker, for you are 
 retained and he is free; enjoy his joke as a perfectly 
 frivolous pleasure, and then return with a reluctant 
 force to serious speech, reserving your own wit until 
 you are again in command. You will thus rob him of 
 the appearance of having parried and thrust, when all 
 he did was to jump out of the way of a wound. 
 
46 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 Humor is not truth — but truth, under the terms of 
 this elaborate process we call civilized life, is humor- 
 ous. And those who are not satisfied with the classi- 
 cal authority upon this point will be interested to 
 know that Charlie Chaplin has the same thing to say 
 of his art as Aristophanes. 
 
 "It is telling them the plain truth of things,” he 
 replied instantly, when I asked him what it is that he 
 does to people when he makes them laugh. "It is 
 bringing home to them by means of a shock the sanity 
 of a situation which they think is insane. When I 
 walk up and slap a fine lady, for instance, because she 
 gave me a contemptuous look, it is really right ! r iney 
 won’t admit it, but it’s right, and that is why they 
 laugh. 
 
 "I make them conscious of life. ‘You think this is 
 it, don’t you?’ I say, ‘well, it isn’t, but this is, see?’ 
 And then they laugh.” 
 
 I doubt if any joker ever gave a more penetrating 
 analysis of his art. Its lovers will agree — and the 
 lovers of every deeply moving art of humor — that it 
 is full of the sudden uncoverings of a simple, original, 
 and more purely burning element of reality, from which 
 we have all somehow got intricately lost, and from 
 which we still hold ourselves aloof, so that when his 
 relentlessly playful hand uncovers it, our very gesture 
 of the moment has been baffled, and yet our deepest 
 wish drinks deep. 
 
 There are people, of course, who lack altogether 
 these deeper wishes, or have them so well stifled that 
 
HUMOR AND TRUTH 
 
 47 
 
 they seem really satisfied to dwell forever in the false 
 fronts of decorum. I suppose they cannot come down 
 to the face of reality even alone in the bathtub. And 
 these people are resentful of the humor that reveals, 
 because it shakes their confidence and frightens them. 
 They call it “levity,” and wish to have it segregated 
 and rendered irrelevant, confined to the “ funny page,” 
 or the “comic paper,” included in parentheses, or at 
 least stigmatized with an exclamation-point, or a 
 pointed voice, or something else to indicate that it is 
 not to be taken seriously or allowed to spread. Stanton 
 called it “levity” when Abraham Lincoln endeavored 
 to bring a little of the light of sagacious laughter 
 into those stern meetings of the war cabinet. 
 
 People who manifest this asperity or uncouth stupor 
 at the play of humor through the serious enterprises 
 of life must be either heavy of interest, so that they 
 cannot shift within the time required from some end 
 they were bent upon, to the new and perhaps greater 
 one, or else they are shallow and timorous and unac- 
 customed to dwell with these greater ends — the pas- 
 sions and realities — even in their own hearts. A 
 man whose interest is agile, and whose converse with 
 life and death is mature, does not have to have a bell 
 rung and a flag put up every time anything is to be 
 taken humorously. He does not regard humor as an 
 interlude. He is continually in hope that a bit of 
 the framework will break back and something real 
 look through the stucco front of our culture, and when 
 not hoping that it will, he is contriving that it shall. 
 
48 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 For although he may be too fond of his own comfort 
 to attack the sham and superficialities of man with 
 anger and riot, he could not quite endure them if they 
 were not continually shot through with humorous 
 acknowledgments to the source and reality of life. 
 To him seriousness in these weak exploits and waterish 
 matters of conversation and business is the interlude, 
 and humor the real engagement. A true joke is a 
 reverence that we do to nature, an expiation for having 
 so denied and betrayed her in our lives. It is at once 
 a glad acceptance of failure in the puny enterprise upon 
 which our mind is bent and a grateful acknowledg- 
 ment of some greater good that she was holding out 
 in her hands. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 
 
 Science is never so proudly happy as when it has 
 got rid of qualities, and reduced all the enjoyable 
 glories of this world to mere quantity and number. 
 And we need not be surprised if our own hypothesis 
 takes on a persuasive simplicity when we apply it to 
 the humor that arises, and the pointed jokes that are 
 created, by a manipulation of the mere quantity or 
 degree of things. One need but magnify a subject 
 plausibly enough to carry along the attention, and yet 
 extremely enough to make belief or imagination im- 
 possible, and no matter what he is talking about — it 
 need not be a fish that he has caught — if his hearers 
 are in a state of playful rapport with him, their disap- 
 pointment will be humorous. And one need but speak 
 with a winning and believable manner words which 
 are so slight and inadequate to the facts as to be of no 
 sense or credibility whatever, and the same result will 
 follow. We call the latter process, the humor of un- 
 derstatement, irony ; and the humor of overstatement 
 we call exaggeration . They are forms of humor which 
 require no very brainy ingenuity, but only a certain 
 agility of imagination, in their creators; and they are 
 forms which reveal more simply than any others the 
 perfect essence of what humor is. 
 
 49 
 
50 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 It is not mere magnitude or braggadocio at which 
 we laugh, nor is it minuteness or mere modesty of 
 speech. Neither of these things begets humorous 
 laughter until it goes to the point of impracticability. 
 We laugh not at the much, but the too much, and not 
 at the little, but the too little. We laugh, that is, in 
 the course of a simple quantitative variation that is 
 playful, exactly at the point where we should, if we 
 did not laugh, experience a real balk or bewilderment 
 of mind. 
 
 Imagine a person who has no sense of humor — and 
 has not yet learned to relax and let pass when he sees 
 others laughing — confronted with one of Rabelais’s 
 accounts of a drinking-bout or a light meal of victuals. 
 Imagine him attending to Mark Twain’s story of a 
 night’s effort to find his way back to bed in the dark. 
 He will meet nothing witty here, nothing ingenious, sly, 
 double-turned, paradoxical, or even unusual. Every 
 inch of that night’s journey he could duplicate out of 
 his own personal recollection. And yet those inches 
 are so wantonly multiplied, and their possibilities 
 swelled out and extended, that by the time he reaches 
 the conclusion — “I glanced furtively at my pedometer 
 and found I had made 47 miles, but I did not care, 
 for I had come out for a pedestrian tour anyway” — 
 what can he do, this person who is without benefit of 
 humor, but cry out in a kind of weak prayerful pro- 
 fanity: “O Lord, this is too much !” In these cries of 
 the unprotected is revealed the exact nature of the 
 thing they lack. 
 
THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 
 
 51 
 
 Mark Twain would have been at home among the 
 Gargantuans. He and Rabelais both took an almost 
 pathological delight in mere quantity and dimension. 
 And yet we can find no more childlike example of 
 the humor of understatement than that chapter 
 of the “Pantagruellian Prognostications” beginning: 
 “This year the stone-blind shall see but very little; 
 the deaf shall hear but scurvily; the dumb shall not 
 speak very plain; the rich shall be in somewhat a 
 better case than the poor. . . And there is hardly 
 a more celebrated ironic joke in history than Mark 
 Twain’s message from London at the time when he was 
 reported dead in the New York newspapers — “The re- 
 ports of my death are grossly exaggerated.” The rea- 
 son why those eight words became immortal, is that in 
 the first place they are so natural and familiar in their 
 general form as to tempt our confidence, and yet in the 
 second place they are so related to the particular situa- 
 tion as to be concisely and absolutely inadequate, and 
 yet again in the third place they are made adequate — 
 their humor acquires a point — through the fact that 
 Mark Twain must have been alive to utter them. So 
 much is contained in so brief an experience. But the 
 humorous heart of that experience was his saying too 
 little plausibly — a thing at which w T e laughed for the 
 same essential reason that we so often laugh at his 
 plausible sayings of too much. Pointed and raised to 
 a high point of distinction, it is the same kind of humor 
 as that of the cheery passer who remarks that “It 
 looks like rain” when the clouds have burst and the 
 
52 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 town is standing in four feet of water. It is the kind of 
 humor that Albert Einstein indulges in when he pref- 
 aces a volume on “The Special and General Theory of 
 Relativity ” with the hope that “This book may bring 
 some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought !” 
 The meaning is no doubt felicitous in direction, but it 
 falls short in the amount. 
 
 It is proper to apply the name of irony , in the first 
 place, to the elementary humor of understatement, 
 not only because of its peculiar flavor, but because in 
 its origin that is what the word implied. In Aristotle’s 
 ethics we find the two nouns, 6 aXa^cov and o ecpcov 
 set off against each other as opposites — the one mean- 
 ing a man who “talks big,” the other a dissembler, 
 or one who avows less than he intends. And it was 
 the application of this latter term to the peculiar 
 humor of Socrates that gave popularity to that word 
 irony , which has kept up all through the ages so deli- 
 cate a balance between humor and the simple truth. 
 Socrates would come up to some complacent citizen 
 on the streets of Athens and ask him if he knew a 
 certain thing. And when the citizen replied, “ Of 
 course,” Socrates would say: “I just wanted to ask 
 you, because I myself don’t know anything, and I 
 wondered if it w r ould be possible for you to enlighten 
 me a little.” From such a beginning would ensue a 
 conversation in which the ignorant folly of the citizen 
 and the adroit profundity of his questioner became 
 equally apparent. 
 
 Thus by a playful “saying little” Socrates was able 
 
THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 
 
 53 
 
 seriously to mean much. His irony was pointed. 
 And the point of it was almost always this identity 
 that he would succeed in creating between his own 
 delusive modesty and the real humiliation of his 
 opponent. And so it was natural that the word irony, 
 from meaning understatement, came to acquire a 
 flavor of mild and gentle-minded scorn — gentle, be- 
 cause in Socrates’s thoughts there lurked always the 
 serious opinion that if he did know more than others, 
 it was but the knowledge of his own ignorance. In- 
 deed it is the peculiar charm of his irony that it never 
 completely confesses itself to be a joke. We are never 
 quite sure whether Socrates is humorously understat- 
 ing himself, or whether he is simply the first and only 
 man in creation who ever stated himself with enough 
 hesitation to be accurate. The ironies of his successors 
 usually reveal by some sheer impossibility in their 
 little meaning, or by some excessive emphasis or irrev- 
 erent delivery of it, that their real meaning is big. 
 
 There is but one philosopher who has ever tried 
 to make of irony the same sustained and subtle art 
 of holding us in doubt that Socrates did, and that is 
 Thorstein Veblen, the author of “The Theory of the 
 Leisure Class.” He has not travelled away into a 
 city of Birds or Frogs or Gargantuans or Lilliputians 
 or Penguins or Angels, or any other of those animal or 
 impossible regions, where he might have fun with hu- 
 manity by talking about something else. He talks 
 about humanity, and he delivers an attack upon its 
 follies as profoundly derisive as any we have from the 
 
54 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 hand of Swift or Voltaire, but he talks a language of 
 scientific erudition so remote and abstract and preter- 
 naturally non-committal of emotion, that we cannot 
 positively declare at any moment whether what he is 
 saying is great science, or great irony, or whether per- 
 haps it is both. He is a “dissembler” in the original 
 sense, a man of whom we long to ask, yet would not 
 for the world, how much he seriously means. 
 
 It may have surprised the reader to find irony and 
 exaggeration included together as a single general kind 
 of humor. It will surprise him more to reflect that the 
 two cannot in many cases be distinguished. We may 
 say that Socrates understated his knowledge, or that 
 he exaggerated his ignorance; we may say that Veblen 
 dissembles his emotional meaning, or that he puts up 
 a vast pretense of intellectual abstraction. It makes 
 no difference, because the quantities involved here 
 are intensive rather than extensive. Even in the 
 stories of Mark Twain and Rabelais, where the things 
 magnified are extensive enough, our perception of 
 them is still in our own heads, and we can view them as 
 examples of a ridiculous “want of moderation” if we 
 choose. And so by a little perceptive shift or casuistry 
 any exaggeration may be viewed as irony, and any 
 irony as exaggeration, and the view that actually pre- 
 vails in a given example is not always easy to deter- 
 mine. 
 
 Laurence Sterne tells us in his defense of Hobbies 
 about a certain great doctor, Kunastrokius, who at his 
 leisure hours took “the greatest delight imaginable in 
 combing of asses’ tails, and plucking the hairs out with 
 
THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 
 
 55 
 
 his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket.” 
 And although I find that concluding phrase, appearing 
 with so much inappropriate aplomb at the tag-end of 
 so ludicrous a portrait, a delicately humorous thing, 
 yet I have never been able to say whether it comes as 
 an exaggeration of the great doctor’s devotion, or 
 whether it adds a flavor of understatement to what 
 had gone before — as though that would have been a 
 sufficiently decorous procedure had the tweezers been 
 wanting. It is clear only that it disturbs me, not with 
 the nature of what has been said — for that I have 
 already gathered — but with its degree. 
 
 It needs, then, no special explanation that the word 
 irony, having named the jokes which say less in order 
 to mean more, came also to include those which say 
 more in order to mean less. It came to include all 
 kinds of quantitative humor with a point. And since 
 quantities that are diminished sufficiently become the 
 negative of what they were, it needs no further princi- 
 ple to explain those extreme ironies which are state- 
 ments neither of less nor more, but of the exact op- 
 posite of what they mean. They too are quantitative. 
 They provoke our laughter with a minus after letting 
 us expect a plus. 
 
 “Ye thought he was a bad man,” said Mr. Dooley, 
 “but I knew him for a single-minded innocent ol’ 
 la’ad who niver harmed anny wan excipt f’r gain an’ 
 was incapable iv falsehood outside iv business.” 
 
 It is obvious that these forms of speech are very 
 handy to the purposes of ridicule. And ridicule is so 
 handy to the purposes of life, that irony has almost 
 
56 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 come to mean upon the common tongue a lightly hos- 
 tile or satiric speech of any kind. It has lost the fine 
 sense of measure that it had. But there is no neces- 
 sary connection between irony and the hostile attitude. 
 There is no pride nor biting in that exquisite title of 
 Charles Lamb’s essay, “On the Inconveniences Re- 
 sulting from Being Hanged” — a pure and perfect 
 irony. And although Socrates by talking small used 
 to triumph greatly over his playmates, we recognize 
 the same ironic flavor in Henry Fielding, when he talks 
 big in order to humble himself before them. 
 
 “As this is one of those deep observations,” he says, 
 “which very few readers can be supposed capable of 
 making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them 
 my assistance; but this is a favour rarely to be expected 
 in the course of my work. Indeed, I shall seldom or 
 never so indulge him, unless in such instances as this, 
 where nothing but the inspiration with which we 
 writers are gifted can possibly enable any one to make 
 the discovery.” 
 
 We all employ the art of irony for purposes of 
 praise as well as blame. We say, “ He is some dancer ! ” 
 and mean by our excessive emphasis upon the slight- 
 ness of it, that he is a great deal of a dancer. Or we 
 say, “He is a great dancer, he is!” and mean by the 
 emphatic repetition that he is little or no dancer at 
 all. In both these ironies — conventionalized, but still 
 a little playfully alive in spirit — we can see the original 
 sense and bearing of the term. We ought to try to be 
 as wise as our language, and not let the delicate per- 
 
THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 
 
 57 
 
 ceptive flavors of such terms decay. We ought to 
 apply the word irony to the simple humor of under- 
 statement, in the first place; then let it include jokes, 
 whether derisive or not, whose point is the identity of 
 saying too little with meaning much; and then jokes 
 whose saying too much is a meaning of little; and finally 
 those sayings that are directly opposed to their mean- 
 ings; and there we ought to stop. For all of these ways 
 of joking are distinguished from others by the fact 
 that, in depriving us of the goal we originally set out 
 after, they do not provide something of alien quality 
 in its place, but simply shift back the direction of our 
 intention, so that we get either the same thing in 
 greater or less degree, or its exact opposite. 
 
 Irony is the humor that we attribute to nature in 
 her play with man, because nature is always present- 
 ing us with facts. And facts, although extreme and 
 exciting enough in their own character, never travel 
 very far in the direction of our romantic locutions. 
 They come along after we have been talking them up, 
 with a decidedly Socratic manner and expression of 
 unpretentious adamant, amounting to very little, and 
 yet amounting to so much more than all our talk. 
 Reality is the supreme artist of understatement, and 
 the ironies of Fate wear a most illuminating smile. 
 They show very clearly to the pliant-hearted what 
 the point of a joke is, for they offer us in the form of 
 humility the very prize that we were grabbing in the 
 form of pride. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 A painful or unpleasant feeling may arise in us in 
 two different ways. It may arise from our losing or 
 failing to attain an experience that we want, and it 
 may arise from our receiving an experience that we 
 do not want. A similar distinction can be drawn 
 among the forms of that play-effigy of pain which we 
 call humorous emotion. There is a humor of disap- 
 pointment, properly so called — and this was what Kant 
 observed when he said that laughter arises from “a 
 strained expectation that is suddenly brought to noth- 
 ing.” And there is a humor of disturbance, or the 
 playfully disagreeable — and this was observed by Aris- 
 totle, who defined the laughable as the “harmlessly 
 ugly.” Kant did not explain why any disappointment 
 should ever give us pleasure, and Aristotle did not tell 
 how the ugly could ever actually be “harmless,” but 
 each of these philosophers perceived one aspect of the 
 veritable essence of the sense of humor. 
 
 When our playful trend is forward to some end or 
 object of interest, and we are simply tripped up, or 
 dropped into a trap, or left staring at nothing, the 
 humor that results is of a rather hard and prosaic 
 quality, as all feelings are that occur in a mood of 
 enterprise. And if we give to this the name of prac- 
 
 58 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 59 
 
 tical humor, we shall appropriately distinguish it from 
 that more liquid and irradiant feeling that arises when 
 some present object, or some group of qualities actu- 
 ally perceived, is laughable. I think that the words 
 absurdity and comic and wit and joke apply rather to 
 the practical kind of humor, and the words ludicrous, 
 and comical, and droll, and humorous are used oftener 
 of the poetic. 
 
 Those imps and April witlings whose main end of 
 being lies in the elaborate bedevilment of their neigh- 
 bors, will see that I do not mean by practical humor 
 what they mean by a practical joke. They mean a 
 prepared contrivance for getting playful enjoyment 
 out of the serious discomfiture of others. And in so 
 far as these contrivances are humorous, and not merely 
 a direct overflow of neighborly hostility, their humor 
 is, of course, practical. But practical humor, in the 
 large sense in which I contrast it with humor that is 
 poetic, need not be deliberately perpetrated, nor does 
 it require the discomfiture of others. It requires only 
 the discomfiture, in some purposeful creature, of a 
 practical tendency, and the presence of some humorous 
 creature, whether the same one or another, who is 
 able to take that event playfully. The advantage of 
 having these discomfitures befall others, and ourselves 
 receiving them only as in a kind of emotional mirror, 
 is that we are then very free to take them playfully. 
 We are relieved of the shock, and we do not have to 
 consider the consequences. The range of our enjoy- 
 ment is thus enormously increased — although even here 
 
60 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 sympathy sets a bound, and we are not most of us 
 able to perceive any loss entailing real anguish as hu- 
 morous, unless the persons involved are far away, or 
 long dead, or imaginary, and we merely hear the tale 
 of their troubles. But whether the joke is on us or 
 Saint Anthony, the interior result in its negative aspect 
 is essentially the same. It is a disappointment which 
 for some reason we are able to take playfully. And 
 nothing will lead us wider astray from the psychology 
 of practical humor than the opinion that we are able 
 to take playfully only the disappointments of others. 
 
 “One can always make a child laugh,” said Leon 
 Dumont, “by pointing to a spot upon its clothes 
 that does not exist !” And that is the elementary 
 atom of a jest — a thing at which we and not the child 
 should laugh, if looking down upon others were the 
 essence of the beauty of such things. For my part, I 
 have found the most hilarious of practical laughter to 
 arise when all of those present are involved in the 
 same predicament, and the humor is increased through 
 sympathetic reverberation without the possibility of 
 derision. Suppose, for example, that the whole family 
 have got all dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and 
 boarded a two-seated vehicle in the direction of the 
 village church; and suppose that the horse does not 
 concur in the piety of the general intention, but re- 
 fuses to move out of his tracks. Then all these elab- 
 orate preparations, and the continued obtrusion of a 
 purpose in their still sitting the way that was to be 
 forward, begin to enlarge themselves and display them- 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 61 
 
 selves, until they succeed in giving to that mere ab- 
 sence of an event a quality that is positively and enor- 
 mously comic. The young brother jumps out to 
 gather some straw, and lights a fire under the horse, 
 thinking to demonstrate the well-advertised superi- 
 ority of man over nature, and the horse feeling his 
 belly ache backs them all up into the barn. There is 
 little that being left out of it could add to the glory 
 of that situation. 
 
 It is an absurd situation. And absurdity, I believe, 
 is the best general name we can choose for that humor 
 of a practical kind which is purely negative, or in which 
 the positive values are too fine and vaporous to be 
 identified. It is a “reduction to absurdity” of the 
 whole attitude of our wills. In the particular kind of 
 activity called thinking, however, a special name has 
 already been applied to these practical comings-to- 
 nothing. They have been called bulls. And because 
 it is so hard to understand why we should enjoy a mere 
 nothing, they have usually been imputed to a people 
 we like to laugh about, and called Irish bulls. But it 
 seems likely that this word was derived in the first 
 place from the Latin bulla, which means a bubble. 
 And an Irish bull may very well be defined as any 
 remark which appears rotund and meaningful enough, 
 until our apprehension actually arrives upon it, when 
 there is simply nothing there. Its plausibility is the 
 only thing to distinguish it from pure nonsense. But 
 this plausibility can be so finely and fancifully devel- 
 oped as of itself to have a colored charm, and then the 
 
62 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 nothing can be landed in our laps with so dexterous 
 and graceful a temper of playfulness, that we would 
 be glad to have these bubbles blown before us all day 
 long. It is a genius for such glowing light logical ab- 
 surdities — a genius for making fairy-delicate plausibili- 
 ties out of intellectual nothing — that gives much of its 
 unique flavor to the humor of Lewis Carroll in “Alice 
 in Wonderland.” It is the kind of humor that we 
 might naturally expect of a mathematician at play. 
 
 “‘What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice 
 ventured to ask. 
 
 “‘Oh — things that happened the week after next/ 
 the Queen replied in a careless tone. ‘For instance 
 now/ she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on 
 her finger as she spoke, ‘ there’s the King’s Messenger. 
 He’s in prison now being punished; and the trial 
 doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course 
 the crime comes last of all.’ 
 
 “‘Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice. 
 
 “‘That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the 
 Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger 
 with a bit of ribbon.” 
 
 Kant was right in insisting that it must be an abso- 
 lute nothing into which our practical expectation is 
 transformed, if we are to laugh with humor. It must 
 be a nothing — or at least a worth nothing — from the 
 standpoint of that expectation. But if from some 
 other standpoint the nothing turns out to be also 
 something, then we have still the absurdity, the humor 
 of the bull, and we have this positive thing besides. 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 63 
 
 And such happy combinations, when they are delib- 
 erately perpetrated in conversation, we describe as 
 wit. A witty joker may be likened to a man who, 
 having hidden a gold piece beside the path we are 
 treading, or having discovered at least that one lies 
 hidden there, contrives to trip us up in such a way 
 that we shall find it. To stumble and find something 
 is to enjoy a joke. 
 
 Cicero tells us how his friend Nasica avenged him- 
 self upon a Roman gentleman by the name of Ennius, 
 upon whom he had paid a call. He had been in- 
 formed by the maid that Ennius was not at home; 
 and when it came about that Ennius called upon him, 
 he stuck his head out of the window and said: “I am 
 not at home.” 
 
 “What are you talking about?” said Ennius. 
 “Don’t I know your voice?” 
 
 “Why, you rascal,” said Nasica, “I believed your 
 maid when she told me you were not at home, and 
 you won’t believe me even when I tell you myself !” 
 
 Is not this classical Latin joke most obviously, in 
 the mere form of argument, an Irish bull — a piece of 
 logically plausible and yet complete nonsense? But 
 even while we enjoy that nonsense, do we not enjoy 
 also a certain vague sense that pervades it — a kind of 
 diffused vapor-douche of the short and ugly shot one 
 might direct at Ennius under the circumstances? So 
 it is that “comings to nothing” and “sudden glories” 
 are combined in the most common form of adult 
 fighting play; and so it is that two such utterly diverse 
 
64 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 opinions as those of Hobbes and Kant about the cause 
 of laughter could stand up with equal authority so 
 long as they have. 
 
 Repartee is the name we give to this common form 
 of play, and the rules of the game might be laid down 
 somewhat as follows: One of the contestants pro- 
 pounds a thesis which gives glory to himself, or igno- 
 miny to his opponent; his opponent so manipulates 
 the implications of that thesis that the propounder’s 
 glory disappears, and his own appears in its place; 
 the propounder then further manipulates it, if he can, 
 to restore his own glory; and so on, until one or the 
 other of them cries enough. An example which figures 
 in the translation of Freud’s book about wit is the 
 reply of Charles Sumner to a minister who asked him 
 impertinently why he did not go into the South with 
 his antislavery speeches where slavery exists. His 
 reply was: “You are trying to save souls from hell, 
 aren’t you? Why don’t you go there?” 
 
 Freud would have us believe that the pith of this 
 wit lies in the “eluding of a censorship,” the saying of 
 a thing indirectly which good manners would otherwise 
 prohibit. And we must acknowledge that such a thing 
 is accomplished — it was a very genteel way of telling 
 a minister to go to hell. But nobody not occupied 
 with proving a theory could possibly identify its gen- 
 tility with its humor. Humor lay in the fact that the 
 minister went to hell on the wings of his own logic. 
 His condemnation of Sumner was not answered; it 
 was not contradicted; it was simply brought to noth- 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 65 
 
 ing, and Sumner’s condemnation of him allowed to 
 appear in its place — a victory according to the essen- 
 tial rules of the game. Many people are free from 
 the censorship of good manners, but few would not 
 prefer that jocular victory to the sober damnation of 
 an opponent. 
 
 A form of enjoyment that is very far away from 
 these quips and privy taunts is our enjoyment of the 
 naive. And it requires a very generous theory of 
 humor to bring the naive blunder in under its shelter 
 without crowding out the witty joke. The trick has 
 given much idle occupation to the philosophers of 
 laughter. And if our own theory proves capable of 
 this ample spread of wing, it is because, in the first 
 place, we refuse to be entirely carried away by that 
 sophisticated distinction between our own experience 
 and the observed experience of others, and in the second 
 place, we recur always to the words pleasure and dis- 
 pleasure, or to no less general names of feeling, in 
 giving our account both of humor and of jokes. A 
 naive blunder can be shown to give a shock which 
 might he displeasure to those who enjoy its humor, 
 and to give a rich and positive pleasure besides. 
 
 Remember, for example, the schoolboy who de- 
 fined a marsupial upon his examination paper as “an 
 animal who has a pouch in the middle of his stomach 
 into which he can retire when he is hard pressed.” 
 That is absurd in the same perfectly logical way that 
 the humor of Lewis Carroll is absurd. It is, in fact, 
 an “Irish bull.” But it is more than that, for besides 
 
66 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 failing to deliver the proposed meaning to our critical 
 judgment, it does present some other thing to our 
 affectionate attention. It presents that schoolboy 
 himself, earnestly and anxiously trying to remember 
 his text-book — the words “hard pressed” being a 
 stock in trade with all text-books. We see him bend- 
 ing over his paper, personifying and continuing before 
 our eyes, in spite of logic, physiology, and all else to the 
 contrary, the original meaningful impulse which he has 
 aroused and disappointed, and we have a rare oppor- 
 tunity to enjoy his innocence. Surely there is nothing 
 in the nature of humor to prevent that enjoyment, or 
 dry up the feeling of tender sympathy with which any 
 creature having a human heart must see the picture 
 of a child undergoing an examination. So far from 
 scorning him, we love him suddenly. We resolve that 
 he shall be remembered among the martyrs who have 
 suffered greatly for the happiness of mankind. And 
 beside him, for the still further illumination of pos- 
 terity, the little girl who said that “ Saturnalia was the 
 name of the wolf that suckled Romeo and Juliette.” 
 
 These blunders are beautiful. And naive absurdities 
 are often more beautiful, even when they are not more 
 humorous, than absurdities of the voluntary kind. 
 They offer us a variety of positive satisfactions which 
 the clown or the deliberate wit-snapper can only sim- 
 ulate — the satisfaction of loving an innocent mind, as 
 in the example I have discussed; or the satisfaction 
 of glorying over it, as in the classic theory; or as Freud 
 tells us, the satisfaction of realizing through it some 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 67 
 
 wished-for thing which our own sophistication forbids. 
 Any of these affirmative values may flow in to enrich 
 our enjoyment of a naive blunder. But even in the 
 blunder itself there is a special shining out of comic 
 color, because it is not only humor in the midst of 
 play that suddenly appears, but playful humor in the 
 midst of serious life. For a similar reason we laugh 
 more generously at a humorous thing which “really 
 happened” than at the same thing if it is offered as a 
 “funny story” — a fact which comic editors need to 
 have perpetually in mind. A naive absurdity actually 
 observed, or related to us while in a mood of serious 
 belief, has the special virtue of lightning when the 
 clouds are dark. A sudden rift, and a bright flood of 
 illuminating laughter breaks over us, as though we 
 heard the bell ring for recess in the midst of our les- 
 sons. We are at play, but real life is our plaything. 
 
 The form of practical wit most utterly remote from 
 this beautifully humorous condition is the play upon 
 words, the pun. Indeed there has always been some 
 dispute among the captains and superintendents of 
 polite laughter as to whether there can be humor in a 
 pun — and whether we may be permitted to smile, for 
 instance, at that answer of one of Thomas Hood’s 
 heroes to his wife’s attempt to fortify him against his 
 sorrows : 
 
 “I know I’m not so fortified, nor fiftyfied, as you.” 
 
 For my part I think we ought to be allowed a slight 
 liberty of choice in this matter, and that a sharp dif- 
 
68 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 ference ought to be recognized between those puns 
 which rely too much upon their negative action, and 
 those which offer some good strong joy in the recov- 
 ery. The negative action of a pun in its purity is, of 
 course, merely the nonsensical use of a word or sylla- 
 ble — a thing which Shakespeare seems to have been 
 childlike enough to enjoy, but which we do not recog- 
 nize, as we do mere conceptual absurdities, with a 
 special name. We call verbal absurdities puns only 
 when they offer, besides the humor of pure nonsense, 
 some reasonable excuse for their intrusion — some 
 meaning in another sense, or at least some vocal like- 
 ness or identity with a thing already said. We need 
 not pay them much respect, however, unless they go 
 beyond the point of reasonable excuse, and give us a 
 warm recompense. For their intrusion is in a peculiar 
 way graceless and out of true connection with our life. 
 
 Words are in ordinary speech merely the material 
 carriers of meaning or image or emotion. They are 
 containers, necessary but negligible, and our attention 
 is not directed upon them. We do not “expect” them 
 to do their work appropriately, but just assume they 
 will. And when they fail, no matter how dexterously 
 the failure may be arranged, we do not experience a 
 simple and immediate disappointment. We have 
 rather to abandon our whole expectation, and begin 
 over in a more shallow attitude in which we can realize 
 the part played in it by these containers. For that 
 reason a verbal absurdity cannot be briefly and di- 
 rectly felt as humorous experience, and even the pun 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 69 
 
 with a point — the failure of a particle of speech to 
 mean one thing combined with its success in meaning 
 another — startles our admiration more than it stim- 
 ulates our sense of humor. It is not a part of what 
 we are doing. It requires a pause, an act of recogni- 
 tion. Even in the most loose and foolish of hilarious 
 discourse, a pun comes a little alien, like the attempts 
 at congeniality of a drunkard or of a person whose 
 reason is slightly touched. Indeed there are forms of 
 insanity in which the deeper associations of words 
 seem to become dried up, and a “flight of ideas” oc- 
 curs, which is like the racing of a motor disgeared from 
 the machine it was intended to move, and in this con- 
 dition puns are sometimes seen to fly off in the most 
 extraordinary swarms and galaxies. It is a condition 
 that any one can reproduce by forcing himself to talk 
 more rapidly than he can think; he will then see in 
 what kind of mind it is that these verbal sports have 
 a natural and substantial flavor. 
 
 King James the First seems to have had a mind of 
 this sort, and to have been so addicted to the idiotic 
 fun it supplied him, that he would not promote any 
 one to high place in the English kingdom who had not 
 some skill and fertility as a punster. The result was 
 an elegant epidemic, in which by means of social sug- 
 gestion puns acquired a value which was not in any way 
 connected with humorous emotion. As Addison tells 
 us, the pun was now “delivered with great gravity 
 from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn 
 manner at the council table. The greatest authors, 
 
70 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 in their most serious works, made frequent use of puns. 
 The sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the tragedies of 
 Shakespeare are full of them. . . . The sinner was 
 punned into repentance.” It is sad to record that, in 
 spite of Addison’s hygienic advice and example, Eng- 
 land has not yet altogether recovered from this afflic- 
 tion, and these obtrusions of the vocable show a degree 
 of social and literary audacity upon that island which 
 they have never attained, to my knowledge, in any 
 other part of the planet. At least I count it a point 
 of legitimate pride in my own country, infested though 
 it is with that other little superfecund pest of inheri- 
 tance from the Court of Saint James, the English spar- 
 row, that it has, upon the whole, and within the limits 
 provided by law, manfully resisted the transplantation 
 and general propagation of the household pun. I do 
 not believe there is any American of literary sensi- 
 bility who will not be pained or touched with a sympa- 
 thetic embarrassment to find one of these hard, shal- 
 low bumps in the fluid texture of that most wonderful 
 passage of Charles Lamb “On Burial Societies; and 
 the Character of an Undertaker.” 
 
 To provide ourselves a bier, he tells us, we curtail 
 ourselves of beer. 
 
 It fills the whole form and definition of a joke. 
 There is a meaninglessness in one way of taking the 
 word he has italicized, a meaningfulness in the other 
 — a nothing and a something, a disappointment and 
 a satisfaction. But there is no grace of absurdity 
 borne onward by a wave of delight, because the event 
 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 
 
 71 
 
 has not happened in the sphere of our actual enterprise, 
 which was not a perceiving of words but a conceiving 
 of ideas. We are made aware that a joke has been 
 perpetrated, but denied the pleasure of its intimate 
 experience. We have something to forgive as tra- 
 ducing, rather than to enjoy as disappointing our 
 expectation. And for this act of clemency we ask a 
 fair consideration. We demand that a pun shall do 
 something more upon the affirmative side than merely 
 make a little sense. Only when that demand is hand- 
 somely met do we admit a pun among the most illus- 
 trious of those “darlings of absurdity” to be described 
 as practical jokes. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 POETIC HUMOR 
 
 People who feel affectionate toward daffodils call 
 them daffodillies, and I suppose that people who feel 
 the same way toward crocodiles call them crocodillies, 
 although I have never met any such people. I will 
 assume that the reader at least has no such deep at- 
 tachment in this direction as would blind him to a 
 certain inappropriateness combined with the appro- 
 priateness of the word. It is a feeling word that does 
 not fit. And that is a thing most obviously to be de- 
 scribed as poetic humor. For poetry always speaks in 
 words that feel. It speaks in words that cherish the 
 qualities of things, and bring them forth shiningly into 
 the mind. Poetry is the art of calling names, and 
 poetic humor is a playful disconcertion of this art. 
 To call whiskey “fire-water” is poetic; and to call 
 Apollinaris “this water that tastes like your foot’s 
 asleep” is poetic also, but with a tincture of the im- 
 possible that makes it humorous. 
 
 Aside from the hypnotic assistance of rhythm, 
 there are two methods by which poetic language makes 
 vivid our realization of things. It chooses some salient 
 detail or flavor in those things upon which we may 
 focus our attention; and it compares those things with 
 others which are similar in some salient detail or flavor. 
 
 72 
 
POETIC HUMOR 
 
 73 
 
 In poetic humor we can distinguish these same two 
 arts — an art of inappropriate choice and an art of 
 incongruous comparison. 
 
 When Dante describes a saint who has come down 
 from heaven as “One who left off singing hallelujahs,” 
 he is naming his object by means of the salient detail. 
 And when O. Henry speaks of a metropolitan charac- 
 ter as “One at whose bidding many lobsters had per- 
 ished,” he is doing the same thing. The poetry of 
 the first expression lies in the appropriateness of the 
 detail spoken to array round itself as a centre all the 
 other qualities of the thing it names. The humor of 
 the second lies in a certain objective possibility of its 
 doing that, combined with an emotional impossibility. 
 We feel that a human being can hardly be designated 
 by so accidental an attribute, or that if he can, then 
 the designation ought not to be applied with so much 
 rhetorical dignity. It is a playfully inappropriate 
 choice. 
 
 When Burns tells us that 
 
 “Like winds in summer sighing. 
 
 Her voice is low and sweet,” 
 
 we are moved by the congruity of these two things to 
 realize them both the more perfectly. But when 
 Aristophanes tells us that an eminent statesman “has 
 a voice like a pig on fire,” we receive into our conscious- 
 ness two emotional atmospheres so negative to each 
 other that they fall apart with an explosion. It is a 
 playfully incongruous comparison. 
 
74 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 These two simple acts of choice and comparison 
 underlie and explain all the forms of poetic language 
 which grammarians call “figures of speech” — synec- 
 doche, metonymy, metaphor, simile, all those incom- 
 prehensible terrors of the classroom. And just as the 
 language of Shakespeare is packed full of these poetic 
 figures in the intense, bold, delicate, wanton extremity 
 of their perfection, so the language of Rabelais is packed 
 full of them in a state of contortion, magnification, 
 syncope, insanity, sudden collapse, and general dis- 
 combobulation, injury and disability of existence, that 
 is among the supreme wonders of literature. The hu- 
 morous names of Rabelais and the poetic names of 
 Shakespeare — these two things come nearest in natural 
 miracle to the invention of language itself. 
 
 Of course it is not only names but also things that 
 are poetically humorous. In actual life as well as in 
 imagination we attempt to realize the being of things, 
 and find ourselves balked by some rift or inhospitality 
 in their structure. Either they contain too much 
 of the ugly, the dreadful, the disgusting, for us to realize 
 with serious enjoyment, or else they contain elements 
 so contradictory according to the judgment of our 
 habits, that they will not “run together” in percep- 
 tion — they are incongruous. And this external disaster, 
 being playfully accepted, gives rise to the same warm 
 laughter, many-colored and tinctured with all the 
 varieties of emotion and sensation, as the language of 
 the humorous poet. 
 
 Indeed there is no better way to portray the gradual 
 
POETIC HUMOR 
 
 75 
 
 and yet great difference between practical and poetic 
 humor than by recalling the development of that 
 quaint figure of pity-comedy created by Charlie Chap- 
 lin in the moving pictures. He began his career un- 
 der the rod of the commercial manager as an amazingly 
 agile and original clown, a little big-footed, semi- 
 mechanical manikin with a gift for blundering when we 
 expected him to succeed, and succeeding when we ex- 
 pected him to fail. His enterprising misadventures 
 followed each other with the rapidity of bullets fired out 
 of a machine-gun, keeping us in a state of narrative sus- 
 pense too strenuous and perpetual for any poetic drink- 
 ing in of qualities in scene and character. We carried 
 home only the general memory of a violent state of 
 busyness, a little man forever in a new hurry, stumbling 
 on every pebble of his tread, and yet continually ar- 
 riving too, and winding up in a pure whirlwind of 
 action and reaction with some great joyful or dis- 
 astrous bang at the end. We might say that the con- 
 crete material of those pictures, the people, scene, 
 and situation, served only the purpose of arousing a 
 sufficient interest in the question what was to be done. 
 
 But a poet was acting in them, and after the author- 
 ity of a manager and the commercial pressure w r ere 
 removed, he began to give rein to his native interest in 
 those materials for their own sake. He allowed the 
 presence of qualities as well as the accomplishment of 
 deeds to occupy time. He filled his pictures full of 
 rich and moving incongruities of mood and character 
 and situation, amid which he himself, without chang- 
 
76 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 ing the quaint garb of the buffoon days, began to 
 acquire a quality of soft and curious pathos. A be- 
 wildered wistful genius in low circumstance, he is, 
 moving with all our pity and delight through a series 
 of experiences wrought together with exquisite sense 
 for the ludicrous, the droll, the confluence of incom- 
 patible emotions. The “gags” no longer consist 
 only of new ways to fall down and find something; 
 they consist of new kinds of inappropriateness in atti- 
 tude and gesture and expression. Indeed a gift for 
 acting as though a present thing were something else, 
 and acting so vividly that the absent thing flashes 
 actually before us too, is almost the essential principle 
 in Charlie Chaplin’s art. He is not a “funny man.” 
 He is not even exactly a comedian. He is a humorqjus 
 poet who happens also to be a great actor — a master 
 of mimetic gesture and expression. It is this union of 
 two perfect gifts that has enabled him, without ever 
 speaking a word, to arrive at a place of renown in the 
 world’s adoration that might be envied by Santa 
 Claus. 
 
 What could be more inherently laughable, for in- 
 stance, supposing it is enacted with the perfect realism 
 of the barnyard, than the picture of an angel picking 
 its feathers? It combines in a single perception two 
 groups of associated ideas and feelings so lively and 
 yet so incompatible, and it combines them with such 
 irresistible plausibility, that we can neither deny it 
 nor receive it into the existing habits of our mind. 
 We must either humorously laugh, or give up the hope 
 
POETIC HUMOR 77 
 
 of remaining alive in this perception. And that is 
 the characteristic of all truly poetic humor. 
 
 Those who think that laughter is composed of scorn 
 are accustomed to describe these incongruities as ex- 
 amples of the “degradation” of a felt value. They 
 will say here that the reminiscence of a hen-house brings 
 a kind of disgrace or defilement of honor to an angel, 
 and that our laughter is a gleeful exultation at his fall. 
 But they could find in these same comedies, if they 
 chose to, examples in which the intruding reminiscence 
 is on a perfect par of honor with the actual scene — as 
 when a stack of pancakes is counted and divided like a 
 roll of bills. And they could find examples in which 
 the reminiscence is incongruous because it gives too 
 much honor to the present object — as when the actor 
 lifts his hat deferentially to a cow upon seizing her teats, 
 as though offering a somewhat dubious courtesy to a 
 lady. It is true that humor depends upon playful- 
 ness and implies it, and for that reason the intrusion 
 of something too intensely solemn or devout cannot 
 be humorously perceived, no matter what it may 
 intrude upon. Both ends of a simile that is humorous 
 must be lightly taken. But beyond that there need 
 be no downward tendency. There need be no ten- 
 dency at all, no choice implied, no judgment rendered. 
 And for the most there is none in these pictures. It 
 is just the perpetual streaming out of quaint, odd, 
 grotesque, jolly-foolish, droll, and fantastic mixtures 
 of the qualities of experience that gives them so poetic a 
 popularity. The incidents most laughed at have no 
 
78 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 value but the pleasure of that laugh. They stand in 
 the same relation to poetic jokes that absurdity does 
 to practical jokes. And the comic emotion they cre- 
 ate, although more lingering and vari-colored, and 
 capable of being objectified, so that it seems a quality 
 in the things instead of an element in our perception, 
 is still the pure feeling of playful pain. It is the un- 
 mixed and original action of our sense of humor. 
 
 Humor of this kind does acquire a point, however, 
 and may be suitably described as a “joke” when the 
 disappointment of our poetic or idle impulse to per- 
 ceive, is so managed as to bring either a meaning to 
 our minds or a satisfaction to some underlying current 
 of choice between the two things offered to our atten- 
 tion. It is this underlying current, for example, that 
 gives durability to the memory of that little old lady 
 who went to church one Sunday morning, stepping 
 quietly and soberly down the aisle, leaned over an 
 elderly gentleman in one of the front rows, and asked 
 him in a loud whisper: “Is this pie occupewed?” 
 Few apparently pointless jokes have survived so long 
 and travelled so far in the conversational lore of a 
 people as that one has in the United States. Any- 
 where else in the world it might have been recalled 
 once or twice, I should imagine, and then forgotten. 
 But to us who were so early compelled to go to church, 
 and to go to a very Protestant church where a solemn 
 behavior was required of us in absence of the sensuous 
 conditions of solemn feeling, to us the relief of tension 
 involved here seems to have been so great as to con- 
 
POETIC HUMOR 79 
 
 stitute a positive joy, and we preserve this blunt joke 
 as carefully as though it had a point. 
 
 An immense variety of laughable anecdotes can be 
 remembered, however, of which this little old lady’s 
 misadventure is typical — amazing and fine things that 
 have happened in the midst of prayer, keen remarks 
 that little children have made about God, shoving up 
 of little buds of reality through the vain show of wed- 
 dings, christenings, patriotic celebrations, Sunday- 
 school lessons, prayer-meetings, burial excursions, 
 visits of the bishop. Rabelais carried these jokes to 
 the extreme to which all good things ought to go in 
 the twenty-second chapter of his book “ Pantagruel,” 
 in which a pious lady attends to her prayers, and what 
 befalls her is so contrary to the expected blessings of 
 God upon the devout, that I leave it to the reader to 
 find out for himself at a time when his curiosity some- 
 what exceeds his piety and refinement. 
 
 There is in the breast of every one of us a little child 
 who has never absolutely accepted these adult solem- 
 nities, or agreed upon their awful and transcendent 
 value, and it is the pleasure of the unchaining of this 
 child that flows in upon the body of our surprise, 
 and makes a complete joke out of what would other- 
 wise be but a ludicrous interruption. We receive a 
 satisfaction that is really more exalted than the ful- 
 filment of our pious intention, and better for our 
 health too. It is the satisfaction of feeling free. And 
 humorous liberty is so definite and delightful a quality 
 of feeling that it too has been made the basis of a 
 
80 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 definition of humor, and all laughter has been explained 
 as a kind of declaration of independence upon the part 
 of the nervous system. But “liberty” is only another 
 way of describing the things of which we are perpetu- 
 ally deprived. And any of these things may be re- 
 lied upon to reinforce our laughter at a poetic incon- 
 gruity, as well as at a practical disappointment. They 
 all seem to combine together indeed — liberty, and hos- 
 tility, and truth, and even a sexual interest adheres 
 to them — in the case of the man who was compelled 
 to ride to his wife’s funeral in the same carriage with 
 his mother-in-law, and all protests and evasions hav- 
 ing ultimately failed, he leaned over the wheel and 
 growled at the funeral director: “Well, you’ve spoiled 
 the day for me, that’s all ! ” It is the perfect inept- 
 ness of that form of words to the flavor of the occasion, 
 that makes so humorous its aptness for the expression 
 of certain eternal if not very tactful underpropensities 
 of the broken heart. 
 
 Of all the values that may loom up in the midst 
 of a poetic ineptitude, the most charmingly surprising 
 is poetic truth from some other point of view. For 
 it happens that the external world is so indeterminate, 
 or so patient of our whims, that it is quite willing to 
 be a great many different things according as we choose 
 to perceive it. It is only a question of the posture of 
 our eyes and feelings, for example, whether Turner’s 
 famous painting in the Boston Museum is properly to 
 be described as a picture of “The Slave-Ship,” or of 
 “A tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of toma- 
 
POETIC HUMOR 
 
 81 
 
 toes.” There is the action of the poet in both names. 
 And this is true, not only of oil-paintings, but also of 
 the most interesting creations of nature. We might be 
 watching with a child’s romantic admiration a parade 
 of nature’s wonders through the village street, and 
 some more realistic friend might whisper that an ele- 
 phant walks as though his pants were coming down. 
 And although that ludicrously disturbs our own poetry 
 of elephants, we see that it is accurate, and in the 
 second ripple of our laughter we become the poets of 
 its truth. To be able to perceive the world in many 
 different ways, and in each receive it with the poet’s 
 love of all experience, is perhaps a danger in the moral 
 fibre, but it is a gift that adds deep joys of color to our 
 humorous laughter. It is the gift of those who have a 
 quick imaginative sympathy, and it makes them seem 
 to be laughing a little all the time when they are not 
 in tears, for they are seeing life’s incidents continually 
 with the eyes of others while they see them with their 
 own. 
 
 It is clear, then, that poetic jokes do not differ 
 from practical ones in the variety and high potency of 
 their points. They differ in their more enduring 
 ability to provoke laughter without a point. A mere 
 incongruity, like the picture conveyed in these lines, 
 
 “So very deaf was my grandfather Squeers, 
 
 That he had to wear lightning-rods over his ears, 
 
 To hear even thunder, and oftentimes then 
 He was forced to request it to thunder again,” 
 
82 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 will tickle us into laughter more strongly and more 
 often than a mere bull, or vacancy of meaning, be- 
 cause it presents to us an actual thing and not just 
 the absence of it. And for that reason the poetic 
 humorist, when great and significant incongruities 
 fail him, is less at a loss than the practical wit. He 
 can fall back upon the crude flow of materials, and 
 pass the time in mere horse-play or general tom- 
 foolery, relying upon the fact that to an aroused imagi- 
 nation a little tinged with the relics of previous hilar- 
 ity, the very presentation of existence, the queer com- 
 binations of attributes which hobble upon the stage 
 of reality and make their lame attempt to be things, 
 is enough to beget humorous laughter. 
 
 Especially in America our habits seem to be tolerant 
 toward this form of relaxation. I remember a time 
 when the Mayor of New York told some young ladies 
 graduating from a seminary that the proper way to fix 
 an egg so that a man can eat it, is to put it in boiling 
 water and boil it for four minutes; and this little article 
 of faith fell under the eye of the “funny man” em- 
 ployed by the New York World, who for two weeks 
 thereafter filled a column and a half a day with all 
 manner of theses, dissertations, arguments, sermons, 
 exhortations, epistolary disquisitions, field reports, 
 laboratory findings, diagrams, maps, pictures, and sta- 
 tistics, to the amusement of a whole city. It was not 
 because he had anything very witty to say about boil- 
 ing eggs, but because he had the poetic sense to per- 
 ceive that the intrinsic qualities of an egg — its history, 
 
POETIC HUMOR 
 
 83 
 
 its connections, its possible career, its non-committal 
 expression combined with a liability to blossom sud- 
 denly — offer a wealth of immediate material to the 
 faculty of humorous perception. One of the letters 
 he received put up a vain pretense that eggs are not 
 humorous. 
 
 “Egg Editor, 
 
 “The New York World: [it ran] 
 
 “Dear Sir: 
 
 “ I want to express my sympathy with you in your 
 unsuccessful effort to extract humor from an egg. I 
 don’t blame you. Ever since we moved out on the 
 farm I’ve been trying to find out what there is about 
 an egg to cackle over. I think the truth is that an egg 
 looks funny, but really isn’t. Of course all this talk 
 about hard-boiled eggs is pure nonsense. It doesn’t 
 matter how hard you boil an egg, the question is how 
 long. When you get right down to common sense, 
 there is no such thing as a boiled egg. You can’t boil 
 an egg. An egg hardens below the boiling point. All 
 you can do is to boil the water around it, and you can 
 do that just as well before, or after, or without putting 
 the egg in at all.” 
 
 If there is any ground for the opinion that the Ameri- 
 cans have “ a different sense of humor ” from the British, 
 it is a difference in the direction of their tolerance. 
 The British are more interested in intellectual life than 
 we are, and that interest renders them tolerant toward 
 
84 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 intellectual silliness. But they have also an ideal of 
 emotional restraint, a cult of hypocritical coolness, 
 that makes them frown down upon any mere ludicrous 
 uproar as somewhat provincial, frowning through an 
 eye-glass which itself looks so funny to us we can 
 hardly hold in until we get back to New York. In 
 New York all kinds of loose and inebriate foolishness 
 is accepted, but those puns and little lingual and 
 cerebral jigs and jocules so dear to the cultivated 
 British, are greeted by us with the symptoms of serious 
 pain. 
 
 It was in America, I think, that the poetic “ humor- 
 ist ” as a professional character was first baptized 
 with that name. He is not a satirist, nor a clown, 
 nor a comedian, nor in any sense a resurrected court 
 fool or jester. He has not enough wit or agility for 
 that. He is a man of naturally droll mind and rather 
 uncouth magnetism, who simply stands up and talks. 
 He makes everything he talks about seem funny with- 
 out cracking jokes about it. It seems funny because 
 he is funny. He is inappropriate. Everything he 
 does or has to do with is inappropriate. The harle- 
 quin dresses himself up in order to make people laugh, 
 but the humorist, knowing that all mankind is dressed 
 up, achieves the same end by coming out in his own 
 clothes. If there is any point in his humor, it is a 
 kind of lovable honesty which underlies all that inap- 
 propriateness — not a profound honesty, perhaps, but 
 honest provincialism in a society much overstraining 
 the effort to escape it. Artemus Ward was one of the 
 
POETIC HUMOR 
 
 85 
 
 founders of this tradition, which achieved a great 
 height of art and personality in Mark Twain, whose 
 innocence was aggressive, and his provincialism one 
 of the gayest, great oaken broadswords with which 
 the idols and elegances of the centres of culture were 
 ever wantonly assailed. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 The day may come when some insuppressible classi- 
 ficator, a kind of scholastic joculary entomologist, 
 equipped with an eyepiece and a bottle of chloro- 
 form, will go about collecting all the different kinds of 
 jokes and puns and whims and twits and follies, and 
 all the nameless little light-winged forms of “smile 
 talk” that the ingenious hand of evolution may un- 
 fold, pin them down in a great book with names de- 
 rived from the all-suffering Latin, one each for the 
 genus, species, family, order, tribe to which they sev- 
 erally belong, and so endow the mighty steel-ribbed 
 shelves of the libraries of this world with a new and 
 monumental science. It will be a science upon which 
 those who are addicted to labor can practise their 
 vice without fear of ever exhausting the material. 
 For here we have already, with our distinction between 
 simple humor and jokes with a point, and between the 
 two currents of value, positive and negative, which 
 constitute the point of a joke, and between poetic 
 and practical, quantitative and qualitative humor — 
 we have already laid ground for enough permutations 
 and combinations to fill with their illustration many 
 laborious volumes. And we have not even mentioned 
 the well-known distinction between dry humor and 
 
 86 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 87 
 
 wet, or between salt wit and sweet, or made half the 
 trouble that might be made out of that between comic 
 action and the humor that is conveyed in words. 
 Undoubtedly a deep and stupendous task is here al- 
 ready in outline. And there remains the fact that 
 when we are once inwardly frivolized, and rendered a 
 little inanely hysterical, as we certainly shall be before 
 we have finished perusing one of these vast works, we 
 will laugh at anything at all that is mentioned — and so 
 in the end the learned professor will find himself com- 
 pelled to classify all things that are, and he will have 
 to kill and chloroform the whole universe and pin 
 down the very wings of time, in order to complete 
 his science and be sure that everything laughable is 
 ordered and understood as it should be. 
 
 It is not my purpose even to make a beginning of 
 this exalted work in the present chapter. I shall 
 merely venture to designate one little minor difference 
 which that ultimate compilation will no doubt very 
 justly ignore — the difference between good jokes and 
 bad. Whether it is a sheer lack of moral enthusiasm, 
 or an inability to plumb the thing to its depths, the 
 fact is that no one who has ever written upon this sub- 
 ject has offered any rule or precept by which we might, 
 without risking some terrible public disgrace and 
 exposure, choose in advance between the good and 
 the bad. No technique has ever been established, no 
 lessons given, no schools founded, no text-books, no 
 lectureships, no missionaries sent among the infantile 
 and the depraved, to explain how to avoid the pale 
 
88 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 fizzle and bring on the jovial cheer. It has all been 
 left to chance and divine empirical guesswork. And 
 yet it is quite possible, I believe, to diagnose the infirmi- 
 ties of jokes that are bad, and tell what are the fine 
 points of a joke that is good. And by concentrating 
 the attention of certain bright wits and village cut-ups 
 upon the extreme delicacy of these latter points, it 
 might even lie within the scope of mortality to reduce 
 the number of their delinquencies and the incredible 
 glibness with which they commit them. I will, there- 
 fore, lay down the first eight laws of a code for serious 
 joke-makers. 
 
 Law Number One 
 
 There must he a real engagement of the interest of the 
 •person who is expected to laugh. 
 
 This would seem obvious enough, were it not that 
 so many of those serious persons who have elected 
 themselves philosophers of the comic have been under 
 the impression that laughter is a purely intellectual 
 product. Seeing that humor is playful and has little 
 to do with their own industrious feelings, they have 
 jumped to the conclusion that it is “logical” or “cere- 
 bral,” and has nothing to do with the feelings at all. 
 But as we have observed that play is an instinctive 
 condition, and that humor itself is a feeling, nothing 
 appears more certain than that jokes cannot strongly 
 affect us unless our voluntary nature is alert. We 
 must be interested, both in the direction of the disap- 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 89 
 
 pointment and in that of the satisfaction, in order to 
 receive the full flavor of a comic experience. 
 
 If this fact were fully appreciated and made the 
 subject of public instruction, it might serve to defend 
 us against the infliction not only of dull jokes but also 
 of what may be called perfunctory jokes, the product 
 of a mere habit of shallow-headed caprice, or “kid- 
 ding” — both words are derived from the goat — and it 
 might also reduce the torture we suffer from the per- 
 petual conversational play-acting, grandiose or pet- 
 iose mummery, baby-talk buffoonery, and general 
 clowning around of unmagnetic people. It is only 
 necessary for a person who is considered wise to act 
 foolish in order to give us a kind of jocular surprise, 
 for we experience at the same moment a shock and the 
 pleasure of a moral relaxation. But very often the 
 person who decides to act foolish is mistaken in think- 
 ing that this will be a surprise, and out of that fact 
 arises much awkward boredom and the artificial laugh- 
 ter which may truly be called intellectual. These 
 inveterate conversational gay-boys and professional 
 pickle-herrings should be advised to make sure that 
 the company is fond of them before they carry too far, 
 just as jokers must be sure that their matter is interest- 
 ing, and not trust the mere form of comicality to pro- 
 duce laughter. Humor must be alive — that is the 
 first law of the laughter-making art. 
 
 An intuitive effort to conform to this law is the trick 
 of imputing one’s jokes to prominent or popular person- 
 alities, and especially to great humorists. Mark Twain 
 
90 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 would appear, since Lincoln passed into history, to be 
 the author of most of the comic things that have ever 
 been said in the United States. And this is merely 
 because the imagination of his genial person and au- 
 thority colors a joke and tunes it up to a better explo- 
 sion, thickening the mixture a little, as he might have 
 said. A trick that is similar in purpose, although 
 opposite in fact, is to attribute every humorous thing 
 one relates to his own past history, giving it thus the 
 warmth of his visible personality and winning a tol- 
 erance toward its frailties that might otherwise be 
 lacking. This method must be employed with a 
 certain courage and preparedness, however, for when 
 some one in the audience who is not merciful says, 
 “Yes, I heard that story up in Montreal,” there must 
 be no weakening. We must reply firmly, “No doubt 
 you did,” and add in a slightly wearied manner, “it 
 was widely commented on at the time.” 
 
 The importance of this emotional interest in the 
 material of humor is revealed in the adjective with 
 which we describe our favorite examples. We call 
 them rich. And for perfectly scientific purposes a 
 rich joke may be defined as a poetic-practical joke in 
 which the interest balked and the one satisfied are 
 both strong. Jokes about mothers-in-law are not 
 often rich, because upon this topic our interests flow 
 strongly and continually in only one direction. But 
 upon the topic of marriage itself almost all jokes are 
 rich, for we are every one of us both for it and against 
 it. There are few at least whose hearts in love have 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 91 
 
 never inclined toward this authoritative ceremony and 
 condition of legal beatitude, deceiving themselves that 
 in its consummation they will find that Absolute 
 which is the goal of all strong emotion; and few who 
 do not hold in their breast the germs of outrageous 
 rebellion against its artificial and imposing bonds. 
 For this reason matrimony is of all human things the 
 most filled full and spouting at the corners with hu- 
 morous laughter. It is only necessary to say some- 
 thing like this, “Well, there’s one thing about Sam, 
 he’s a king in his own household,” and hire some one 
 to answer, “Yes, I was there the day she crowned 
 him with a pot of beans,” in order to secure a position 
 of permanent affluence upon the American vaudeville 
 stage. 
 
 In Puritan countries we have a similarly divided 
 attitude toward profanity — a mixture of hereditary 
 love and acquired disapproval — which makes it pos- 
 sible to enliven the dullest tale by dropping in some ap- 
 propriate but inappropriate swear-word. And along- 
 side of matrimony and swear-words I think we might 
 place doctors, as a topic upon which our feelings are 
 mixed in this way that is so fertile of hilarity. Healers 
 and bringers of balm in our days of pain, in our pros- 
 perous days they are always coming in and convicting 
 us of unheard-of diseases, and they take a deliberate 
 pleasure in removing our appendixes, our tonsils, our 
 pituitary bodies, our various ducts, glands, and tissues, 
 including our pocketbooks, and other organs which we 
 have erroneously considered indispensable. 
 
92 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 A man subject to epileptic seizures was picked up 
 unconscious on the streets of New York and rushed to 
 a hospital, and when they took off his coat one of the 
 nurses found a piece of paper pinned to the lining, upon 
 which was written: “To inform the house surgeon that 
 this is just a case of plain fit — not appendicitis. My 
 appendix has already been removed twice.” Nothing 
 more impetuous than this rush to the doctor — the pic- 
 ture of expectancy — nothing more out of that picture 
 than to find the mute cause of it warding off any further 
 disaster with a diagnosis prepared in advance! And 
 when that mute’s contribution is apparently complete, 
 and the remark merely thrown in that his appendix has 
 been removed, a remark of which we expect little but 
 the conclusion, and this impossible word twice hits us, 
 disappointing our minds again, but releasing in our 
 hearts a whole secondary flood of antidoctorial glee, 
 joy, and glory, the cup is indeed running over. That 
 is the kind of joke that doubly deserves to be called 
 rich, the joke with a reinforced point. And with that 
 we may take it as settled that a good joke requires at 
 least two strongly flowing currents of interest in the 
 person who is expected to laugh. 
 
 Law Number Two 
 
 The feelings aroused in the person who is expected to 
 laugh must not he too strong and deep. 
 
 As our first law flowed from the fact that the sense 
 of humor is an instinct, this law flows from the fact 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 93 
 
 that it is a play instinct. There are certain things 
 about which certain people care too firmly and passion- 
 ately to contemplate them, or even to perceive them, 
 playfully. There are pains and disappointments too 
 great, even when they are imaginary, for any interior 
 machinery of light-heartedness to turn them into comic 
 enjoyment. They run too deep to gear in with that 
 machinery. And on the other hand, there are satis- 
 factions too solemn and noble in their rhythm of joy 
 to reinforce the short ripple of a comic laugh. In 
 both directions there must be moderation, in both a 
 sense of the bounds of the heart’s possibilities, if we 
 are to avoid the peculiar disaster of the inept or un- 
 timely joke , the joke that is malapropos . 
 
 How peculiar a disaster it is! How much more 
 sickening to the beholder — and to the perpetrator, if 
 perchance he is not the shallow barbarian he appears 
 — than a misplaced image of poetry, a misplaced pity, 
 or pride, or ventilation of anger ! When a joke is not 
 a joke, it is too often a tragedy. And this is because 
 humor brings with it an implication as to our total 
 attitude to life. It does not merely add an emotional 
 color, but alters the general tone. The question is not 
 only whether we shall feel humorous, but whether we 
 shall he playful, at that particular moment — a more 
 entailing question. We recognize this in the exquisite 
 admiration we give to those who have jested in seasons 
 of great personal danger. When Sir Thomas More 
 set foot upon the scaffold it shook a little, you remem- 
 ber, and he said to the executioner who offered him a 
 
94 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 hand: “Help me to ascend — I will shift for myself 
 coming down.” The unfitness, and yet again the ter- 
 rible fitness, of this so common form of words in that 
 uncommon circumstance is what makes it humorous; 
 but what makes it dearer than any jest is the strong 
 audacity of the man’s heart who could say it. Cour- 
 age is required to take life playfully, and we are as- 
 sured of this when we see one of these men of courage 
 take death with the same genius. Rabelais punned 
 with his last breath upon the name of the Lord, and 
 Heine too had his smile at the business of being al- 
 mighty. These celebrated jests are significant, not 
 only as examples of the power of humor on the lips of 
 those who are in a position to command our feelings, 
 but also as warnings to those who are not. We cannot 
 jest on any death-bed but our own, and there is a gen- 
 eral incompatibility between humor and the deep ex- 
 perience of passion, which only those understanding 
 it can ever dare to ignore. 
 
 Of the jokes which are bad because they are incon- 
 siderate of this simple fact, the commonest and most 
 definitely charactered are the hostile joke that is car- 
 ried too far, and the sexual joke that we call obscene. 
 I suppose the reason why an obscene joke has so blas- 
 phemous a flavor to those who enjoy the religion of 
 love is that their reverence for love upon the physical 
 side was arrived at only after overcoming a childish 
 identification of sexual things with things that are 
 disgusting. It is a reversion to this attitude that 
 they fear when people begin to speak humorously 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 95 
 
 about the physical aspects of sex. They fear that 
 these people, besides inviting them to be playful about 
 a subject charged for them with the most poignant 
 emotions — an invitation which they might or might 
 not choose to accept — are also inviting them to treat 
 this subject as a mere example of the playfully ugly, 
 a crude form of poetic humor at its best, and in this 
 case contradictory to the essence of their perceptions. 
 Their distaste for such humor is poetic and fully justi- 
 fied by the Freudian explanation of its character, and 
 it is difficult to understand why so many of the apos- 
 tles of the Freudian cult should regard a general in- 
 sensibility to this distinction as a sign of their libera- 
 tion. It is a sign of dulled nerves and a weak sense 
 of the qualities of experience. 
 
 Words do not merely name things, but they indicate 
 an attitude toward them, and the words which indi- 
 cate toward matters of sexual passion an attitude of 
 infantile contempt are very sharply distinguished 
 from other words, and they will naturally be avoided 
 by those whose poetic purpose is not to generate such 
 an attitude. A peculiar difficulty arises, however, 
 when poets wish to speak sensuously about sex. They 
 may desire to speak with all directness, but they are 
 compelled to adopt allusions and circumlocutions, be- 
 cause no simple poetic names exist for the things they 
 would speak of. There is no language of physical love 
 between that of anatomical science and that of obscene 
 ridicule — an evidence that the race of man has never 
 really lived. I can imagine that some day a very great 
 
96 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 poet, or poetic age of freedom, will fill up those strained 
 silences in our vocabulary with names for the lips of 
 lovers and of those who sing. It would require a 
 poet of no more adventurous determination than Walt 
 Whitman, nor more sheer creativeness in language 
 than Rabelais. For Walt Whitman at least avowed 
 the impulse toward such utterance, and Rabelais did 
 fill those silences with pages of the most living names 
 ever created by the tuneful imagination of a poet — 
 only they were always humorous as well as poetic, and 
 so hostile to the full experience of any passion. For 
 neither in the way it is to fail, nor in the way it is to 
 satisfy, can a thing be humorous and touch us to the 
 depths. 
 
 Law Number Three 
 
 Both the negative and the 'positive current of feeling must 
 be simply and naturally induced. 
 
 There must be no appearance of effort either in 
 building up an interest to be disappointed or in plant- 
 ing the seed of satisfaction in that disappointment. 
 A joke above all created things must not seem arti- 
 ficial. It must not seem manufactured, dragged in, 
 far-fetched, or as the Romans used to say it, brought 
 from home. It must appear just to have risen up, 
 with as light a springing as a wild bird out of the 
 natural pathway. In all the forms of art a labored 
 thing is usually condemned as bad, but in the art of 
 humor it may be condemned as nothing at all. For 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 97 
 
 humor is an inseparate property of play, and dies like 
 the light in the eyes of a romping child at the first hint 
 ,<*f an undertaking. 
 
 It was this supreme sin of hard labor that Mark 
 Twain committed in that famous speech of his before 
 the literary divinities of New England — a speech which 
 according to his own account fell into as chilly and 
 bottomless a silence as ever greeted the earnest inter- 
 ruptions of an idiot. To try to make a humorous 
 speech and fail, is the nearest that any man in the full 
 possession of his faculties can come to the fine agonies 
 of nightmare; and we cannot but shudder in sympathy 
 when we think of this young ambitious celebrity com- 
 ing out of the West only to ruin himself in that long 
 ghastly disaster. But it is also painful to feel obliged 
 to try to laugh for the reason that some one with great 
 sweat and effort is trying to make you; and that is 
 what Mark Twain was doing. His speech, which he 
 saw fit to publish and defend many years later, is the 
 most evidently labored over, thought out, built up, 
 joined together, reared, educated, travelled with, and 
 conscientiously perpetrated, of any document in the 
 sad history of comic attempts. I can imagine that 
 those Bostonian moonshees whose inability to laugh 
 he imputes to their dignity and hypersensitiveness, 
 were really in almost as much pain as he was, and 
 devoutly prayed to their gentle gods that he would 
 say something spontaneously playful before he sat 
 down. 
 
 Mark Twain was in his intellectual and poetic gifts, 
 
98 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 and in the native predominance of this instinct, one 
 of the great humorists of the world. And the world 
 was aware of that. But no book remains that is ex- 
 uberant enough to prove it. They are all blemished 
 — even his narrative masterpiece, “Huckleberry Finn,” 
 is blemished — with long passages of uncontagious hu- 
 mor. And I believe the reason is that Mark Twain 
 himself regarded his writing, and especially his humor- 
 ous writing, as work rather than play. It was money- 
 making, and not merry-making, that got possession of 
 the soul of this man. He was indolent, but his in- 
 dolence was not regal enough to disdain the religion of 
 respectability that hung over him. He could never 
 heartily have cried with Rabelais: “The fragrant odor 
 of the wine, oh, how much more dainty, pleasant, 
 laughing, celestial, and delicious it is, than that smell 
 of oil ! And I will glory as much when it is said of 
 me that I spent more on wine than oil, as Demos- 
 thenes did when it was told him that he spent more 
 on oil than wine. I truly hold it for an honor and 
 praise to be called and reputed a Merry Andrew and 
 a Robin Goodfellow. . . . For this cause interpret 
 you all my deeds and sayings in the perfectest sense; 
 reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with 
 these fair billevezees and trifling jollities, and do what 
 lies in you to keep me always merry. Be frolic now, 
 my lads, cheer up your hearts and joyfully read. . . .” 
 
 That is a manifesto to which even the most kempt 
 and demeanored of wits may well pay attention. For 
 whatever be the pain of its parturition, you must 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 99 
 
 never let fall upon the delivery of your joke the shadow 
 of the apparition of hard labor. That is an immutable 
 law of the laughter-making art. 
 
 Law Number Four 
 
 The identity of the positive current with the negative must 
 he immediate and perfect. 
 
 The satisfaction must be, or be of, or be in, the dis- 
 appointment. There must be no mediation or bridg- 
 ing, no argument necessary here. This is, of course, 
 a supreme law for all jokes with a point, flowing directly 
 from our definition of the nature of a point — or, for 
 that matter, from Euclid’s definition. For a point, 
 according to Euclid, is “that which has position with- 
 out dimension,” and this is only a more cumbersome 
 way of saying that “ brevity is the soul of wit.” The 
 soul of wit is more than brief, it is instantaneous. No 
 matter how vast and extensive the surroundings nor 
 how elaborate the building up of the approach — the 
 batteries arranged, the wires laid and connected — all 
 that may be accomplished with leisure if the humorist 
 has poetic or narrative power, but the current must 
 flash when the time comes. If it does not flash, it 
 is not there. You cannot explain a joke. You cannot 
 nurse, cherish, medicate, exercise, or encourage a joke 
 that is lame. The more you sympathize with it, the 
 lamer it gets, your efforts and explanations only add- 
 ing themselves to what already stood between the two 
 elements required to be identical at the first go. Try, 
 
100 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 for example, to insert into the experience of an Eng- 
 lishman, unfamiliar with the sacramental dialects of 
 our great American devotions, baseball and Christian 
 Science, the humorous flavor of that head-line reporting 
 the death of Mary Baker Eddy: “She stole home on 
 an error.” You will realize that nothing in this world 
 is more remote from the causes of humorous laughter 
 than the perfect comprehension of an explained joke . 
 
 A milder infliction, and yet one against which this 
 law should also protect us, is the joke which, while 
 obvious enough in its intention, is in its actuality 
 forced. It is a joke which we have to explain to our- 
 selves, bringing its two currents together by some act 
 of inference or allowance, instead of finding them per- 
 fectly united upon a point. A forced joke whose im- 
 perfection is visible to the eye as well as the mind is 
 that one in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” 
 where Messina tries to sing the praise of Benedick, 
 while Beatrice runs him down: 
 
 Mess. And a good soldier, too, lady. 
 
 Beat. And a good soldier to a lady : but what is he to lord ? 
 
 A splendid Shakespearian line in its utterance of 
 what she means, but in the absence of any identity 
 between that and what she does not mean, a very im- 
 perfect joke. “Too” is not the same thing as “to a,” 
 and only with an expenditure of force can they be com- 
 pressed together into a point. 
 
 The same imperfection, although invisible to the 
 eye, appears in the response of the clown in “Hamlet” 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 101 
 
 when he was asked “upon what ground” the prince 
 went mad. 
 
 “Why, here in Denmark,” he said. 
 
 In order to be a passable joke, these words would 
 have to answer the question “where?” in the same 
 instant that they fail to answer the question “why?” 
 But this does not happen, because the phrase “upon 
 what ground” is not really a natural way of asking 
 the question “where?” We have to pretend that it 
 is, and that act of pretense divides by a hair’s breadth 
 the two things which should be one. 
 
 It may be that this phrase had a different trend of 
 meaning in Shakespeare’s time, and, if so, then we have 
 illustrated the fact that jokes which we translate, or 
 even transport over long ages, have often to be forced 
 when they arrive among us. This joke appears to me, 
 however, not only forced, but also labored — for those 
 words, “Upon what ground,” are not even a simple 
 way of asking the question “why?” They were 
 falsely imputed to the questioner for the very purpose 
 of the clown’s answer. The joke was built up to , in 
 short, with artificial dialogue, as Shakespeare’s jokes 
 too often are, requiring the antics of a naturally ludi- 
 crous actor to get any laughter out of them. And 
 since it is a dull and perfunctory joke besides, and not 
 worth any labor even if labor were a virtue, I think we 
 may set it down as a little model of bad jokes — a thing 
 of vices all compact. 
 
 Shakespeare had a true gift of poetic humor; his 
 characters, his situations, his epithets, are often in- 
 
102 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 trinsically laughable. And, moreover, in his painting 
 of Falstaff he deliberately flouted the narrow satirical 
 conception of humor common to the Aristotelian critics 
 of his time. He demanded that we laugh with Fal- 
 staff and not only at him. “The brain of this foolish 
 compounded clay, man,” says Sir John, “is not able 
 to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than 
 I invent or is invented on me: I am not only witty in 
 myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” For 
 the heroic measure of that boast, as well as for the 
 degree of its poetic achievement, we must give some 
 honor to the humor of Shakespeare. But in the matter 
 of forcing, laboring, far-fetching, explaining, and gener- 
 ally miscreating and mismanaging practical jokes, he 
 has hardly his equal among the great. Shakespeare is 
 the supreme poet, and he was one of the few universal 
 intelligences of history, but also, in some measure all 
 through his life, he was a man with a peculiar little 
 hobby. He was a collector of words, and all sorts of 
 odd and minutely surprising word-relations. Perhaps 
 in this he merely followed the fashion of his time, but 
 often when we expect in Shakespeare a substantial and 
 real passion or opinion, we find only the quaint metic- 
 ulous enthusiasm of a displayer of these curios. And 
 this which is an occasional blemish in his poetry, is the 
 continual plague of his jokes. Even when they are 
 good jokes, he usually contrives to destroy the current 
 of life in them by turning them upside down, advanc- 
 ing them face backward, dragging them in, dragging 
 them out, picking them apart, or in some other way 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 103 
 
 displaying for our inspection what seems to interest 
 him far more than humor does — the queer and curious 
 beings these words are, out of which it can be made. 
 
 When jokes are very lively in their emotional ma- 
 terial, and provoke us to call them rich, they can often 
 dispense with some point of formal perfection; and if 
 they contain ludicrous imagery, a certain lameness of 
 practical formation may even add to their charm. 
 But the purely practical and dispassionate jokes which 
 we call excellent, or very fine, are always characterized 
 by a surprisingly perfect intricate coincidence of some- 
 thing which they purport to be and are not, with 
 something totally different which they are. A Jewish 
 lawyer who studied in the office of Joseph Choate is 
 said to have made out a bill to his first client for $500, 
 and when Choate quietly picked it up, and added 
 another cipher to the amount, the Jew remarked, “Al- 
 most thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” If that 
 remark runs counter to your emotional prepossessions 
 in the matter of jokes between Jews and Christians, 
 you will be the more ready to appreciate the quality 
 which I am describing as formal perfection. For the 
 elaborate exactitude with which those words express a 
 wealth of meaning completely alien to the wealth of 
 meaning they are wont to express, is what makes them 
 memorable. Had it been necessary to vary the quo- 
 tation by the breadth of a letter, or having reproduced 
 it correctly to ask allowance for the least awkwardness 
 or inadequacy of meaning in the new situation, we 
 should never have preserved this joke as we have in 
 
104 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 the humorous lore of the nation. We should have 
 called it forced — or seen that it was lame upon the one 
 leg or the other. And of this fault, when it is not 
 mitigated by some special warmth or delicacy of poetic 
 flavor, even the most willing laughers are intolerant. 
 
 Law Number Five 
 
 Practical jokes should not he poetically told, nor poetic 
 
 jokes practically told. 
 
 This simple inference from our definitions would 
 save us, oftener than any other rule we could devise, 
 from the irritating pity of jokes that are spoiled in the 
 telling. It is possible, of course, to spoil a joke in all 
 the ways that a joke can be bad — and even in one 
 other way, for occasionally some expert bungler will 
 leave out the point altogether, giving us a full account 
 of the surrounding circumstances with that inexhaust- 
 ible beaming smile proper to those who have learned 
 their pleasures by heart. Against this accident we 
 need no protection, for these jokers by memory create 
 more laughter than they destroy. A person who fails 
 to see the point is almost always funnier than the 
 point. 
 
 But no such compensation occurs when people who 
 have enjoyed a story primarily because of the ludicrous 
 image it evoked in their imagination, repeat it cor- 
 rectly enough in a practical way but without taking the 
 trouble to evoke an image in the imagination; nor 
 when people who have enjoyed something primarily 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 105 
 
 because of the practical or purely narrative setback 
 which it contained, dilute that value in the rehearsal 
 by spreading an imaginative interest all over the inci- 
 dental details. In practical jokes our interest should 
 be concentrated upon some forward motion toward a 
 goal either of meaning or achievement. In poetic 
 humor our interest should be awakened in the qualities 
 of a situation. 
 
 A lecture-manager in California once telegraphed to 
 Artemus Ward asking him what he would take for 
 forty nights on the Pacific Coast. He telegraphed 
 back: “ Brandy and water/ 5 That was a manipulation 
 of the intellectual process of meaning, and in retelling 
 it I had no concern but to put the word “ lecture- 
 manager 55 in so prominent a position that the original 
 trend of the question would be clear. Other details, 
 or any lingering upon this one, would detract from the 
 vigor of that trend, and so from the force of its disap- 
 pointment. What is wanted is a perfectly naked angle 
 of meaning, a blank stoppage in one direction, with 
 instantaneous headway in the other. Poetic language 
 as such does not give us this angularity of meaning, 
 and for that reason poetry is hostile to the clear exist- 
 ence of what we call in the narrow sense “a joke.” 
 A joke has to be sprung , and while rhyme and a ding- 
 dong metre may chime in, true poetry of speech refuses 
 to assist in so mechanical a process. 
 
 To his other faults as a joke-maker, Shakespeare 
 adds this more forgivable one, that he is never quite 
 willing to cease being a poet. He continually tries 
 
106 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 to spring practical jokes in the language of the imagina- 
 tion. He does not seem to perceive the difference be- 
 tween that and his true art of luxuriating in the ludi- 
 crous — an art which we might well illustrate with 
 a chapter from the misadventures of John Falstaff. 
 In “The Merry Wives of Windsor” he was trapped in 
 his attempted amours by the jealous husband of Mis- 
 tress Ford, and concealing himself in a basket of soiled 
 clothes, was carried away at her direction and “slighted 
 into the river with as little remorse as they would have 
 drowned a bitch’s blind puppies, fifteen i’ the litter.” 
 Those who remember this tale as Shakespeare tells it, 
 will realize that if it were repeated by some one who 
 merely knew how to convey a piece of practical infor- 
 mation, it too could be spoiled in the telling. 
 
 The distinction between poetic and practical humor, 
 like that between poetic and prosaic language, is of 
 course a relative one. The two kinds of value are 
 commingled in various proportions. But they differ 
 fundamentally, and a sense of their difference is indis- 
 pensable to those who would make us perfectly happy 
 when we laugh. 
 
 Law Number Six 
 
 The disappointment involved in a practical joke should 
 be genuine. 
 
 This is of course only our technical way of saying 
 that one cannot get the full sting of a joke twice — or 
 even once, if the joke is so badly handled that its out- 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 107 
 
 come can be anticipated from the beginning. It is a 
 rule that should protect us against stale jokes, on the 
 one hand, and against obvious jokes, and the terrible 
 disaster of giving away the point, on the other. For 
 two reasons the rule is not absolute. In the first place 
 we can be led to adopt an aesthetic attitude toward a 
 good joke, and value it as an object of humorous art 
 without actually passing through the process that made 
 it humorous. Admiration is a happy pleasure, and 
 there are few things that the race of man admires more 
 than a clever joke. In the second place, a certain 
 amount of histrionics is natural to the mood of play, 
 and most of us are able inwardly to simulate an atti- 
 tude of genuine expectation, even when we know just 
 how it is to be disappointed. We go through the true 
 motions, and get some shadow pleasure even at the 
 fiftieth rehearsal. But the fact remains that, in practi- 
 cal life at least, nothing in the world is quite so stale 
 as a stale joke. We beg for the repetition of a familiar 
 song, but we consider it an act of mercy to stop a man 
 before he tells us one of the stories we have enjoyed 
 before. It is because a disappointment was of the 
 essence of that enjoyment, and a second disappoint- 
 ment in the same premises is impossible. A joke, in 
 order to be a joke, has to be a new one. 
 
 And that is what makes family life so trying. It 
 was a custom of the previous generation, and will be, 
 I suppose, of all previous generations, to lay in a stock 
 of “ good stories ” in early youth, and bring them forth 
 upon festive occasions, reserving the earlier vintages 
 
108 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 for the more signal festivities, and the more celebrated 
 guests that might be invited into the family circle. It 
 was a further custom to bring forth these archaeological 
 wonders with a certain pomp and circumstance, call- 
 ing the board to attention, or at least waiting for a 
 lapse of the conversation in which it might be possi- 
 ble to grab its attention, and make formal announce- 
 ment that a joke was about to be brought on. Hav- 
 ing thus destroyed the atmosphere of spontaneous life 
 in which the poor thing might have enjoyed a momen- 
 tary resuscitation, and having thoroughly diluted the 
 general expectancy by these formal preparations for 
 its disappointment, the master of ceremonies would 
 proceed, in a hush more appropriate to the offering of 
 a word of prayer, to lay out the familiar specifications, 
 draw up the plans, prepare, and gradually but with 
 resolute purpose and fidelity produce the venerable 
 wonder before the eyes of all. A great burst of exag- 
 gerated laughter would follow, and every one privately 
 seek about among the wreckage of the previous conver- 
 sation for some good line upon which to get away from 
 the scene of the disaster. But no! The ceremony 
 was not finished. Before this all too perfect burst of 
 hilarity should subside, there was to be at least one, if 
 not indeed two or three, or perhaps four, repetitions 
 of the very quintessential point of the thing, so that 
 no mind could escape it, or fail to acknowledge its 
 wonderful spice and durability. 
 
 That was a model of the proper way not to appeal 
 to the sense of humor. A person who comprehends 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 109 
 
 the natural action of this sense will not only never 
 repeat a stale joke if he can help it, nor permit the 
 point of a joke to appear before it has arrived, nor 
 attempt to dwell upon it, or drag it out, after it has 
 arrived, but he will even prefer — if his joke is good 
 enough to dispense with the aid of hypnotic sugges- 
 tion — to keep his auditors unaware up to the very 
 point of explosion that he has any designs whatever 
 upon their centres of risibility. For thus their disap- 
 pointment will be most pure and genuine, and their 
 satisfaction brightened with a real surprise. 
 
 We find accordingly that the more sensitive lovers of 
 humor are loath to sit in at those long sessions of “ story- 
 swapping” that corrupt the atmosphere of our club- 
 rooms, and spring up sometimes around our very 
 hearths. There is truth in the dictum of Thomas De 
 Quincey that “Of all the bores whom man in his 
 folly hesitates to hang, and heaven in its mysterious 
 wisdom suffers to propagate their species, the most 
 insufferable is the teller of ‘good stories’ — a nuisance 
 that should be put down by cudgelling, by submersion 
 in horse-ponds, or any mode of abatement, as sum- 
 marily as men would combine to suffocate a vampire 
 or a mad-dog.” It is not only the peculiar vapidness 
 of an expected disappointment that justifies this noble 
 incitement to riot, but also, I think, the peculiar rigid- 
 ness which comes over a joke so soon as it is regarded 
 as a thing, a commodity, an object of general ex- 
 change. For it then gets over into the category of 
 economic goods, is tainted with a suspicion of “labor 
 
110 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 value/’ and so loses, as we have seen, that playful 
 liquidity which was its bath of origin, and is the only 
 element in which it can vigorously revive and receive 
 breath. 
 
 Is there in all the annals of commerce a more pathetic 
 and humorless figure than the man who having made 
 a joke and typewritten it upon a slip of paper, is spend- 
 ing his morning peddling it from one comic editor to 
 another, in hope to secure the price of his breakfast? 
 Is there a more lifeless corpse in creation — a fish more 
 distant from water — than that joke as he pulls it with 
 this serious engagement of interest from his inside 
 pocket? And is there, finally, a person less in a po- 
 sition to enjoy the joke, supposing it should come to 
 life upon his knees, than that industriously “ comic” 
 editor? I think the reader will agree that commerce 
 is only a shade less poisonous than manufacture to 
 the play atmosphere in which all jokes take life and 
 motion. And if he will reflect that barter is but a 
 primitive and infant kind of commerce, he will begin 
 to see the form in which an indignation against the 
 business of swapping stones presents itself to the mind 
 of the true humorist. It is, in brief, a business — 
 or very soon becomes one, a kind of inverse competi- 
 tion setting in, and each bright wit trying to give more 
 for his money than the preceding, until thus gradually 
 creating a state of emulative enterprise, in which none 
 of them is able to give anything of the fresh, idle, and 
 inconsequential bloom of true humor. Humor is a 
 wild thing, quick on its wings. It comes at its best in 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 111 
 
 the midst of other preoccupations, breaking them and 
 yet belonging among them like the foaming ripple in a 
 clear stream, subsiding again to be again awakened 
 after its flash is forgotten. 
 
 Having established these six absolute precepts, as 
 it were from the exterior, we may now pass into the 
 interior of a joke, and lay down two laws as to the 
 proper relation of its parts. The first of these laws is 
 directed against those jokes in which the interest dis- 
 appointed, while not very passionate, has acquired a 
 fair momentum from the elaborateness of its prepara- 
 tion, or the time through which it has been sustained, 
 and the substituted satisfaction when it comes, seems 
 relatively slight and inconspicuous. The point does 
 not stand up, and the joke is properly described as 
 flat. To avoid flat jokes our law of symmetry may be 
 expressed as follows: 
 
 Law Number Seven 
 
 The interest satisfied must not he too weak in proportion 
 to the interest disappointed. 
 
 In order to apply this law with liberality, it is neces- 
 sary to remind ourselves that a mere disappointment, 
 if properly managed, can be humorous — just as nega- 
 tive electricity, they say, can exist alone — and the 
 droll moment thus arising is not properly to be de- 
 scribed as a '‘joke,” nor to be tried or condemned 
 under these laws of symmetry. Every once in a while 
 
112 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 a comedian devises a new form of complicated prepara- 
 tion to do something, and succeeds in convulsing his 
 audience, and retiring after half an hour amid shouts 
 of applause, without having done anything at all. 
 That is almost a pure absurdity, and its virtue — aside 
 from those indefinable poetic values of personality 
 and situation — lies in the sincerity and elaborateness 
 of the preparations. The art is to convey a playful 
 humor by seeming hopelessly at work. And the same 
 thing is true about absurdities in speech, the merit 
 of an Irish bull consisting entirely in the nice perfec- 
 tion of its plausibility. 
 
 Charles Lamb was very much puzzled by the charm 
 of a certain whimsical no-joke, which he describes in 
 his Essay on the Popular Fallacy that The Worst Puns 
 are the Best. “An Oxford scholar,” he says, “meeting 
 a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, 
 accosts him with this extraordinary question: "Prithee, 
 sir, is that thy own hare, or a wig?’” 
 
 Observing the total inability of his mind to find 
 rest in this ""most utter and inextricable” absurdity, 
 Charles Lamb sought out points of rest for his imagi- 
 nation. He tried to explain its humor by alluding to 
 the place where it occurred, "" a public street not favora- 
 ble to frivolous investigations,” the character of the 
 participants, and other subordinate if contributory 
 details. In short he deceived himself that it was a 
 poetic joke, because as a practical joke he was at a 
 loss to understand what satisfaction it held. The 
 failure of satisfaction itself was the focus of his enjoy- 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 113 
 
 men t — and not only the failure of serious satisfaction, 
 but the failure of that failure to produce a jocular 
 satisfaction, while holding out so plausible a pretense 
 to do so. The reason why “the worst puns are the 
 best” — an aphorism which I believe John Dryden 
 originated- — is that they play a joke upon jocularity. 
 And when jocularity is as poor as it is in the whole 
 business of pun-making, we are more than willing to 
 have this joke played. 
 
 When I say we are “more than willing,” I do of 
 course concede to these puns a positive value as well 
 as a negative. Besides failing to he good , they succeed 
 in being completely had , and that brings some balm 
 to the victim. The balm is so slight, however, and 
 the trouble so large, that I think we might take these 
 puns which we are supposed to admire for their crimi- 
 nality as fair examples of the whole genus of flat 
 jokes — typical in their structure, and in their flavor 
 characteristic. They do not hand forth a sincere, 
 spontaneous, and unavoidable nothing for us to smile 
 at with the original smile of humor; they put up a 
 grinning and egregious pretense to give us also some- 
 thing else , and that something else turns out a mere 
 trite act of petty cognizance. They have a point, 
 but its positive action is extremely weak. 
 
 To further illustrate this weakness — and to avoid 
 damaging any reputation that is less secure — I take a 
 second example of a flat joke from Aristophanes. He 
 is still describing an argument in Hades as to which is 
 the greater poet, iEschylus or Euripides. Dionysus, 
 
114 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 who is the judge, sets up a pair of scales, and orders 
 the two poets to take hold, one upon each side, and 
 recite a line of poetry. Euripides recites the first line 
 of his Medea: 
 
 “Would god no Argo e’er had winged the brine!” 
 
 /Escliylus quotes his Philoctetes: 
 
 “Spercheios, and ye haunts of grazing kine!” 
 
 The scales descend in favor of HSschylus, and Eu- 
 ripides asks the reason why. Dionysus replies: “He 
 slipped in a river, like a wool-dealer wetting a fleece to 
 make it heavy. You put in a verse with wings.” 
 
 Before condemning this joke we ought to remind 
 ourselves that judging poetry and weighing wool were 
 both matters of vital interest in Athens. The subject- 
 matter was alive, and we must make some effort of 
 historic imagination even to hear the story as it sounded 
 then. But that effort being made, we become inter- 
 ested. We want a decision on the literary merits of 
 these poets. We have been wanting it in fact through 
 several scenes, and here an extensive apparatus has 
 been collected, and our expectation, while not exactly 
 “strained,” may at least be described as well banked 
 and glowing. 
 
 We are disappointed. We get no decision on the 
 merits of the poets or their lines of poetry. And what 
 do we get? A reminder that a river weighs more 
 than w T ings, that wool-dealers cheat their customers, 
 a dig at iEschylus on the basis of that labored simile, 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 115 
 
 a dig at the business of weighing literature when that 
 business was only rigged up for the very purpose of 
 this joke — a mere job lot of triviality, in short, and 
 that after a long wait and a real disappointment. I 
 think we can say with more confidence than usual in 
 matters of translated humor, that this joke did not 
 have enough strength in the joy end to “get across” — 
 or that if it did, then in the language of Frank Tinney 
 it “just laid there.” 
 
 Aristophanes himself seems to have been a little 
 nervous about it, for he tried it over again twice with 
 a slight variation, and then fell back hastily upon a 
 gibe at the marital difficulties of Euripides — a “sure 
 fire” in any age or language. /Esehylus tells Euripides 
 to get into the scales himself, with all his books, and 
 his wife and children, or as we should say, the whole 
 damn family — including Cephisophon. Well, Cephis- 
 ophon was not a member of Euripides’s family, except 
 as the furtive lover of his wife. And so here the audi- 
 ence received not only a ludicrous suggestion, exag- 
 gerating this already fantastic performance to the 
 point of explosion, but also, in the midst of that sug- 
 gestion a startling irrelevancy that was delightfully 
 relevant. 
 
 The studious reader will see that the centre of 
 gravity — or to be more accurate, the centre of levity — 
 in this joke was well over the base, and there was no 
 possible danger of its falling flat. And this condition 
 of stable equilibrium was attained, he will observe, 
 by adding weight to the positive side. It was upon 
 
116 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 that side at least that we felt the weakness of what 
 preceded. Our second law of symmetry deals with 
 those jokes in which there is a similar lack of equilib- 
 rium, but instead of feeling the weakness of the posi- 
 tive, we feel the excessive strength of the negative. 
 We feel deeply disturbed, and but lightly compensated 
 for the disturbance. 
 
 Law Number Eight 
 
 The interest disappointed must not he too strong in pro- 
 portion to the interest satisfied . 
 
 To a mechanic it wdll appear that this law differs 
 from Number Seven only in emphasis; and that is 
 true. But to an artist, who understands that we are 
 concerned with feelings and not with material weights 
 and measures, it will be evident that this law is not 
 only very different, but far more serious than Num- 
 ber Seven. Indeed I venture to predict that when all 
 these Eight Commandments are properly engraved 
 upon tablets of stone and set up in the market-place 
 of some future commonwealth — the relative triviality 
 of our criminal and civil codes being by that time 
 generally understood — it will be this eighth section 
 under which the greatest number of convictions will 
 be secured, and the most summary executions will 
 follow. For its purpose is to protect the free citizen 
 against sudden aggression and violation in any mortal 
 part of the poetry of his life at the hands of the flip- 
 pant joker. And a flippant joker may be defined, in 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 117 
 
 accordance with its provisions, as one who disrupts 
 any strong trend of action or thought or feeling, with- 
 out offering in its place a profound, wise, beautiful, or 
 exciting comment, or idea, or vision of life, or even a 
 sincere and contagious contempt of life. He is a light 
 nut whose thoughts have no momentum. His feel- 
 ings have no depth. He thinks he can skate like a 
 water-bug with the same silly whims over shallow and 
 deep. And when this habit is thoroughly settled 
 upon him, and we observe that everything which comes 
 under his ken is given a turn supposed to interrupt 
 our contemplation of it with some microscopic pleasure, 
 usually the pleasure of admiring his wits, we call such 
 a person facetious. Those to whom the death penalty 
 may seem a little extreme even for these chronic offend- 
 ers — those who never despair of reforming their kind — 
 will find a sentence pronounced against one of them 
 by William Shakespeare, which has a remedial appro- 
 priateness not common in courts of less poetic justice. 
 He tells him to “Go and jest a twelve-month in a 
 hospital.” There, if anywhere, he will learn the sim- 
 ple truth upon which the law he violates was founded. 
 There are moods and passages in this battle of heart- 
 beats in which, although humor may be possible, it is 
 not easy, and for the playful reception of a gratuitous 
 pain we demand with all right and justice a substan- 
 tial and a quick reward. 
 
 It is not only because we are practical, and wish to 
 be serious in the pursuit of our happy ends, that we 
 make this demand, but also because we are poetic and 
 
118 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 desire the privilege of tasting our sorrows. We should 
 not always choose to perceive humorously, even if we 
 could, those pains and sweet losses that belong to us. 
 We have so strong an impulse to experience life that 
 we enjoy suffering. And since the suffering that is 
 caused to us by our own afflictions is too cleaving and 
 shocking to our equilibrium to be always welcome, 
 we turn often to that milder pain which comes to us 
 by sympathy when we behold the misfortunes and the 
 sad expressions of others. We let them bear the or- 
 ganic shock, and also the practical consequences, 
 while we drink off the pure flavor of sorrow. And this 
 experience — still more enjoyable when we know that 
 those others are not now alive, or that the misfortunes 
 which give rise to their expressions are only simulated 
 — this experience we call pathos. Pathos is a name 
 for any arrangement of things, deliberate or acci- 
 dental, which permits the tender and sympathetic en- 
 joyment of sorrow. And because the occasions which 
 permit this enjoyment, the slight remoteness or modera- 
 tion of the misfortunes involved, are similar to the occa- 
 sions which produce humorous pleasure, it is the most 
 difficult of all values to defend against “fresh” or flip- 
 pant jokers. Pathos is impossible to the flippant; in 
 their very presence its color blanches like the petals 
 of a flower in chlorine gas. Both for the purposes of 
 joy and sorrow, therefore, we resist them. 
 
 But the proximity of humor and pathos, although 
 laying us open to these insipid depredations of the 
 Smart Aleck, offers to the humorist whose jokes are 
 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 
 
 119 
 
 rich and human in their positive values a unique and 
 poignant avenue of art. For his humor is not so far 
 out of key with pathos as to be destroyed by their mod- 
 ulation the one into the other. It is a modulation be- 
 tween serious and playful pain — a thing which seems 
 to enhance, almost as though with a tremor of peril, 
 our enjoyment of them both. I do not know any 
 book in which this experience was ever made more 
 beautiful than it is in “ Sentimental Tommy.” Tommy 
 ran away, you remember, on that night after the birth 
 of Elspeth — an accident which he had tried so hard 
 but ignominiously failed to prevent. He fell asleep on 
 a distant stair, and woke up in the very early hours of 
 morning, clammy and cold and quaking — “and he was 
 a very little boy, so he ran to his mother. 
 
 “Such a shabby dark room it was, but it was home, 
 such a weary worn woman in the bed, but he was her 
 son, and she had been wringing her hands because he 
 was so long in coming, and do you think he hurt her 
 when he pressed his head on her poor breast, and do 
 you think she grudged the heat his cold hands drew 
 from her warm face? He squeezed her with a violence 
 that put more heat into her blood than he took out 
 of it. 
 
 “And he was very considerate, too: not a word of 
 reproach in him, though he knew very well what that 
 bundle in the back of the bed was.” 
 
 Our hearts are quickened by this swift and gentle 
 change, and their smiling laughter shines out both 
 humbled a little and refreshed, like the blossoms in a 
 
120 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 meadow after the passage of a shower. And they are 
 quickened in the same way when the shower does not 
 pass at all, but the sun just comes and shines inconti- 
 nently right in the middle of it. It was so when 
 Tommy after a period of selfish hesitation decided to 
 spend the whole of a God-given shilling to buy his 
 destitute and hungry mother a useful present. “He 
 devoted much thought to what she was most in need 
 of, and at last he bought her a colored picture of Lord 
 Byron swimming the Hellespont.” 
 
 That was one of those trembling moments — frequent 
 enough in our own lives too — of which we say, “ I did 
 not know whether to laugh or cry!” They reveal to 
 us better than any discourse can what humor is, and 
 why it is. And they give also a kind of poem-portrait 
 of its nature. For there is a tincture of pathos, as 
 well as of comedy, in the very existence of this in- 
 stinct — as a glance in the eyes of any great humorist 
 can tell you. Humor is a most adroit and exquisite 
 device by which our nerves outwit the stings and 
 paltry bitterness of life, but it is after all only a device. 
 It cannot be substituted for life. Like Pagliacci we 
 can only up to a certain point recite our lines in play. 
 The serious purposes of nature throb up into our heads, 
 and we find ourselves living the tragedy to its depth. 
 It is not play. Or if perhaps it is, then the game is 
 too rough for this frail-hearted child of his mother, 
 man, who has strayed into it. His sense of humor is 
 more rich than consolation, but it is not victory. 
 
PART II 
 
 THEORIES OF HUMOR 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 That there are two general kinds of laughter, and 
 that a complete comic experience contains a union of 
 the two, can almost be inferred from the variety of the 
 attempts men have made to explain laughter and give 
 a single account of its cause. Their explanations 
 divide themselves into three classes — those which seek 
 the cause of laughter in some kind of disappointment, 
 those which seek it in some kind of satisfaction, and 
 those which seek it in a mixture of satisfaction with 
 disappointment. 
 
 In the very beginning it was a conversation about 
 pleasures that are mixed with pain which gave rise to 
 the attempt to make a science of comic entertainment. 
 
 “You remember,” says Plato in the “Philebus,” 
 “how at the sight of tragedies the spectators smile 
 through their tears?” 
 
 “Certainly, I do.” 
 
 “And are you aware that even at a comedy the 
 soul experiences a mixed feeling of pain and pleasure?” 
 
 The science of humor was born in this peculiar in- 
 tuition of Plato’s. But, though so well born, it did not 
 grow very well in his hands, for Plato quite failed to 
 comprehend the nature of this “mixture” which he 
 
 123 
 
124 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 had divined. He said that the pleasure which we 
 experience in laughing at the comic is an enjoyment 
 of other people’s misfortunes; the pain is our envy of 
 those people, which makes that enjoyment possible. 
 He would have been in a stronger position if he had 
 said that the pain is our pity of those people, for then 
 he would have made plausible a real mixture of pleasure 
 with pain, instead of merely asserting that the pleasure 
 is one which relieves us of a pain. It is not necessary 
 to envy people in order to enjoy their misfortunes — it 
 is only necessary to be there. And Plato may have 
 become aware of this, for he did not develop the idea 
 that the comic is a mixture of pleasure with pain, but 
 wandered away from it, and seemed content in the 
 end to define the comic simply as a pleasure — the 
 pleasure of seeing other people humiliated, of seeing 
 them appear stupid when they are not powerful or 
 important enough so that their stupidity is a danger 
 to us. 
 
 Aristotle borrowed this idea, just as he and the rest 
 of the world have always borrowed ideas, from Plato, 
 and in the fifth chapter of his “ Poetics” he defined 
 the occasion of comic laughter as an ugliness that is 
 not harmful. 
 
 “Comedy,” he said, “is an imitation of characters of a lower 
 type— -not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludi- 
 crous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in 
 some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To 
 take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, 
 but does not imply pain.” 
 
THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 125 
 
 Thus it appears that both Plato and Aristotle iden- 
 tified the laughter of the Greek theatre with scorn. 
 Or, to be more scientific, they conceived laughter as 
 the expression of an emotion compounded of com- 
 placence, or “ positive self-feeling/’ with a very slight 
 tincture of disgust or anger. And upon the basis of 
 this conception they were inclined to condemn laughter, 
 and advise the philosophers and wise men of the state 
 not to indulge in it. “ Persons of worth,” says Plato 
 in the third book of the “ Republic,” “even if only 
 mortal, must not be represented as overcome by laugh- 
 ter, and still less must such a representation of the gods 
 be allowed.” In the “Theatetus,” however, where 
 Plato gives his most genial description of the character 
 of the philosopher, he says that under certain circum- 
 stances he “ cannot help laughing sincerely in the sim- 
 plicity of his heart.” And it is worth remarking that 
 Plato himself indulged in such laughter very often, 
 and that a gentle and all-comprehending profound 
 smile is almost the essence of his philosophy. Indeed, 
 such a master as he of the warmer and more lovable 
 colors of humor could never have grown up among 
 the Athenian Greeks if their laughter had been all 
 egotism and envy. 
 
 There was, to be sure, a great license of attack and 
 ridicule on those holidays which the city of Athens 
 devoted to laughter. Aristotle tells us it was the 
 “lampooners” who became writers of comedy when 
 dramatic action began to take the place of the recita- 
 tion of poems. And lampooners were men of free 
 
126 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 tongue in that youthful day. But he also tells us that 
 comedy arose among the makers of phallic verses, 
 and we know that the word comic itself in its origin 
 does not mean lampoonery, or satire, or ridicule, or any- 
 thing else either so scornful or so intellectual as that. 
 It means village revelry or merrymaking, and has relics 
 in its aroma of wine-drinking in the evening, and of 
 ribald song and organized conviviality after the day’s 
 work is done. It is more Pantagruellian than sardonic, 
 having about as much scorn in its comprisal as one of 
 those fervent salutations of Rabelais to his disciples — 
 “Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice 
 precious pockified blades!” 
 
 Any one who tries to enter into the humor of Aris- 
 tophanes will realize how much of this mood still pre- 
 vailed in his time. His plays are good-natured great 
 farcical exploits of imaginative tomfoolery, which 
 cannot even be enjoyed in the reading, unless one has 
 got into his mind in advance a very copious extra 
 supply of pure mirth. And while pugnacity and pride 
 play a great part in creating the positive values of 
 these exploits, so also do sexuality and sociability, 
 and the love of truth and poetry, and all the other 
 loves of an abounding life. “ He is always in the com- 
 pany of Dionysus and Aphrodite,” as Plato himself 
 said of him. His characters were Falstaffian rather 
 than Quixotic — they enjoyed the jokes, and frequently 
 went laughing about their own fantastic business. 
 Indeed the very license of their biting gives evidence 
 that the fundamental mood of their creation was not 
 
THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 127 
 
 hostile but hilarious. The Athenians did not throng 
 out upon that sunny hillside to enjoy the misfortunes 
 of others, but to enjoy laughter. And they were as 
 ready to laugh when the comedian turned his ridicule 
 upon them as when he made himself ridiculous for 
 their pleasure. It is still remembered how Socrates 
 got up in his seat to make more comic the caricature 
 of him which Aristophanes was presenting upon the 
 stage, and I believe that incident is typical of the exu- 
 berant humor of those best days of the world. 
 
 There must have been some opposition even in 
 Plato’s mind, to the idea that comic laughter is always 
 derisive. For in the “Symposium” he represents 
 Aristophanes as making a distinction between the 
 word 7eXoto?, which is elsewhere Plato’s name for the 
 ridiculous, and /carayeXacrTos , or as we might say, 
 the laughable and the laugh-downable. And at the 
 end of the “Symposium,” when everybody else is 
 drunk or asleep or gone home, and the cocks are be- 
 ginning to crow, Socrates is still sitting there discours- 
 ing, and he is insisting to Aristophanes and Agathon 
 that “the genius of comedy is the same as that of 
 tragedy,” to which statement they are compelled to 
 assent because they are “ sleepy and do not quite un- 
 derstand his meaning.” At so great a distance we 
 can hardly pretend to understand his meaning, either, 
 but we can believe it involved the idea that imagina- 
 tive sympathy as well as corrective hostility plays its 
 part in the process of comic enjoyment. 
 
 In view of these facts, it is not surprising that Aris- 
 
128 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 totle’s writings, besides containing the derision theory 
 of Plato, should contain also the other great historic 
 theory — that laughter is caused by a disappointment 
 of the person who laughs. In his “Rhetoric,” which 
 is a more practical book than the “Poetics,” a book 
 devoted to showing people how to talk effectively in 
 the law-courts, Aristotle speaks entirely in the lan- 
 guage of this theory. He does what every one else has 
 done who has ever attempted to tell any one how to 
 make people laugh — he identifies a joke with a deceived 
 expectation. In illustration he quotes a line of poetry 
 which would be funny in English, too, if we wore san- 
 dals and placed our words in the same order that the 
 Greeks do. 
 
 “He proceeded, wearing under his feet — chilblains !” 
 
 Aristotle might have observed how in this very 
 example he was uniting a disappointment of the read- 
 er’s temporary expectation with a satisfaction of his 
 chronic hunger for the misfortunes of others. And so 
 he might have combined Plato’s definition of the comic 
 with his own definition of a joke, and evolved a theory 
 of humor that would have saved his successors a great 
 deal of trouble. He would have given a real mean- 
 ing to Plato’s assertion that comic experience is a 
 kind of “mixture.” And that “the misfortune of 
 others” is not an indispensable part of this mixture 
 would soon have been evident to him — for he did 
 actually describe a joke in which the affirmative value 
 is not misfortune, but a simple recognition of the truth. 
 
THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 129 
 
 It was a pun made by Isocrates upon the word &PXV, 
 which means both sovereignty and beginning . Isocrates 
 said that the sovereignty of the Athenians (over the 
 sea and the surrounding peoples) was the beginning of 
 their troubles. And Aristotle observed that we en- 
 joy this joke because “that is stated which we did not 
 expect, and we acknowledge it to be true.” 
 
 Thus the Greek philosophers were groping toward a 
 real understanding of the complexities of the comic. 
 But they did not labor long enough, and the problem 
 was left at loose ends by them, as it has been by the 
 moderns. There was a satisfaction theory, a disap- 
 pointment theory, and a vague apprehension of the 
 twofold character of jokes. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 
 
 Cicero was a brilliant mocker, and he said in his 
 dialogue “De Oratore” that it is a part of the orator’s 
 business to raise a laugh, because it “ lessens, confounds, 
 hampers, frightens, and confutes the opponent.” He 
 defined the province of the ridiculous, in accordance 
 with Aristotle’s theory, as “a certain meanness and 
 deformity,” and he enjoyed most easily, it seems, the 
 jokes that are jokes on somebody. I can imagine the 
 sly and urbane masculine relish with which he used to 
 repeat that response of a certain Sicilian to some one 
 who was lamenting because his wife had hanged her- 
 self upon a fig-tree. “My dear,” he said, “I wish you 
 would give me some slips of that same tree that I may 
 graft them in my garden !” 
 
 But Cicero was also a genial friend, and he knew 
 quite well that there are other kinds of humorous 
 laughter than this. He quoted beside it the little re- 
 mark of Marcus Lepidus, who stretched himself out 
 on the grass with a sigh and said, “I wish this was 
 working !” — a remark which while dismaying our sense 
 of rationality and the potential in the way of wishes, 
 yet gives an extreme pleasure of expression to our own 
 indolence, and makes us admire Lepidus with a pious 
 and companionable love. Thus it was natural that 
 
 130 
 
THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 
 
 131 
 
 Cicero should revive also the other opinion of the 
 Greeks, and say that “the most eminent kind of the 
 ridiculous is that in which we expect to hear one thing 
 and another is said.” 
 
 Cicero was not content, however, to leave these two 
 ideas unrelated to each other, as Aristotle had; he did 
 propose a plan by which they might be reconciled. We 
 always laugh at some one, he said, but in the cases 
 where laughter arises from a deceived expectation, 
 “our mistake makes us laugh at ourselves.” That is 
 the way in which genial humor is still usually explained 
 by those who insist that all laughter is but a modified 
 contempt; it makes out of the derision theory some- 
 thing that at least pretends to be a complete expla- 
 nation. 
 
 Aside from originating that commodious idea, Cicero 
 added nothing to Aristotle’s solution of the problem of 
 the comic, except the valuable opinion that Aristotle 
 did not solve it. 
 
 “ What a laugh is,” he said, “by what means it is raised, 
 wherein it consists, in what manner it bursts out, and is so sud- 
 denly discharged, that though we were willing, it is out of our 
 power to stifle it, and in what manner it all at once takes pos- 
 session of our sides, of our mouth, our veins, our look, our eyes, 
 let Democritus explain all these particulars; they are not to my 
 present purpose, and if they were I should not at all be ashamed 
 to say that I do not know them; for even they who pretend to 
 account for them know nothing of the matter.” 
 
 Quintilian followed Cicero in this as in most of his 
 opinions. His book on the “Institutes of the Orator” 
 
132 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 tells us that “scorn is close kin to laughter,” and also 
 that “deceiving the expectation” is a method of mak- 
 ing people laugh. But its principal conclusion is that 
 “none yet have satisfactorily expressed what laughter 
 is, though many have tried it.” 
 
 Evidently the problem was a good deal gently ban- 
 died about among the Romans as among the Greeks, 
 and not very respectfully considered. And the pro- 
 posal to make a virtue of giving it up did not die 
 with them, either, but has held its place among the 
 leading theories of humor. Galen adopted it. David 
 Hume said that wit “cannot be defined but is dis- 
 cerned only by taste and sensation.” Jean Paul de- 
 clared that the ludicrous would “never go into the 
 definitions of the philosophers except under compul- 
 sion.” In our own day James Sully — whose long “ Es- 
 say on Laughter” travels in a weary-thorough fashion 
 all over this subject — seems to avoid any more final 
 opinion than that laughter is a good thing and ought 
 to be preserved if possible. Edward L. Thorndyke, in 
 his “Educational Psychology,” observes that the pro- 
 vocatives of laughter have not yet been included in 
 any simple generalization, although he expresses the 
 hope that they may be. The same hope was expressed 
 by G. Stanley Hall, who sent out a questionnaire on 
 “Tickling, Laughing and the Comic,” and received in 
 return three or four thousand items of information, 
 which proved little but the enormous variety of the 
 occasions of laughter, and persuaded him that “all 
 current theories are utterly inadequate and specula- 
 
THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 
 
 133 
 
 tive.” That they not only are, but always will be, 
 inadequate, seems to be the opinion of the French 
 psychologist Ribot, and of his pupil L. Dugas. In 
 his “ Psychologie du Rire ” Dugas says that the occa- 
 sions of laughter are too varied for any generalization 
 to include, or any “psychological unity” ever to be 
 found among them. A similar conclusion seems to 
 have been reached a 'priori by the Italian philosopher 
 Benedetto Croce. In an article called “ L’Umorismo” 
 in the Journal of Comparative Literature he says that 
 those who rightly understand the functions of descrip- 
 tive psychology and literary criticism will “conclude 
 by renouncing the vain pretense of finding the true 
 (that is, rigorous and philosophic) definition of humor; 
 and from the fact that no two psychologists are in 
 accord upon its definition, will draw the inference for 
 once correct; that humor is a word which applies to a 
 group of representations that can never be separated 
 out from their relations with a clear precision, except 
 arbitrarily and for convenience.” 1 
 
 This sceptical tendency has its climax in an essay 
 by L. Cazamian, to be found in the Revue Germanique, 
 entitled “Why We Cannot Define Humor.” In that 
 essay, as also in Croce’s, humor is not taken as we take 
 
 1 Croce seems in this essay to leave open the possibility that 
 “empirical psychology” may reach a definition of humor, al- 
 though it will be of no value to the literary critic; and in his 
 book on aesthetics he accepts, at least until a better one is 
 offered, the mechanical theory of comic pleasure advanced by 
 Theodor Lipps. It is hard to say just to what length he would 
 extend his scepticism about the definition of “humor.” 
 
134 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 it, to designate the comic experience in general. The 
 author thinks that Bergson’s derision theory is a true 
 account of the comic, but he is not satisfied with its 
 application to those more subtle and complex trans- 
 positions of our ideas and sentiments which we describe 
 as humor in the narrow sense. He really succeeds, 
 therefore, in making apparent the inadequacy of Berg- 
 son’s theory of laughter, and warrants our taking his 
 own conclusion in a more sweeping sense than he may 
 have intended. 
 
 “ Humor escapes science,” he says, “ because its characteristic 
 and constant elements are few in number and generally negative, 
 while its variable elements are in number indeterminate, be- 
 cause its matter, as we have said, infinitely exceeds its form.” 
 
 The ideal definition is to point to a thing. But it 
 seems strange that this ideal should be so uniquely in- 
 voked in the matter of comic experience. There is no 
 other subject, as we reflect upon it, besides God and 
 laughter, toward which the scientific mind has ever 
 advocated so explicit and particular a humility. And 
 since we are, in the manner of all estimable historians, 
 merely using this history for the greater glory of our 
 own opinion, we may now proceed to explain just why 
 it is that so many energetic minds have wanted to 
 give up the attempt to generalize about laughter. It 
 is because they have not been willing to generalize 
 enough. Seeing that laughter is a peculiar thing, they 
 have deemed it also an unusual thing. They have 
 tried to explain it as an accompaniment of some spe- 
 
THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 
 
 135 
 
 cific conditions of fact or feeling, whereas it is an ac- 
 companiment of very general conditions — that of satis- 
 faction, and that of dissatisfaction when the instincts 
 are in a state of play. The thing to be explained by 
 alluding to specific conditions is that sometimes an 
 animal as social and as playful as mankind, even when 
 he is alert and happy, is not found to be smiling ! 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 In the picture of history which learned instruction 
 has built up in my imagination, a complete darkness 
 prevails from a little after the time of Cicero until the 
 time of Montaigne — the sun did not shine and nobody 
 smiled in Europe from the second century to the fif- 
 teenth. I believe the fact is, however, that there was 
 more light-hearted comedy abroad then than ever 
 since. The church took care of our sorrows; our joy 
 was our own. And so it is no surprise if one or two of 
 the writers of that time did generalize enough, and gave 
 a more simple and natural account of the occasions of 
 laughter than any of the great philosophers who came 
 after them. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most 
 prayerful and holy and theological of fathers, was, I 
 believe, the first psychologist to perceive that it does 
 not require humor to make people laugh, but they 
 are ready to laugh at anything or anybody who drops 
 in on them with a flavor like good news. 
 
 “ If one is gladdened,” he said, “ by a pleasant communication 
 the ducts of the body will also be enlarged owing to the pleasure. 
 Now in the case of pain the fine and invisible evaporations of 
 the ducts are checked, and as the viscera within is bound in 
 tighter position, the moist vapor is forced to the head and to 
 the membrane of the brain. This vapor being accumulated in 
 
 136 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 137 
 
 the hollows of the brain is then pressed out through the ducts 
 lying beneath to the eyes, where the contraction of the eyelashes 
 segregates the moisture in the form of drops called tears. Like- 
 wise, on the other hand, it must be observed that if the ducts 
 are enlarged beyond their accustomed size in consequence of 
 the opposite affections, a quantity of air is drawn through them 
 toward the depths, and is there again naturally expelled through 
 the mouth, since the entire viscera, and especially it is said the 
 liver, forcefully ejects this air by a convulsive and violent move- 
 ment. Nature therefore provides for the passage of this air 
 through an enlargement of the aperture of the mouth by means of 
 the pushing apart of the cheeks enclosing the air. This condi- 
 tion is termed laughter.” 
 
 This was in the fourth century. And after a space 
 of one thousand years, in which many similar things 
 may have got lost, or at least were buried too deep for 
 me to find them, the same natural association of 
 laughter with gladness appears in Castiglione’s famous 
 book “The Courtier”: 
 
 “To describe a man the commune saiying is, He is a livinge 
 creature that can laugh: because this laughing is perceived 
 onlie in man, and (in maner) alwaies is a token of a certein 
 jocundenesse and meerie moode that he feeleth inwardlie in his 
 minde, which by nature is drawen to pleasantnesse and coveteth 
 quietnes and refreshing, for whiche cause we see menne have in- 
 vented many matters, as sportes, games and pastimes, and so 
 many sundrie sortes of open showes.” 
 
 That is the simple truth with which Castiglione 
 begins his discussion of jests in the second book of 
 “The Courtier.” But soon after that naive beginning 
 he falls to plagiarizing from Cicero, and he then only 
 
138 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 rehearses the two traditional opinions: first, that the 
 object of laughter is a certain moderate meanness, 
 and that jokes are “privie tauntes” or “nickes,” which 
 are not “of any grace without that litle bitynge”; and 
 second, that “even as in Jestynge to speake contrary 
 to expectacyon moveth laughter, so doeth in Meerie 
 Pranckes to doe contrarie to expectacyon. ... In 
 both kindes the chief matter is to deceive opinion, 
 and to answer otherwise then the hearer loketh for.” 
 Throughout his discourse, however, and his listing of 
 jests, Castiglione retains a more genial and a deeper 
 sense of their function than Cicero had, or anybody 
 else, indeed, until our modern times. Some jests, he 
 said, “have in them a certein cleannesse and mod- 
 est pleasantnesse; other bite sometime privily, other- 
 while openlye.” But whatsoever causes laughter, “ the 
 same maketh the minde jocunde and geveth pleasure, 
 nor suffreth a man in that instant to minde the trouble- 
 some greeffes that oure life is full of.” 
 
 We may think of this as the last word spoken on the 
 subject of laughter in freedom from the sovereign 
 authority of Aristotle. What else the critics and com- 
 mentators of the Renaissance had to say is but an 
 amplification of the famous theory of comedy pre- 
 sented in his “Poetics.” Tresseno in 1563 simply re- 
 peated that theory in its original form; Maggi added to 
 Aristotle’s definition of the occasion of laughter the idea 
 of surprise and suddenness; and Robertelli in 1548, 
 still describing the comic object as the slightly mean 
 and ugly, developed the idea that the purpose of our 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 139 
 
 laughter at such objects is to supply a mild corrective, 
 and help ourselves and others to avoid ungainliness 
 and the small vices of life. Doctor Joubert, whose 
 “ Treatise upon Laughter,” published in 1579, is the 
 first exhaustive study of this subject, was also under 
 the influence of Aristotle. He defined the ridiculous 
 as “ something ugly or unseemly, which is at the same 
 time unworthy of pity or compassion.” But he modi- 
 fied the rigor of this idea by observing that our laughter 
 at this ridiculous thing “does not come of pure joy, 
 but has some little of sadness.” 
 
 Thus it was not by any means an advance, but a 
 shrinkage of man’s understanding of laughter, when 
 Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century revived 
 the derision theory of Plato and Aristotle in its most 
 virulent form. 
 
 “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.” 
 
 This is the most famous opinion about laughter 
 ever expressed, and perhaps the most purely and per- 
 
140 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 fectly incorrect. Hobbes so explicitly identified hu- 
 morous enjoyment with egotism and scorn, and drew 
 therefrom so wry and erroneous a moral, that we might 
 almost dismiss his remarks as a treatise upon sneers, 
 if it were not for the word sudden which is advanced 
 strongly, and intimates that even this bitter taste of 
 joy must come in against our expectation if it is to 
 have the quality of a jest. Hobbes did not develop 
 this intimation, however, nor himself perceive its sig- 
 nificance, and the fame of his theory rests upon its 
 lucid simpleness, rather than upon any broad kinship 
 with the truth. It rests upon the poetic felicity of 
 the name, “ sudden glory.” 
 
 Five or six different plans have been devised where- 
 by to reconcile this conception of laughter with all 
 the too evident facts to the contrary. The first was 
 that one devised by Cicero — to say that when we laugh 
 genially we are deriding ourselves. It was more 
 fully developed by Robert de Lamennais in his “Es- 
 quisse d’une Philosophie.” 
 
 “The self,” he said, “which discovers the ridiculous in one 
 of the inferior regions of its being, separates itself from that at 
 which it laughs, distinguishes itself from it, and rejoices in\/ardly 
 at a sagacity which elevates it in its own esteem. Thus pride 
 feeds even upon the sight of certain weaknesses concealed in the 
 folds of the heart, and which it has been able to discover. I am 
 not the dupe of myself — so we say — and we admire ourselves 
 for that.” 
 
 A second method of compensating for the inade- 
 quacy of his theory was proposed by Hobbes himself 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 141 
 
 in his “ Human Nature,” where he says that “ Laughter 
 without offense must be at absurdities and infirmities 
 abstracted from persons.” 
 
 A third method was to mix a little feeling of the 
 justice of one’s scorn, a little moral complacence, into 
 the comic emotion. This was the contribution of 
 Hobbes’s contemporary, Descartes, who says in “The 
 Passions of the Soul”: “Derision or mockery is a kind 
 of joy mixed with hate which comes from perceiving 
 some little misfortune in a person whom we think 
 worthy of it. We have hate for the evil, we have joy 
 in seeing it in him who is worthy of it, and, when that 
 happens unexpectedly, the surprise is the cause of our 
 bursting out laughing.” 
 
 A fourth and more ingenious way of tempering the 
 derision theory was devised by the German psychol- 
 ogist A. Zeising. He declared that the comic is a 
 process consisting of three phases, in only the last of 
 which do we experience that feeling of self-elevation 
 which causes laughter. The first phase is a shock 
 caused by an object which seems to amount to some- 
 thing and yet does not; the second is a counter-shock 
 in which we are freed from the deception and recognize 
 the nothingness of the object; the third is our happy 
 sense of superiority to that nothingness, which makes 
 us burst out laughing. 
 
 Karl Groos adopted this general account of the 
 comic process, but took one further step away from 
 the derision theory by declaring that in the second 
 phase there is a moment of “inward imitation” of the 
 absurdity. 
 
142 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 “The aesthetic attitude of consciousness,” he said, “can be 
 found nowhere but in the situation which lies between the shock 
 of deception and the counter-shock of enlightenment. In the 
 first phase my ego is repelled from the object, in the third phase 
 it emerges from it laughing. It must therefore during the sec- 
 ond phase have been in the object, and just this transporting 
 of oneself into the object is the characteristic of aesthetic percep- 
 tion.” 
 
 Comic perception becomes for him more and more 
 aesthetic, then, in proportion as the proper cause of 
 laughter, “ superiority to an absurdity,” is modified by 
 a previous participation in the absurdity to which one 
 feels superior. 
 
 Another German psychologist, Ziegler, explained that 
 we laugh at the stupidities and misfortunes of others 
 only when they are slight and inconsequential, and our 
 scorn is essentially playful. And this qualification of 
 the derision theory was also indorsed by Karl Groos 
 with his phrase “fighting-play.” But the total in- 
 adequacy of the derision theory even in this form, is 
 indicated in the fact that while Groos and Ziegler 
 attributed playful derision to the person who laughs, 
 another equally plausible theorist had attributed the 
 same mood to the object of laughter. It is nature who 
 is deriding us in the comic experience, according to 
 Stephan Schiitze, bringing our intended sublimities to 
 a fall, and showing us how limited our freedom really 
 is — and what we enjoy is the more humble privilege of 
 perceiving that she is playing a game ! 
 
 The latest modification of the derision theory — pro- 
 posed by Otto Schauer in 1910 — may be described as 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 143 
 
 an attempt to reconcile these two exactly opposite 
 views. Schauer identified all kinds of comic enter- 
 prise with teasing. 
 
 “ Teasing/’ he said, “ is a game in which the players take the 
 role of adversaries. One seeks to injure his adversary, one dis- 
 closes his failings, one tries to deceive him, and so on. If the 
 sport succeeds, it is naturally not Schadenfreude [joy in the suffer- 
 ing of others] nor a feeling of superiority that one experiences, 
 but it is the joy of play. As was said before, it belongs to the 
 nature of play that one enjoys it not only when others are hood- 
 winked or overcome, but also in the cases when one must him- 
 self play the role of the hoodwinked and overcome/’ 
 
 On the basis of these observations Schauer would di- 
 vide all comic experience into two kinds, the objective- 
 comic and the subjective-comic, the jokes in which we 
 triumph and the jokes in which we are triumphed over. 
 
 If our own theory is the true one, it is evident that 
 Schauer was exceedingly “warm.” He was feeling in 
 the right vicinity for the essence of humor, and had 
 he but freed himself entirely from the assumption that 
 egoistic hostility is fundamental in laughter, and so 
 from his preoccupation with “teasing,” he might have 
 made the necessary analysis of that more general idea, 
 “the joy of play.” As it is, he remains the maturest 
 of those who have tried to explain away a gratuitous 
 assumption. 
 
 Miss Lillien J. Martin, in one of the few empirical 
 studies of humor that have been made, submitted to 
 sixty persons a comic picture excellently fit to give rise 
 to the feeling of “ superiority to an absurdity,” and 
 
144 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 asked them to describe their emotions. Her statement 
 of the result was that “thirty-seven of the reagents 
 have a feeling of superiority. . . . The remaining 
 twenty-three report themselves as having no such 
 feeling.” I looked at the picture, and was able to add 
 one more to the twenty-three, w T hich makes twenty- 
 four, and that is the sum of the empirical testimony 
 upon this ancient subject of dispute. The picture 
 excited in me a comic emotion, and I enjoyed it. I 
 remember liking one of the absurd creatures that made 
 me laugh. And yet I realize that if I myself had been 
 in the picture, and all those “reagents” had come up 
 and laughed while looking at me, I should have felt 
 the superiority of the whole sixty, whether they did or 
 not. I should have been impelled to attribute scorn 
 to them because they were “making fun of me,” even 
 though I knew that their own mood and motive was 
 simply to make fun. 
 
 M. Dugas says that “The English humorists offer 
 models of raillery cruel, sarcastic, and cold; it is natural 
 that a corresponding theory of laughter should be met 
 with among English philosophers.” But I do not 
 know any English philosopher who accepted Hobbes’s 
 Theory without finding some way to soften its voice, 
 or elude the extreme rigors of its application. Joseph 
 Addison in some essays in The Spectator on the subject 
 of False Wit, deferring to the authority of Hobbes, 
 speaks of that “ secret elation and pride of heart which 
 is generally called laughter.” But elsewhere in the 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 145 
 
 same essays he commends the more genial, if rather 
 meaningless, statement of John Locke, that wit lies 
 “most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those 
 together with quickness and variety, wherein can be 
 found any resemblance and congruity, thereby to make 
 up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the 
 fancy.” Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson 
 both attacked Hobbes’s theory, and Hutcheson im- 
 proved upon Locke by describing the cause of laughter 
 as “the bringing together of images which have con- 
 trary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in 
 the principal idea.” Alexander Bain, in “The Emo- 
 tions and Will,” said that “ although Hobbes’s explana- 
 tion might not be literally correct, yet he has probably 
 touched, after all, upon one real point of this much 
 disputed phenomenon. . . . Not in physical effects 
 alone, but in everything whence a man can achieve a 
 stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomfiting a 
 rival, is the disposition to laughter apparent.” But 
 Bain also insisted that this was not the only nor indeed 
 the principal cause of laughter, and he occupies a more 
 distinguished place in another part of the story we 
 are telling. 
 
 George Meredith, in his tense but rather inconse- 
 quential “Essay on Comedy,” while aligning himself 
 with those who regard laughter as fundamentally an 
 act of rejection, is nevertheless so concerned to paint a 
 sage and humane understanding into his portrait of 
 the Comic Spirit that he too may be quoted in mitiga- 
 tion as well as in support of the theory of Hobbes, 
 
146 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 “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 sur- 
 faces, 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 sur- 
 veying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen mor- 
 sels 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, af- 
 fected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantas- 
 tically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hood- 
 winked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, 
 congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting 
 dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their profes- 
 sions, 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, fol- 
 lowed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.” 
 
 That is at least a rare beautification of Hobbes’s 
 theory of the Comic Spirit, and is characteristic of 
 what happened to that theory in England. The phi- 
 losophers who seized the standard of “ sudden glory,” 
 and advanced it without mercy or consideration either 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 147 
 
 for facts or the opinions of their contemporaries, are 
 in fact the Frenchmen Hugues Felicite Robert de 
 Lamennais and Henri Bergson. 
 
 De Lamennais, in his “ Esquisse d’une Philosophic,” 
 says that “ Laughter never gives to the physiognomy 
 an expression of sympathy and of good will: exactly 
 the contrary, it makes the most harmonious faces 
 grimace, it effaces beauty, it is one of the images of 
 evil.” What Lamennais means by evil is the sentiment 
 of individuality, the attachment to self, as opposed to 
 the tendency to lose oneself in the universal life. Even 
 the first smile of an infant he describes as a movement 
 toward self, and declares that smiling is evil only at 
 a less high elevation than the more open grimace. 
 
 “ Whatever be the cause which provokes laughter/’ he says, 
 “go to the bottom of it, and you will find it constantly accom- 
 panied, whether one avow it to himself or not, with a secret 
 satisfaction of amour-propre, of I know not what malign pleasure. 
 Whoever laughs at another believes himself at that moment 
 superior to him in the aspect in which he views him, and which 
 excites his laughter, and the laugh is everywhere the expression 
 of the contentment which this real or imaginary superiority 
 inspires/’ 
 
 Upon the basis of these opinions Lamennais gives 
 the extreme contradiction to that assertion of Socrates 
 in the “ Symposium” that the genius of comedy and 
 tragedy are the same. The one is moral and the other 
 immoral, according to him. 
 
 “ The one has its root in the instincts, the sympathetic powers, 
 which lead man toward other men, and tend to unite him to 
 
148 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 them by the universal bond of sublime love; the other, on the 
 contrary, is directly related to the sentiment of individuality, 
 has its basis in the love of self, and tends to develop the egoistic 
 instincts.” 
 
 Bergson differs from Lamennais only in a more 
 lenient temper, and in that he has found a use for this 
 hostile grimace, and from the standpoint of the hopes 
 of evolution, is able to call it good. 
 
 “ In laughter,” he says, “we always find an unavowed inten- 
 tion to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbor, 
 if not in his will, at least in his deed. . . . Laughter is incom- 
 patible with emotion. Depict some fault, however trifling, in 
 such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the mischief is 
 done, it is impossible for us to laugh.” 
 
 It seems as though these authors never enjoyed a 
 moment of hilarity, and I am sure that they never came 
 into cordial relations with a baby. For either of these 
 experiences would have taught them more than all 
 they have said in their discourses about laughter. 
 Bergson’s ideas have the plausibility, however, that is 
 possessed by everything interesting, and his account 
 of the nature of the inferiorities we correct with laugh- 
 ter has gained credence because of its relation to his 
 beautiful philosophy of Creative Evolution. He de- 
 scribes these inferiorities as “ the rigid, the ready-made, 
 the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever- 
 changing and the living, absent-mindedness in contrast 
 with attention, in a word automatism in contrast with 
 free activity.” Laughter is on the side of life and of 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 149 
 
 intelligence always, he says. We never laugh at a 
 thing. What we laugh at is “that side of a person 
 which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of 
 human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, 
 conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automa- 
 tism, of movement without life. Consequently it ex- 
 presses an individual or collective imperfection which 
 calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is 
 laughter. ...” 
 
 There is a true significance in Bergson’s assertion 
 that we never laugh at a thing. We are not easily 
 able to project our expectations into things, and imagine 
 them as adopting attitudes of purpose, and they are 
 not often, therefore, the purveyors to our imagination 
 of what I have called practical humor. It is only as 
 objects of poetic perception that they can seem funny 
 to us, and then only when we are led to approach them 
 in an attitude of play — as we are, for instance, in these 
 remarks from the pen of Irvin Cobb: 
 
 “ There are certain things which both writers and comedians 
 have found by testing to be almost as funny for general purposes 
 as whiskers. ... A cheese is always funny, whether written 
 about, described or exhibited. Limburger is the funniest brand 
 with Camembert next. Right alongside of cheese, and running 
 it a close race in the popular favor as a humor asset, I would rate 
 the onion. The lemon, which has attained a sort of transient 
 hold on the public fancy here of late years, can never, in my 
 humble opinion, hope to rival the onion as a permanent favorite. 
 It lacks the drawing and holding qualities of the onion. After 
 all a lemon isn’t near as funny, really, as a banana. But the 
 onion is immortal; it is an epic; it is elemental humor. And so 
 
150 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 is cheese. Semper Edam , as the Latins say, signifying, I take it, 
 ‘ Always the cheese. . . .’ 
 
 “A ham is funny, a sausage is positively uproarious, and fish- 
 balls are sort of laughable; but a veal stew is regarded as possess- 
 ing few, if any, of the true elements of humor. Soup is still 
 funny, but not as funny as it was a few years back. Hash is im- 
 mensely humorous, but a croquette is not. Yet, what is a cro- 
 quette but hash that has come to a head ? ” 
 
 We have here the authority of a flourishing humor- 
 ist for the assertion that things can be laughable, and 
 also a kind of demonstration that they are. And it 
 would seem, too, from his testimony, that the most 
 inert things are not usually so laughable as those which 
 show signs of an elan vital . One of Aristophanes’s 
 great jokes was the coming to life of an intelligent 
 corpse on its way to hell. And I remember an appear- 
 ance of Barnum’s Circus in which the chief comedy 
 part was played by an empty Ford car, which followed 
 its master about in a most diligently understanding 
 fashion, and whose each sagacious act was greeted with 
 uproarious screams from those who knew its mechani- 
 cal inwards all too well. We do not only laugh when 
 intelligent creatures behave like machines; we laugh 
 also when machines behave like intelligent creatures; 
 and we laugh oftener than that. 
 
 It is the art of satire, and not the nature of laughter, 
 that Bergson has written about. And we might per- 
 haps point to Moliere and Daumier and Anatole France 
 as among the greatest refiners of this art, and so assert — 
 in the face of M. Dugas — that France is the peculiar 
 
THE DERISION THEORY 
 
 151 
 
 home of the humor that laughs through its teeth. It 
 happens, however, that such an assertion would have 
 no more objective truth than his own statement about 
 England, or than any other of the vanities of intellec- 
 tual patriotism. The greatest jovial laugher of all 
 the universe was Francois Rabelais, and the philosopher 
 who first fully realized the affirmative character of 
 laughter in general — if we except that very hydraulic 
 Saint and that genial Courtier of whom I have spoken — 
 was Voltaire. 
 
 “Laughter always arises,” said Voltaire, “from a gaiety of 
 disposition, absolutely incompatible with contempt and indig- 
 nation.” 
 
 How delightful is the positiveness of his opinion ! 
 It may well relieve us of obeisance to an ungracious 
 theory, which might perhaps never have arisen but for 
 an accidental connection of the muscles with which we 
 express scorn and pleasure. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 
 
 Spinoza was a more careful philosopher than Hobbes, 
 and the most grave and consecrated reasoner about 
 real good and evil that ever lived. His judgment, 
 therefore, that derision is an evil thing, a thing that 
 hinders the being of man, but that jests promote his 
 being and are good, is of greater weight than the 
 casual remarks of more discursive philosophers. It 
 is testimony of some consequence in a science which 
 must rest to a great extent upon introspective feeling. 
 Spinoza had classified derision, with propriety accord- 
 ing to his system, as one of the forms of hate, and 
 he added: 
 
 “ I recognize a great difference between derision (which in 
 Corollary 1 above is termed bad) and laughter or jest. For 
 laughter and jest are a kind of joy, and so, if they are only not 
 excessive are good.” 
 
 Even before Spinoza, indeed, there was opposition 
 to the idea of Hobbes and Descartes that mockery 
 and scornful pride are in the heart of all laughter. 
 There was still living the other opinion of Aristotle, 
 as appears in the remark of Pascal that “ Nothing 
 produces laughter more than a surprising dispropor- 
 tion between that which one expects and that which 
 
 152 
 
THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 153 
 
 one sees.” This opinion did not rise to a position 
 of authority in modern philosophy, however, until it 
 appeared in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s 
 statement is as boldly unqualified as that of Hobbes, 
 and would shine out as clearly in memory, had it been 
 as ably expressed. 
 
 “Laughter ” he says, “is an affection arising from the sudden 
 transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” And after 
 a few words of illustration: “We must note well that it does not 
 transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object — 
 for then there would still be something, which might even be a 
 cause of grief — but it must be transformed into nothing.” 
 
 As an example he cites the story of “a merchant 
 returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in 
 merchandise, who was forced to throw it overboard in 
 a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that 
 his wig turned gray the same night.” He says that in 
 relating this story we should describe the merchant’s 
 grief very circumstantially, so that our hearers will be 
 led to expect some vast evidence of anguish in the con- 
 clusion, and then they will “laugh and be gratified” 
 all the more at the nothing which arrives. 
 
 Kant’s example reveals both the correctness and the 
 inadequacy of his theory. For the statement that a 
 man’s wig turned gray is in truth “nothing” — a pre- 
 tentious nothing — from the standpoint of the specific 
 expectation involved; but from the standpoint of our 
 general sentimental contempt for merchants, and the 
 pecuniary sources of their grief, it is also decidedly 
 
154 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 something. And the something — unlucky for the 
 author — is “ sudden glory” of the most obvious kind. 
 
 Kant's idea was repeated, and a little of the meta- 
 physical excitement about freedom and necessity im- 
 ported into it, by Friedrich Schelling, but until the 
 time of Schopenhauer it was not intelligibly altered 
 or developed. Schopenhauer was like a god in his 
 conviction of the truth and originality of his own 
 opinions, but I cannot see that he did much in this 
 field except to narrow the conception of Kant so that 
 it applied only to disappointments of an intellectual 
 kind. 
 
 “ The cause of laughter in every case/’ he said, “ is simply the 
 sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the 
 real objects which have been thought through it in some rela- 
 tion, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incon- 
 gruity. . . . The more correct the subsumption of such ob- 
 jects under a concept may be from one point of view, and the 
 greater and more glaring their incongruity with it, from another 
 point of view, the greater is the ludicrous effect which is produced 
 by this contrast. All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox, 
 and therefore by unexpected subsumption, whether this is ex- 
 pressed in words or actions. This, briefly stated, is the true 
 explanation of the ludicrous.” And again: “In everything that 
 excites laughter it must always be possible to show a concept 
 and a particular, that is, a thing or event, which certainly can 
 be subsumed under that concept, and therefore thought through 
 it, yet in another and more predominating aspect does not be- 
 long to it at all, but is strikingly different from everything else 
 that is thought through that concept. If, as often occurs, espe- 
 cially in witticisms, instead of such a real object of perception, 
 the concept of a subordinate species is brought under the higher 
 concept of the genus, it will yet excite laughter only through the 
 
THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 155 
 
 fact that the imagination realizes it, i. e., makes a perceptible 
 representative stand for it, and thus the conflict between what is 
 thought and what is perceived takes place.” 
 
 If we examine all these great words carefully, we 
 shall find that they are only the rather formidable 
 definition of a mistake. And it is interesting to remem- 
 ber that long before their appearance Voltaire, in his 
 Preface to “L’Enfant Prodigue,” had observed that 
 “a mistake” is the only thing that ever awakens “ vio- 
 lent peals of universal laughter.” Schopenhauer added 
 to this, however, an original attempt to explain why 
 mistakes awaken laughter. 
 
 “In every suddenly appearing conflict,” he said, “between 
 what is perceived and what is thought, what is perceived is al- 
 ways unquestionably right; for it is not subject to error at all, 
 requires no confirmation from without, but answers for itself. 
 Its conflict with what is thought springs ultimately from the 
 fact that the latter, with its abstract conceptions, cannot get 
 down to the infinite multifariousness and fine shades of difference 
 of the concrete. This victory of knowledge of perception over 
 thought affords us pleasure. For perception is the original kind 
 of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which every- 
 thing that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself. 
 It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gayety; more- 
 over it is attended with no exertion. . . . Besides, it is the con- 
 ceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our 
 immediate desires, for as the medium of the past, the future, 
 and of seriousness, they are the vehicle of our fears, our repen- 
 tance, and all our cares. It must therefore be diverting to us 
 to see this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, 
 for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the 
 mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that 
 of joy.” 
 
156 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 It seems that Schopenhauer enjoyed with a deep 
 understanding those jokes whose affirmative value is 
 what we have called reality, or the simple truth. But 
 it needs little argument to show that this value cannot 
 explain the enjoyment of jokes in general. In the first 
 place we have no such exclusive zeal as this for percep- 
 tual knowledge. In the second place what zeal we 
 have is not humorous. And in the third place we do 
 not need to make intellectual mistakes in order to en- 
 joy humor. We do not need to “ subsume particulars 
 under a concept/’ or even indeed to exercise that de- 
 gree of imagination implied in the word “ expect.” 
 We need only to experience a forward motion of inter- 
 est sufficiently definite so that its “ coming to nothing” 
 can be felt. This might have been brought home 
 to Schopenhauer by calling his attention to the hu- 
 morous quality which is sometimes possessed by music, 
 for he was very sure that music has to do with '“the 
 will” and not “the idea.” I read in the London Spec - 
 tator that Beethoven exhibits a humor “freakish, un- 
 expected and at times obstreperous,” and I suppose 
 the statement will pass without challenge, although his 
 music is, for the .most part, faithful to the view of Scho- 
 penhauer, and does not pretend to represent things or 
 ideas. Its humor cannot be reconciled with Schopen- 
 hauer’s statement that “it is possible to trace every- 
 thing laughable to a syllogism of the first figure with an 
 undisputed major and unexpected minor, which to a 
 certain extent is only sophistically valid.” And neither 
 can the innumerable little giggles and fleet smiles of im- 
 
THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 157 
 
 pulsive and real life be reconciled with it. Comic 
 laughter is too quick for Schopenhauer’s description. 
 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 ieeling. 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 inter- 
 ruption of a habit, a “ conflict of habit systems,” a dis- 
 turbed 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 disap- 
 pointment, if it is to explain the whole field of practical 
 humor. The “ strain” in that expectation Kant speaks 
 of is what makes it capable of humorous collapse. It 
 is an active expectation. The feelings are involved. 
 The will, as Schopenhauer in all other matters taught 
 us to know, is fundamental, and humor is one of its 
 own children. 
 
 Schopenhauer does not seem to have been conscious 
 of the extreme intellectualism of his view of humor, but 
 Leon Dumont, who adopted the same view, made this 
 the essential feature of it. 
 
 “ We laugh,” he said, “every time that our intelligence finds 
 itself in the presence of facts which are of a nature to make us 
 think of one and the same thing, that it is and that it is not. . . . 
 We are, for example, accustomed to associate the idea of such a 
 quality to the idea of such an exterior sign; if this sign appears, 
 the idea of the quality which is associated with it will be imme- 
 
158 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 diately suggested to the mind; but if, at the same moment, we 
 discover by other signs that the object has not at all this quality, 
 that it possesses indeed the contrary quality, there is produced 
 in the intelligence a peculiar collision, a shock from which the 
 rebound makes itself felt in the diaphragm and translates itself 
 into laughter.” 
 
 In order to prove that this comic collision occurs 
 “in the intelligence,” and not anywhere else, Dumont 
 made an investigation of the fine art of tickling, which 
 is memorable as one of the few ventures into this field 
 in the spirit of empirical science. 
 
 “ Announce to an irritable person,” he said, “that you are 
 going to pinch him at such a place and at such a moment; if he 
 perceives the sensation just at the moment and the place that 
 he expected it, he does not laugh at all. Make, on the contrary, 
 a gesture as though to pinch him, and do not really pinch him, 
 he laughs immediately. . . . Does not this lead us to think 
 that the laughter depends less upon sensations of the skin than 
 upon a deceived expectation? .... 
 
 “We have made the following observations upon tickling: 
 
 “1st. When one passes a finger over the skin of another 
 person, without any change of direction or of speed and with- 
 out interruption, one does not make him laugh; it is not tickling. 
 
 “2nd. When one makes successive touches follow each other 
 at the same place or in a constant direction, one does not cause 
 laughter either, if the touches take place at equal intervals of 
 time. But laughter is produced when the intervals are not the 
 same. 
 
 “3rd. Laughter is produced also when, the intervals being 
 equal, there are unexpected changes in the direction of the suc- 
 cessive touches. 
 
 “ 4th. When there is no interruption of contact, one may still 
 cause laughter, either by varying the rapidity, or changing the 
 direction of the movements. 
 
THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 159 
 
 “5th. We do not laugh when we tickle ourselves. 
 
 “To sum up, the laughter appears to have its cause not in the 
 sensation of contact itself, but in the variations of speed, of 
 direction or of interval. It is further necessary that the varia- 
 tions be unexpected, and that is why one cannot cause laughter 
 by tickling himself.” 
 
 I believe the reader will find that he cannot com- 
 pletely verify these observations. It is true that a de- 
 ceived expectation is enough all by itself to cause 
 laughter, but it is not true that laughter cannot be 
 caused without deceiving the expectation. M. Du- 
 mont has observed and proven the fact that our laugh- 
 ter in tickling is peculiarly independent of the actual 
 sensations of touch, but in passing from that to the 
 assertion that it depends upon an intellectual factor, he 
 is guided by his theory rather than by the facts. The 
 peculiarity here is not only that we laugh loudly when 
 we are not touched at all after vividly awaiting it, but 
 also that we laugh happily when we are touched, even 
 though the sensation is so acute as to be in its own 
 intrinsic nature painful. James Sully agrees with 
 Dumont that “some conceptual factor ” must ex- 
 plain our pleasure in this apparently unpleasant ex- 
 perience. But Oswald Kiilpe comes nearer, I believe, 
 to the true explanation, when he says that “The ex- 
 pressive movement of laughter, which often accom- 
 panies tickling and stands in apparent contradiction to 
 the movements of repulsion, is probably not the effect 
 of the common sensation but of feelings arising from 
 the comicality of the situation.” Any one who has ever 
 
160 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 participated in a tickling bout will smile at the idea 
 that his laughter was attendant upon the perception 
 of a “ situation,” and he may think that “ expressive 
 movement” is a very unrealistic name for it. But 
 nevertheless the words “ feeling” and “ comicality,” 
 if Kiilpe had not artificially separated them, do offer 
 the one possibility of a simple description of this ex- 
 perience. It is a comical feeling , and not “ some con- 
 ceptual factor,” that enters in when laughter mingles 
 with our movements of defense. And that this happens 
 only in that condition of the instincts which we de- 
 scribe as play, is nowhere more expressly stated than 
 in Sully’s own account. 
 
 “ The tickling must fit in with a particular mood, the state of 
 mind which makes enjoyment of fun not only possible but wel- 
 come. . . . The dreadfully serious ‘on the alarm’ attitude of 
 the child when nursed by a stranger is an effectual bar to play- 
 ful overtures. A child when cross will not, says Dr. L. Hill, 
 give genial response, even if the attacker be his familiar tickler, 
 father or nurse; and the same is true, he adds, of a child when 
 suffering from vaccination, or when mentally preoccupied with 
 some hurt for which he is seeking for sympathy, or with a story 
 which he wants you to tell him. As Darwin puts it, the great 
 subjective condition of the laughter of tickling is that the child’s 
 mind be in "a pleasurable condition/ the state of mind which 
 welcomes fun in all its forms.” 
 
 All these observations support the hypothesis that 
 the play-attitude is a definite condition of our nervous 
 systems, and that the humorous instinct is somehow 
 inherent in the attitude of play. And I think that 
 
THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 161 
 
 Dumont’s experiments also, so far as they can be veri- 
 fied, tend rather to the same conclusion. His business- 
 like tickling must have had somewhat the same lifeless 
 quality as an explained joke. What we have to thank 
 him for, therefore, is just the experimental confirma- 
 tion of Kant’s assertion that a strained expectation 
 which comes to absolutely nothing may cause a humor- 
 ous recoil. 
 
 Two other empirical studies have given some sup- 
 port to what I call the disappointment theory of laugh- 
 ter. Miss Lillien J. Martin, in her “ experimental pros- 
 pecting” in this field, presented to sixty persons who 
 had been observing their feelings in the presence of 
 funny things a number of classic definitions of the comic, 
 and a majority selected that of Schopenhauer as the 
 truest to their experience. They also agreed that an 
 element of “ unexpectedness,” as well as of “ contrast,” 
 was always present in the things at which they laughed. 
 And they confirmed the popular impression that jokes 
 as they grow familiar, and capable of being quickly 
 anticipated, cease to have any comic quality whatever. 
 
 This impression was further confirmed and a little 
 modified through a series of experiments conducted 
 by H. L. Hollingsworth, who succeeded in demon- 
 strating with an elaborate system of curves the rate at 
 which various jokes wane in value as they grow stale. 
 He discovered that while all jokes wane more rapidly 
 and completely than is usual with verbal objects of 
 esteem, they do not all wane with equal rapidity and 
 completeness. A certain group which are very much 
 
162 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 appreciated at first, lose their value faster than the 
 others and, from being selected among the best of the 
 group at the beginning of the experiments, arrive 
 among the poorest at the end, while some even increase 
 in value a little upon second or third acquaintance. This 
 result was offered by the author as a possible support 
 to Schauer’s distinction between the objective and the 
 subjective comic, but I do not believe that any one 
 distinction would explain it. Poetic jokes endure 
 longer than practical jokes, and yet they cannot be 
 “cracked” quite so smartly at the beginning. And 
 jokes whose value lies mainly in what they do mean, en- 
 dure longer than those whose main value is the ab- 
 surdity of their not meaning what they seem to. Hol- 
 lingsworth does not feel sure enough about Schauer’s 
 hypothesis, or about these jokes of his, to present them 
 for our consideration, and as the theme and principal 
 outcome of his study was to establish the peculiar 
 vapidity of repeated jokes, it seems fair to give a part 
 at least of the credit of his testimony to the Disappoint- 
 ment Theory. It is because they require a “strained 
 expectation” that practical jokes can not be fully en- 
 joyed but once. 
 
 And so this theory, which Aristotle first expressed 
 in his “Rhetoric,” has found at least as much sup- 
 port in modern science as the more famous one in 
 the “Poetics.” It is a fact worth remembering also, 
 that in the Oriental books which correspond to Aris- 
 totle’s “Rhetoric” and “Poetics,” and which more 
 nearly approach a real psychology of the emotions, the 
 
THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 163 
 
 flavor of the derision theory is entirely absent, and the 
 cause of laughter is described as something “ strange” or 
 “ distorted” — that is, contrary to our customary expec- 
 tations. In the Dasarupa, a Sanskrit treatise on the 
 forms of the drama dating from the tenth century, we 
 learn that “ mirth (hasa) is caused by one’s own or 
 another’s strange actions, words, or attire; the develop- 
 ment of this is .declared to be the comic sentiment 
 (hasya).” And in the “Sahitya Darpana,” or “Mirror 
 of Composition,” a similar opinion is expressed in these 
 words: 
 
 “The comic in which the permanent condition is mirth, and 
 which according to the fancy of the mythologists, is white-colored, 
 and has the attendants of Siva as its presiding deities — may 
 arise from the fun of distorted shapes, words, dresses, gestures, 
 etc. Whatever a person laughs at, when he beholds it distorted 
 in respect of form, speech, or gesture, this they call the f substan- 
 tial’ element of the comic” 
 
 These philosophers succeeded, as Aristotle did not, 
 in describing the comic object upon the stage in a way 
 consistent with their description of the comic element 
 in a joke. And their tribute to the Disappointment 
 Theory may be strengthened with the observation often 
 repeated in modern books about humor that children 
 and savages usually greet with laughter anything that 
 is new. 
 
 The Disappointment Theory has also found expres- 
 sion in modern literature, and may be summed up once 
 more in the words of William Hazlitt: 
 
164 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 “ We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious 
 matters, we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in 
 trifles.” 
 
 It is in the general tenor of this theory that the most 
 original contributions of modern thought to the science 
 of humor have been made. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 
 
 The first of these modem contributions was the dis- 
 covery and celebration of benign humor as a great and 
 significant kind of wisdom, an art and yet also a phi- 
 losophy of gracious life. This discovery was authenti- 
 cated and recorded in literature by the German roman- 
 tics and by Jean Paul Richter and Hegel and his dis- 
 ciples, but it was not made by them nor by any person 
 who can be identified. It was made by the English 
 language. In the centuries before Shakespeare the 
 word humor , which signifies in its origin a condition of 
 moisture, was applied to those four fluids which were 
 supposed to determine the temperament of the indi- 
 vidual — blood, phlegm, choler, and black choler or 
 melancholy. It was throughout the Middle Ages a 
 physiological word. But as early at least as the year 
 1475 it began to be applied to the temperaments them- 
 selves, or the states of emotion created by a varying 
 mixture of these fluids. In a passage of “Othello” we 
 can see this transition still occurring: 
 
 “Is he not jealous?” says Emil, and Desdemona 
 replies: 
 
 “ Who he? I think the sun where he was bom 
 Drew all such humors from him.” 
 
 The moods and characters which bother us enough 
 to compel our seeking a physiological explanation are 
 
 165 
 
166 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 naturally the ugly or sad ones, and for that reason this 
 physiological word had at first a rather dark conno- 
 tation. “The Duke is humorous,” in “As You Like 
 It,” probably means “The Duke is grouchy!” And 
 that is the temper of the French word humeur, when 
 it is not modified by an adjective, even to-day. But 
 in English, in proportion as the physiological remi- 
 niscence dropped away, the word humor was more and 
 more used to signify any pronounced tendency or dis- 
 position whatever. The idea of irreducible character 
 and individuality came into it. I think the word “hu- 
 morist” in Shakespeare means a person who enter- 
 tains by a consistently quaint or eccentric or obstrep- 
 erous behavior, rather than by an ugly or ill-natured 
 behavior. It is the same quality of entertainment 
 that Aristotle, lacking any single word, described in 
 his “Rhetoric” as “saying out-of-the-way things.” 
 And so it was along this path of appreciating the unique 
 or unexpected in character — a kind of consecration of 
 whims and human accidents, that the word humor in 
 the century following Shakespeare crept into the lan- 
 guage of those who discussed laughter and the comic. 
 And it brought to them a great illumination and warm- 
 ing up of their ideas. It permitted them to associate 
 laughter with love, and prepared them to welcome 
 with a special terminology the new and exceedingly 
 good-natured works of comic genius which were soon 
 to appear — the works of Fielding and Sterne and 
 Goldsmith, and of Jean Paul Richter. 
 
 English literary patriots have frequently maintained 
 
THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 167 
 
 that humor was not only discovered, but actually born, 
 upon the British Islands — a fact which need not surprise 
 those Americans who think that by comparison with 
 them the British possess no humor at all, since these 
 two opinions have the same fond motive, and the same 
 want of facts to support them. Humor was not born 
 upon any island, nor does it make its abode in the 
 breast of any chosen people. There is indeed a question 
 whether it can be claimed as a distinguishing attribute 
 of mankind. But we can safely predict that if that 
 question is ever decided by some distinguished scien- 
 tist in the negative, and certain of the higher animals 
 are admitted into the circles of those who know when 
 to laugh, they will be French poodles, or Scotch collies, 
 or English bulldogs, or Belgian hares, or American 
 jackasses, or some other patriotic blood-cousins of the 
 scientist himself. For it is a universal law of the his- 
 tory of folly that the sense of humor should be conceived 
 to stop at the boundaries of every nationality, no mat- 
 ter what other commodities may pass across. 
 
 Humor is universal and as old as the origins of man, 
 but because the first men who thought about humor 
 analytically were intellectual in their tastes, and be- 
 cause they confused laughter with the act of scoffing, 
 the earliest names and definitions of humor described 
 only its more intellectual and bitter forms. With the 
 great thrusting forth of popular and simple life into 
 literature and art which has characterized our modern 
 era, the inadequacy of all those names and definitions 
 became evident, and in the eighteenth century the 
 
168 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 English word humor was adopted into every one of the 
 languages of western civilization, from Finland to the 
 Spanish peninsula, to describe the more genial and 
 characteristic excursions of the comic spirit. That is 
 the extraordinary thing which has happened. And 
 because these excursions are more characteristic, and 
 more revealing of the original function of laughter in 
 the history of life, than satire, or wit, or what we are 
 now inclined to call comic, the word humor is grad- 
 ually supplanting such words as a designation of the 
 subject of this science in general. And that phrase, 
 “The sense of humor” — a casual expression, I believe, 
 even in the eighteenth century — is becoming an estab- 
 lished name for this instinct which responds to playful 
 pains and to poetic and practical jokes with laughter. 
 The creation of that name is the most original and the 
 most profound contribution of modern thought to the 
 problem of the comic. 
 
 It would be idle to rehearse the attempts of all the 
 literary critics and philosophers of sentiment in all 
 languages to define the word humor, and distinguish 
 it from the rather hard, reptilly thing they had con- 
 ceived the comic in general to be. Out of twenty-five 
 or thirty of these definitions which I have read, I can 
 extract this much of common agreement, that there is 
 an absence of scorn in humor, a presence of emotion, 
 and that humor is an excellent thing. Carlyle’s defi- 
 nition is characteristic: 
 
 “ True humor springs not more from the head than from the 
 heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in 
 
THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 169 
 
 laughter, but in still smiles which lie far deeper. It is a sort of 
 inverse sublimity, exalting, as it were, into our affection what is 
 below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what 
 is above us.” 
 
 It was from the German that Carlyle borrowed the 
 flavor of these beautiful sentences. And wherever it 
 may have been born, it was in Germany that the literary 
 appreciation of humor flourished to its heaviest bloom. 
 For Jean Paul and those who followed him, humor was 
 not only an art, but also an ethics and a philosophy of 
 life. What we laugh at, he thought, is the petty, the 
 infinitesimal, when it is brought into contrast with our 
 ideal of infinite sublimity. And since all human things 
 are, in contrast with that ideal, petty and infinitesimal, 
 the tendency of our laughter is to promote sympathy 
 for mankind, and give at the same time the greater 
 glory to God. Jean Paul ingeniously explained that 
 when we laugh at the stupidity of other people, it is 
 only because we have imputed, or as he says “loaned,” 
 to them our insight, and thus in them been able to per- 
 ceive the contrast between a minimum and a maximum 
 of such insight. His metaphysical grandiloquizing 
 upon the terms sublime and ridiculous , infinitely little 
 and infinitely great , is fruitless of true meaning, and 
 that I suppose was the essence of its emotional value. 
 But his mellow assertion that “the jest has no other 
 purpose but its own being — the poetic bloom of its 
 nettle does not sting, and one can scarcely feel the blow 
 of its flowering switch full of leaves,” was reinforced 
 
170 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 with a good caustic criticism of Hobbes’s theory of 
 laughter. 
 
 “ In the first place,” he said, “the feeling of pride is very se- 
 rious, and not at all related to the comic, albeit related to con- 
 tempt which is likewise serious. In laughter one feels not so 
 much that he himself is elevated (often perhaps the contrary) 
 as that others are lowered. That tickle of self-comparison would 
 have to enter as comic pleasure into every perception of the 
 errors of others, and be the more laughable the higher one stood, 
 but the contrary is true, one often experiences with pain the sub- 
 jection of others. . . . Laughers are good-natured and place 
 themselves often in rank and file with those they laugh at; chil- 
 dren and women laugh most; the proud self-comparer the least; 
 and the harlequin who holds himself worthless laughs over every- 
 thing, and the proud Mussulman over nothing. No one is 
 ashamed of having laughed, but we should be ashamed of such 
 a gross elevation of ourselves as Hobbes describes. And finally 
 no laugher takes it badly, but right well, if a hundred thousand 
 others laugh with him, and thus a hundred thousand self-eleva- 
 tions surround his; which would be impossible if Hobbes were 
 right.” 
 
 Jean Paul is the only humorist who ever diligently 
 tried to explain humor, and his testimony upon the 
 side of the genial explanation is important. He tells 
 us that to him in the mood of comic enjoyment, any- 
 thing satirical “ sharply bursting out” was actually 
 “disturbing,” and that confession is of more value than 
 his theory. It may be placed alongside Aristophanes’s 
 praise of Comedy, and Rabelais’s definition of Panta- 
 gruelism, and Voltaire’s exclamation about laughter, 
 and the remark that I quoted from Charlie Chaplin, 
 
THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 171 
 
 in proof that humorists at least have not been numb to 
 the original quality of humor. And thereto may be 
 added Laurence Sterne’s assertion that if his book “is 
 wrote against anything — ’tis wrote, an’ please your 
 worships, against the spleen,” and Byron’s confession 
 that 
 
 “ If I laugh at any mortal thing, 
 
 Tis that I may not weep.” 
 
 Even Heine’s bitter praise of laughter concludes with 
 a refrain in harmony with this more genial view. 
 
 “And when the heart in the body is torn, 
 
 Torn and bleeding and broken, 
 
 We still have laughter beautiful and shrill.” 
 
 Hegel was not so wise as Jean Paul in his apprecia- 
 tion of laughter, which he described as “little more 
 than an expression of self-satisfied shrewdness,” but he 
 drew a sharp distinction between the ridiculous objects 
 which cause this expression and the humor which we 
 enjoy a little more soberly. And he brought all the 
 weight of his authority, and the additional weight of 
 his unintelligibility, to the opinion that true humor 
 invites us to a sympathetic experience, and that the 
 highest form of comedy is that in which the character 
 himself enjoys his superiority to circumstance. 
 
 “Inseparable from the comic,” he said, “is an infinite geni- 
 ality and confidence, capable of rising superior to its own con- 
 tradiction, and experiencing therein no taint of bitterness nor 
 sense of misfortune whatever. It is the happy frame of mind, 
 a hale condition of soul, which, fully aware of itself, can suffer 
 the dissolution of its aims.” 
 
172 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 Hegel cited the Comedies of Aristophanes and the 
 character of Sir John Falstaff as examples of this true 
 and highest kind of humor. But he might also have 
 had the support of the ancient Sanscrit dramatists, 
 or at least of their philosopher-critics. The comic 
 excitants, says the “Sahitya Darpana,” “ cannot be 
 realized in their completeness, unless we suppose a 
 Hero, under the influence of the sentiment, exhibiting 
 his sense of the ludicrous by external marks. . . . 
 These excitants, are apprehended by reason of there 
 being through sympathy an indentification of the 
 spectator with the actor ; and thence is this flavor, ‘the 
 comic,’ experienced by the spectators.” 
 
 In spite of this wisdom of his simpler self, Hegel’s 
 philosophizing about humor was less laudatory than 
 that of Jean Paul. Seeing that in comic laughter we 
 are inwardly pleased at what outwardly seems unsatis- 
 factory, he declared that the “Absolute Idea” which 
 has been seeking in the other forms of art to embody 
 itself in the objective world, here gives up the attempt, 
 and simply turns back to expatiate in its own inner self. 
 Thus “ it is comedy that opens a way to the dissolution 
 of all that art implies.” 
 
 It was the task of Hegel’s followers to prevent this 
 disaster from flowing logically out of the postulates of 
 his system, and they fulfilled it with a “German tho- 
 roughness.” Humor ascended in their speculations to 
 a height even above that to which Jean Paul had as- 
 signed it. Weisse, in his “System of ^Esthetics,” 
 declared that humor, instead of destroying art, en- 
 
THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 173 
 
 riches it by raising the ugly and distasteful into its do- 
 main, and he defined the comic as “ ugliness elevated or 
 the reconstitution of beauty out of her absolute nega- 
 tion/’ In the main, however, it was not by defending 
 our right to ignore the objective character of things 
 that Hegel’s followers outwitted him, but by pointing 
 out that in the humor of art an objective value does 
 usually come to the support of that inward “expatia- 
 tion” of the Idea, which he had declared to be the 
 essence of this experience. That is to say, in plain 
 language, that as he had glorified the negative, they 
 glorified the positive, element in the point of a joke. 
 
 “ The comic/’ says Lotze, “ does not empty the objective world 
 of the Idea in order to let subjective phantasy reign in its place, 
 but rather it moves us to rejoice in the fact that the Idea cannot 
 be driven out of reality. This, with the additional remark, how- 
 ever, that the idea which remains in the world is not the same 
 one contemplated from the opposite point-of-view. That all 
 beautiful individual schemes of definite aesthetic formation come 
 to nothing, the comic does indeed teach us; it comforts us only 
 in this, that the Idea remains underlying as a universal formless 
 infinite possibility for the emerging of these individual ever- 
 transitory formations.” 
 
 By such arguments humor was raised upon the wings 
 of German philosophy almost to the height of a devo- 
 tion, and it was actually defined by one pious philoso- 
 pher, Lazarus, as “the religion of the mind.” 
 
 “For the mind in humor,” he said, “ is related to the Idea and 
 to Reality exactly as the whole feeling of man in religion is re- 
 lated to God and the World. The two basic elements of religion 
 
174 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 are just these, that on the one hand man finds himself and all 
 the world deeply bowed and humiliated, because finite and sin- 
 ful, feeble and transitory, before his God, but that on the other 
 hand he feels himself elevated over all the world and towards 
 his God, who is near even to his sinful heart, and he is certain 
 that he will ultimately wander or be led into the heavenly light. 
 Similarly the humorous mind sees itself and its actual life far 
 from the Idea, powerless to attain its goal and its desire, and 
 therefore tamed and broken in its pride, and oft even condemned 
 to the despondent fierce laughter of self-contempt, and yet on 
 the other hand elevated and purified through the consciousness 
 that in spite of all, it possesses the Idea and the Infinite within 
 itself, and in its even so imperfect works it reveals them and 
 lives them forth, and is itself most inwardly at one with them, 
 if only through the painful recognition they bring of its own im- 
 perfection/ ' 
 
 Thus the simple scientific truth about humor, more 
 nearly stated by Hegel perhaps than by any other 
 great philosopher, was, in true Hegelian fashion, ob- 
 scured and vaporized and rendered a mere vehicle of 
 metaphysical soulful emotions. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE MECHANICAL THEORY 
 
 It was characteristic of science in the later nine- 
 teenth century to drop all these vague but significant 
 emotions and go in for an explanation of laughter upon 
 the mere ground of cerebral mechanics. The hint of 
 such an explanation was contained in Leon Dumont’s 
 idea of an “ intellectual collision” which “ translates 
 itself” into these motions of the diaphragm. But the 
 classic and supreme expression of it is Herbert Spen- 
 cer’s essay on “The Physiology of Laughter.” Spencer 
 undertook to explain all laughter — or at least all comic 
 laughter, for he sensed the existence of other kinds — 
 in the same manner that you would explain the opera- 
 tion of a pump or siphon. It is simply an overflow, 
 along the most ready and available channels, of ner- 
 vous energy from a reservoir that has been stored up 
 too full. It occurs when we have prepared our minds 
 for something big and momentous, and there follows 
 something small and inconsiderable. Thus we see an 
 acrobat run down a spring-board and do a somer- 
 sault over the backs of four horses. It takes some en- 
 ergy to perceive that. A clown follows him with the 
 same earnest gait and gesture, and we gather energy 
 to perceive it again. The clown stops to flick a bit 
 
 175 
 
176 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 of dust off the flank of the nigh horse, and all that 
 energy of ours, made suddenly superfluous, floods forth 
 into the nearest available nerve-channels, which happen 
 to innervate these muscles of voice and respiration and 
 facial grimace. 
 
 There is no exaggerating the eminence in our his- 
 tory of these few clear pages of Herbert Spencer. They 
 seemed really for the first time to explain how laughter 
 “ bursts out, and in what manner it all at once takes 
 possession of our sides, of our mouth, our veins, our 
 look, our eyes. . . .” They authenticated the asser- 
 tion of Jean Paul that the laughable as an objective 
 thing is “the infinitely little,” and they supplied the 
 basic idea for the most thoroughly elaborated treatise 
 on humor and the comic that we have — that of Theodor 
 Lipps. 
 
 What Lipps did was to formulate a psychology to 
 correspond with Spencer’s physiology of laughter. 
 Spencer had explained why we laugh when we per- 
 ceive something comic, and Lipps offered upon the 
 same hypothesis to explain why we feel happy. He 
 repeated in other language Spencer’s definition of the 
 comic in itself as a “descending incongruity’ 1 — an in- 
 congruity in perceiving which our attention passes from 
 great things to small. And he fortified this definition 
 by analyzing several examples of the comic — his favor- 
 ite, for some reason, being that of a tiny house stand- 
 ing near to a great palace and accurately imitating its 
 form, or such a house occurring in a whole row of pal- 
 aces. We are comically affected by this contrast, he 
 
THE MECHANICAL THEORY 
 
 177 
 
 observed, but by the contrast between a row of pal- 
 aces and a church or a theatre, although it is equally 
 pronounced, we are not so affected. And if we see a 
 row of little houses and then one great palace, our 
 emotion is wonder and astonishment rather than comic 
 amusement. Thus a “ something little” forms always 
 one side of the comic contrast, and it is always the 
 second side, the goal and not the starting-point of our 
 thought or perceptive activity. To ward off super- 
 ficial objections, Lipps further characterized this psy- 
 chologically little thing as that which is “for us rela- 
 tively meaningless,” which “possesses little weight,” 
 “makes less impression.” “A relative nothing,” he 
 calls it, and thus comes into verbal accord with the 
 statement of Kant, as well as those of Spencer and 
 Jean Paul. 
 
 Before endeavoring to show why such a contrast 
 should produce comic feeling, Lipps is concerned to 
 determine just what the essence of this feeling is. And 
 he begins by throwing out all previous attempts to say 
 what it is, on the ground that they do not recognize 
 its uniqueness. They all try to identify the comic 
 with some other emotion, and Lipps truly and repeat- 
 edly asserts that “the feeling of the comic is a feeling 
 of the comic and nothing else.” It is not always even 
 a pleasant feeling, according to him, but may assume 
 now more of the character of pleasure and now more 
 of pain. But whether pleasurable or painful the 
 ground-color of it is always a kind of merriment (. Heiter - 
 keif). For in spite of the customs of speech, says 
 
178 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 Lipps, there is not only a merry pleasure, but also a 
 merry pain. And this merriment — or gaiety, or fri- 
 volity, as we might have to call it in English — is a feel- 
 ing appropriate to what is small and of light import. 
 “ The feeling of seriousness [des Ernstes] is a feeling of 
 greatness or the great, it is a feeling of the strong, the 
 very moving or weighty, the broad, the deep. The feel- 
 ing of merriment in the aforementioned neutral sense 
 [neutral, that is, in relation to pleasure and pain] is a 
 feeling of smallness or the small; it is a feeling of the 
 superficial, the light, the playing.” This feeling, says 
 Lipps, affords “the common moment” in all experi- 
 ences of the comic. 
 
 In order to understand the origin of these two feel- 
 ings, we must realize that it requires energy to make 
 out of anything that affects our nervous system an 
 object of conscious attention. It is as though our con- 
 scious life were but the upper level of a reservoir of 
 psychic, or at least cerebral, processes. To raise the 
 waves of any of these processes high enough to bring 
 them into consciousness is an actual mechanical effort, 
 and the supply of psychic force required for this effort 
 is greater according to the weight, or meaningfulness, 
 or emotional importance of the given process. It is 
 the relation of the supply of this psychic force we have 
 prepared, to the demand that an object of attention 
 actually makes upon us, which gives rise to these op- 
 posite feelings of serious and gay. If a great object 
 comes after little preparation, a sudden psychic labor 
 is required of us, and we feel extremely grave; but if 
 
THE MECHANICAL THEORY 
 
 179 
 
 a little object comes after we have prepared for a 
 great one, then our labor is more than done, and we 
 feel like celebrating a holiday. And this may happen, 
 even though we wanted the greater thing, and are 
 somewhat pained at the loss. The qualitative contrast 
 pains us, but quantitatively we are still the winners, 
 for we have on hand an extra supply of “ psychic force,” 
 and so even when our laugh is bitter, it is gay. 
 
 We can best resist the charm of this too neatly me- 
 chanical theory by recalling it to our mind upon some 
 occasion when we are put into a fit of lasting hilarity 
 by an incident so richly comic that we can neither 
 depart from it nor regain any composure of our bodies 
 while it survives. At such times it can only appear 
 quixotic to attempt to separate comic laughter from 
 other seizures of passion, which have their appropriate 
 stimulus and their hereditary mode of behavior. But 
 even if comic laughter were always merely a quick giggle 
 of relief, such as might carry off a bit of energy out of 
 the cerebrum, it could be demonstrated that its causes 
 are too general to be defined as descending incongrui- 
 ties, or as merely quantitative disappointments. It 
 has been demonstrated, in fact, by one of Lipps’s critics, 
 with the example of a man’s laughter who thinks he 
 hears a cat in the closet, and when he opens the door 
 discovers his aunt. Lipps was compelled to acknowl- 
 edge that an aunt is both larger and of greater “psy- 
 chic weight” than a cat, and he avoided the difficulty 
 by saying that “the comic resides in one’s expecting 
 for the aunt a worthy situation and finding an un- 
 
180 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 worthy.” But if we are going to be mechanical, we 
 cannot jump aside in this way from the real sequence 
 of events. The man had “ prepared his psychic energy” 
 for raising into consciousness a cat. What he raised 
 into consciousness was his aunt in an unworthy situa- 
 tion — a weightier thing from every point of view. I 
 suppose there is a joy for all healthy nephews in laying 
 bare an aunt who has been smooching around the 
 closet — a joy not untinctured with poetic humor — 
 but I think it must be conceded that this humor is 
 enriched by the simultaneous collapse of a more trivial 
 expectation. Perhaps it would simplify the problem of 
 weights and measures if the man were to find a cow in 
 the closet. And yet I suppose it might be possible to 
 prove that a cat has some closetarious importance, a 
 kind of abditory or lurk-hole dignity at least, that 
 makes him in that situation the heavier of the two. 
 
 It is not easy to disestablish a theory which rests 
 upon so indeterminate a fact as “psychic weight.” I 
 believe, however, that the reader who can find humor 
 in a small house occurring in a long row of palaces, will 
 find humor in a large baby occurring in a long row of 
 small ones. And he will have the same difficulty find- 
 ing humor in a small baby that he does in a large house . 
 The reason is that the smallness of babies, like the 
 largeness of houses, does not so easily pass the range of 
 our appetites. A tiny house is no house from the 
 standpoint of our disposition toward houses, and a 
 baby cannot be very much enlarged without ceasing 
 to be a baby and becoming a preposterous object. 
 
THE MECHANICAL THEORY 181 
 
 That is why these opposite quantities are the ones more 
 easily made comic. 
 
 If quantitative disappointments as such were the 
 cause of our laughter, we should giggle a little at very 
 slight ones, and roar louder and louder as they grow 
 more extreme. But since playful annoyments are the 
 cause of our laughter, it is natural that we should not 
 even begin to laugh at the quantitative ones, until they 
 grow extreme enough to rob us of the possibility of 
 serious adjustment. It is not possible for one who ex- 
 pected a clown to jump over four horses to adjust his 
 preperceptions to the minute act of attention to a grain 
 of dust upon one of the horses’ flanks. That is too 
 little . But suppose the clown stands there meticulously 
 dusting invisible grains from that flank, until through 
 and by means of the process of comic laughter we have 
 adjusted ourselves to it, and then suddenly draws back 
 and gives the horse a terrible resounding whack — we 
 shall laugh again and with the same comic delight, for 
 that is too much. 
 
 I remember an acrobatic juggler who, after enter- 
 taining his audience for a time in the usual fashion, 
 came down toward the front of the stage in argument 
 with an accomplice in the gallery, who objected to his 
 performance. The argument became so hot that the 
 accomplice began to throw apples at the acrobat, and 
 he, instead of dodging them energetically with his whole 
 body, placed himself exactly in the way of them, duck- 
 ing his head at the last moment and catching them in 
 his hands behind his back. He thus disappointed us 
 
182 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 of the extravagant pleasure of seeing his head cracked 
 with an apple, but presented to us in the same mo- 
 ment a rare exhibition of nimble dexterity. Our laugh- 
 ter was comic and uproarious. He repeated this trick 
 until he could observe that our disappointment was no 
 longer genuine, because we were now expecting the 
 nimble dodge instead of the disaster. Then without 
 the least change of method or expression, he permitted 
 an apple to smash to pieces upon his bald crown. 
 At this we laughed again freshly and with comic up- 
 roar. For we had got exactly the satisfaction that we 
 originally desired, -and got it in the form of a disap- 
 pointment. This incident seemed to me useful as a 
 disproof of the derision theory, for it showed that hu- 
 morous laughter can arise when people are unexpectedly 
 deprived of derision and presented with admiration, as 
 well as when they are deprived of admiration and pre- 
 sented with derision. But it seemed still more useful as 
 disproving, in the only way that so flexible an idea 
 could be disproven, the assertion of Lipps and Spencer 
 that we laugh only when we arrive at the psychically 
 small after expecting the psychically great, for here 
 the thing expected and the thing arrived at were accu- 
 rately interchanged, and our laughter was of equal vol- 
 ume in the two cases. 
 
 A certain feeling of ease or gaiety doubtless ensues 
 when strenuous mental preparations have been made 
 to perceive something which is trivial when it arrives. 
 And this feeling colors the comic emotion, giving a 
 character of levity to such humor as is merely absurd 
 
THE MECHANICAL THEORY 
 
 183 
 
 and meaningless, or consists in offering preposterously 
 little things to our attention. When a clownish acro- 
 bat poises himself and draws breath for an enormous 
 leap, and then suddenly turns and saunters off the 
 stage, there is a kind of easing joy mixed in the comedy 
 of our laughter. It is a different mixture from that 
 which arises if he stumbles and bumps his nose against 
 some solid object on the way out. But to make that 
 feeling of ease or levity the definitive essence of all 
 comic experience is to commit exactly the error that 
 Lipps so scornfully attributes to his predecessors. It is 
 to define the comic feeling by saying that it is some- 
 thing else. And Lipps could have demolished his own 
 theory in the same words with which he demolished 
 theirs. “The feeling of the comic is a feeling of the 
 comic und weiter nichts!” That sentence contains his 
 real contribution to the science of humor. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 
 
 While those philosophers, impressed chiefly by the 
 laughter of disappointment, were developing this dis- 
 tinguished system of mechanics to explain it, another 
 series of philosophers, impressed also by the laughter 
 of satisfaction, had hit upon an equally distinguished 
 and almost as mechanical explanation. Laughter, they 
 said, is the result of a release of the nervous system 
 from some form of tension or constraint. It is a let-go, 
 a playing free of the whole apparatus upon the sudden 
 removal of a purpose or an obstacle. 
 
 An association of laughter with the idea of liberty 
 first appeared in Lord Shaftesbury’s famous essay on 
 “The Freedom of Wit and Humor” in 1711. 
 
 “The natural free spirits of ingenious men,” he said, “if im- 
 prisoned or controlled, will find out other ways of motion to 
 relieve themselves in their constraint; and whether it be in bur- 
 lesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to 
 vent themselves, and be revenged on their constrainers. . . . 
 *Tis the persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one.” 
 
 The constraint implied here was external, and for 
 the most part legal and political, but this same idea 
 carried inward, and applied to the workings of our 
 own minds, became one of the most famous theories 
 
 184 
 
LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 185 
 
 of comic laughter. It was Alexander Bain, I believe, 
 who first so applied it. 
 
 “ The Comic, in fact, starts from the Serious,” he said. “ The 
 dignified, solemn, and stately attributes of things require in us 
 a certain posture of rigid constraint; and if we are suddenly 
 relieved from this posture, the rebound of hilarity ensues, as in 
 the case of children set free from school. ... It is always a 
 gratifying deliverence to pass from the severe to the easy side 
 of affairs; and the comic conjunction is one form of this transi- 
 tion.” 
 
 The idea suggested here has found increasing favor 
 in modern times, and may be discovered along with the 
 dying echoes of Hobbes’s theory in almost any text-book 
 of psychology. It was enriched by Charles Renouvier, 
 who added to the moral and emotional deliverance im- 
 plied in Bain’s language, the idea of a deliverance from 
 the constraints of rationality— an idea already hinted 
 at by Schopenhauer. I quote from “La Nouvelle 
 Monadologie”: 
 
 “ One sometimes sees the face of him who laughs marked with 
 incertitude, with astonishment. He seems for a moment to 
 make an effort of attention, in order to find a reasonable meaning 
 in the thought that one offers him. But in presence of the im- 
 possibility of sensible interpretation and recognizing that the 
 unreason is voluntary, he feels that it is not the moment to make 
 sense, and releases himself. This release of the reason translates 
 itself physiologically by the laugh. Mentally it is a kind of 
 play. . . . 
 
 The reasonable animal, the same as the risible animal (so 
 described by the scholastic doctors) in playing the fool, escapes 
 
186 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 for a time from the constraints of the rational faculty, and ex- 
 periences a joy of deliverance in going outside of its law and 
 making nonsense.” 
 
 This view of comic laughter found a valiant cham- 
 pion in the year 1893, when A. Penjon published his 
 brilliant dogmatic essay on “Laughter and Liberty.” 
 And in the year 1894 it received a more judicious in- 
 dorsement in John Dewey’s articles on “The Theory 
 of Emotion.” Dewey was not directly concerned with 
 the problem of humor, but by way of illustrating his 
 discussion of emotion and emotional expression in gen- 
 eral, he spoke at some length about laughter, which he 
 described as a “ sudden relaxation of strain.” It marks 
 the end, he said, of a period of suspense or expectancy, 
 “the attainment of a unity.” We constrain our ner- 
 vous energy in much the same way that we hold our 
 breath during a period of expectancy, and in attain- 
 ment we release it, and laughter is the effect of that 
 release. Humor and all the forms of the comic offer 
 “ simply more complex and intellectually loaded differ- 
 entiations of this general principle.” 
 
 Dewey was probably not aware of Penjon’s attempt 
 to apply this principle to those more complex differ- 
 entiations. If he had been, he might have felt some 
 doubt of its validity. For Penjon, in his enthusiasm 
 for the idea that laughter is nothing but “ the end of a 
 constraint” — or as he names it again more picturesquely 
 “ liberty visible ” — arrives at some assertions that would 
 do violence to Dewey’s very guiding sense of real 
 fact. Even gibes and mockery confess themselves to 
 
LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 
 
 187 
 
 be a special kind of spiritual freedom in the course of his 
 essay, and the smile with which one greets a friend is 
 described as “the natural mark of an increased liberty.” 
 We cannot but admire the skill and energy with which 
 M. Penjon rides his epigram, but we do not receive a 
 sense of arriving at any assured destination. We ob- 
 serve that a number of brilliant starts are made and 
 that at least one famous and fertile idea was launched 
 by him — the idea that comic speech and behavior is 
 “the sudden eruption of a spontaneity,” and that 
 “nature,” which is “in a large sense synonymous with 
 liberty,” is what breaks through the constraints of 
 civilization in jokes and humorous laughter. It is this 
 idea that now occupies so much attention in the doc- 
 trines of Sigmund Freud. 
 
 That psychology was tending in this direction before 
 Freud’s theories became widely known, however, may 
 be seen in several articles and text-books. Among 
 these a plea for the general acceptance of Penjon’s 
 theory, which appeared in the American Journal of 
 Psychology for October, 1907, is interesting because it 
 reveals a new tone of voice in which the problem of 
 humorous laughter was beginning to be discussed. 
 
 Humor “ stands guard at the dividing line between free and 
 mechanized mind, to check mechanization and to preserve and 
 fan the sparks of genius. . . . The humor stimulus gives 
 glimpses of the world of uncertainties, of spontaneities, and of 
 life, and in so doing creates the sense of freedom of which the 
 sense of humor is the obverse side. . . . Perhaps its largest 
 function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss 
 
188 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 and gain, and enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees 
 us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism on the 
 other by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than 
 what can happen to us.” 
 
 It is evident in these paragraphs that some of 
 Hegel’s wisdom was coming back into this modern 
 theory, and that humorous laughter, from being a 
 mere mechanical by-accident or purely negative con- 
 dition of release, was beginning again to resemble wis- 
 dom and nobility of life itself. We must confess, how- 
 ever, that liberty is a purely negative condition, and 
 if taken in any defined scientific sense, does not per- 
 mit all these positive good things to be deduced from 
 it. The author says at one point in his essay that “ the 
 uniqueness of the humor tone is the crux of the matter,” 
 and that is true, but it is contradictory to everything 
 else that he says. For liberty, a release from tension, 
 a removal of constraint, an absence of mechanization 
 — however we describe it — does not necessarily possess 
 this unique tone. We do frequently laugh at the end 
 of a period of tension, and if the end comes in certain 
 ways, we laugh humorously, but there are many other 
 things which w^e do at the end of such a period. We 
 move our chairs, get up and walk about, stretch, sigh, 
 swear, pray, cough, or say “Whew !” or say “Well! 
 Well!” or “Bless my soul!” Dewey himself points 
 out that we release our breath after a period of tension, 
 but he does not offer that as an explanation of breath- 
 ing, and there is little better reason why laughter, and 
 above all humorous laughter with its unique quality 
 
LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 
 
 189 
 
 of feeling, should receive so negative an explanation. 
 Laughter is not a concise and finely determined form 
 of behavior, perhaps, but it is a sufficiently definite 
 semivoluntary act. It is a part of what we do, and 
 not merely something that happens when we have 
 ceased to do anything. 
 
 When Dewey says that the smile of an infant is an 
 expression of assent, he has himself profoundly con- 
 tradicted his explanation of laughter as a kind of me- 
 chanical accident. He has placed it where so universal, 
 frequent, and emotional an activity would seem inevi- 
 tably to belong, among the positive functions or in- 
 stincts of man, whose ultimate explanation is their 
 utility in life and evolution. Likewise when Penjon 
 is compelled by his theory to declare that in meeting 
 a friend we experience an increase of liberty, he has 
 tacitly acknowledged the failure of his theory. For it 
 was not liberty as a vague word of eulogy for all the 
 positive good things of life, but liberty as “ la fin d’une 
 contrainte,” that had given meaning and scientific co- 
 gency to his epigram. Laughter is liberty — yes, it is 
 one of the things that we are most likely to do when we 
 are set free. But it is not what we always do; some- 
 times we shout. And it is a thing that we do upon 
 other occasions also; we laugh at our chains. There- 
 fore, however happily they may be associated together, 
 and however much a feeling of liberty may sometimes 
 accelerate our laughter and flavor the enjoyment of a 
 joke, liberty is not laughter and cannot fundamentally 
 explain its existence. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 The scientific world is generally aware that Sigmund 
 Freud, in addition to his other momentous gifts to our 
 self-knowledge, has made an important contribution 
 to the understanding of wit and humor. But just 
 what that contribution is, nobody seems to know. 
 And there are two good reasons for this. One is that 
 Freud himself has not a clear conception of it, and 
 the other is that he has chosen a method of exposition 
 which would leave his reader in a state of refined doubt 
 and madness, even were his own thoughts the clear- 
 est in the world. His method is to coax and allure 
 us with original and apparently fertile ideas continually 
 up to the verge of some point or conclusion, only to 
 dodge away at the last moment, intimating that the 
 matter must remain in suspense until “later on,” and 
 then never explicitly to mention it again. There is 
 no reader in existence who could hold all these sus- 
 pended matters in memory throughout the labor that 
 follows, and we may simply put it down as one more 
 evidence of the wide gulf between theoretic and active 
 knowledge, that one of the greatest students of the 
 human mind should write a book that no human mind 
 can satisfactorily read. With that much by way of 
 “discharging the affect,” we may be able to estimate 
 
 190 
 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 191 
 
 Freud’s ideas justly, and give them a due place in our 
 history. 
 
 These ideas really belong to the theory of laughter 
 as liberty, or a release of the mind and nervous system 
 from constraint. Freud brought the support and illu- 
 mination of his hypothesis of the Unconscious to that 
 theory, confirming in a surprising way the remarks of 
 Bain and Renouvier and John Dewey, and building 
 up a solid platform of fact under Penjon’s acrobatic 
 speculations. But owing to his scientific environment, 
 as it seems, rather than to any thorough consideration 
 and choice, he accepted the mechanical theory of Lipps 
 and Spencer as an established science of laughter, and 
 unsuccessfully endeavored to engraft his thoughts upon 
 that theory. 
 
 Freud’s book is primarily an investigation of wit, 
 or what we have called intellectual jokes, and he 
 traces these jokes to their origin in the world-play and 
 thought-play of children, an activity which he thinks 
 is not humorous, but merely a happy and wanton 
 exercise of the mental faculties. It is a direct enjoy- 
 ment of nonsense, such as Renouvier had declared that 
 the play of a “rational animal” would be. As the 
 child grows up he is compelled by the social standards 
 of rationality, and what we call “good sense,” to aban- 
 don these forms of amusement, but the impulse to 
 indulge them remains alive in his bosom, and he finds 
 in maturity a very astute way of satisfying it. He 
 seeks out forms of speech which are from one point of 
 view nonsense, but which from another point of view 
 
192 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 mean something. He thus gratifies his love of non- 
 sense, without too much offending his reason and 
 critical judgment. And that is the simplest kind of 
 wit, which Freud designates with the word Scherz , and 
 which his English translator has called the “jest.” In 
 a jest as so defined we do not derive any pleasure from 
 the meaning of what is said; our pleasure lies in its 
 meaninglessness, and the meaning is there only “to 
 guard this pleasure against suppression by our reason.” 
 
 Freud recalls, as an example of this rudimentary 
 kind of playfulness, the remark of a professor who 
 taught at the University of Gottingen in the sixteenth 
 century. 
 
 “ Wishing to enroll a student named Warr in his class, he asked 
 him his age, and upon receiving the reply that the student 
 was thirty years of age, he exclaimed: 'Aha, so I have the honor 
 of seeing the Thirty Years’ War I’” 
 
 There is a comic quality in this remark, and yet it is 
 not to be described as “wit,” according to Freud, be- 
 cause, although it makes sense, the sense has no value. 
 If the man’s name had been Johnson, there would have 
 been no purpose in saying “ I have the honor of seeing 
 a Thirty year Johnson.” Such a statement would just 
 barely have made sense — and so also of this statement. 
 But that is all that is required of the formal aspect of a 
 jest. Its value is its nonsense — the sheer folly, in this 
 case, of announcing in the midst of a dignified academic 
 performance “I see the Thirty Years’ War!” 
 
 In order to place it in the higher species of humor, 
 
FREUD'S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 193 
 
 which Freud calls “wit,” the sense of a jest as well as 
 the nonsense must have value. And in such cases our 
 infantile pleasure in the nonsense serves to enhance and 
 magnify the value of the sense. It makes us think 
 more of it than we otherwise should, although still it is 
 not the sense, but the nonsense— the release of our mind 
 from the constraints of reason — that produces witty 
 pleasure, and gives the character of humor to these 
 intellectual jokes. 
 
 As an example of wit Freud is very fond of recalling 
 the remark of Heine’s character Hirsch-Hyacinth that 
 “I sat next to Solomon Rothschild, who treated me just 
 as if I were an equal, quite famillionaire.” The sense 
 that Freud finds in this nonsense is the rather bitter 
 observation that Rothschild “ treated him in a familiar 
 way, that is, as far as this can be done by a million- 
 aire.” Thus “the jest,” or nonsense made tolerable 
 to reason, rises to the dignity of “wit,” or nonsense 
 lending its glamour and protection to a sensible state- 
 ment. 
 
 But nonsense has a still greater career to fulfil, be- 
 fore it ever becomes the cause of hilarious laughter. It 
 has to give release to other and stronger repressed ten- 
 dencies of our nature than the mere tendency to play — 
 namely, the hostile or aggressive tendency, and the 
 sexual or “obscene” tendency. When the sense which 
 lurks behind the nonsense of a jest is a conscious ex- 
 pression of one or the other of these great unconscious 
 tendencies, “ from which nothing that is formed in psy- 
 chic life can escape for any length of time,” then it has 
 
194 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 come into its full maturity as a provoker of laughter, 
 and assumed an altogether new importance in the 
 mechanism of our minds. Freud calls these jests which 
 release from the unconscious a major impulse of our 
 nature “ tendency wit,” as opposed to that “ harm- 
 less wit” which merely sets free the play-impulse, 
 and at which he says we never laugh very uproari- 
 ously. 
 
 In tendency wit there is still from one point of view 
 a nonsense in what is said, and that is the more obvious 
 point of view. And our childish pleasure in this non- 
 sense makes the words acceptable and easy to express, 
 although in reality they are merely a disguise for cer- 
 tain intimate and emotional kinds of sense , which with- 
 out such a disguise we could not, or would not dare to 
 express at all. We might find it difficult, for instance, 
 to acknowledge, or even to know, that there exists in 
 our bodies a rather indiscriminate yearning to commit 
 adultery. But if we were earnestly advising some 
 young man to take a wife, and he should earnestly 
 reply "Whose?” that would give us a pleasure out of 
 all proportion to the proper value of such nonsense. 
 It would not only release us from the temporary con- 
 straints of intellectual purpose, but it would set aside 
 the whole structure of restriction upon which our social 
 culture is founded, and inaugurate a moment at least 
 of really barbaric and uproarious liberty. Tendency 
 wit might be defined then, according to Freud, as a 
 kind of nonsense, pleasurable in itself, but so con- 
 structed as to furnish a disguise under which a man 
 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 195 
 
 hearing it can bear to admit into his own society his 
 own suppressed impulses. 
 
 For those who are a little shocked, either in their 
 taste or their sense of reality, by Freud’s assertion that 
 the impulses released in this way from the unconscious 
 are only two — the aggressive and the sexual — it will 
 be interesting to know that Freud even declares that 
 these two “may be united under one view-point” — 
 and that of course the view-point of sex. He does not 
 unite them, however, but on the contrary expands and 
 generalizes the one called “aggressive,” until it includes 
 much that is remote from the real implication of the 
 word. It includes that form of satire which is an at- 
 tack upon the unnatural and overpretentious institu- 
 tions of human culture; it includes jokes told upon one- 
 self, and the jokes which Jewish people delight in at 
 the expense of their own race; and it even includes, as 
 a separate class, jokes which attack neither a person 
 nor an institution, but “the very certainty of our 
 knowledge,” and may be called “sceptical jokes.” 
 
 It is characteristic of that tendency toward amateur 
 and irresponsible generalization which can be detected 
 elsewhere in Freud’s writing, that he should erect an 
 entirely distinct kind and class of wit called “scepti- 
 cal,” for no better reason than that he has thought of a 
 good story which awakens in him a pleasurable specu- 
 lation. If he had thought a little longer he could have 
 erected many other classes of tendency wit besides the 
 hostile and the sexual — as many as there are impulses 
 
196 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 unsatisfied in man. Let us hear the story, however. 
 It is about two Jews who met in a railway-station: 
 
 “ Where are you going ?” said one. 
 
 “To Cracow,” said the other. 
 
 “What a liar you are!” said the first. “You want 
 me to believe you’re going to Lemburg, and that’s why 
 you say you’re going to Cracow. But I know very well 
 you’re going to Cracow!” 
 
 The remoteness of our pleasure in this story from a 
 mood of hostile or obscene aggression against the 
 existence of truth may justify us in taking the rest of 
 Freud’s classification somewhat lightly. We may in- 
 dulge a little scepticism of our own at his expense. 
 When he boldly asserts — as he quite often does — that 
 all of a large number of things may be “united under 
 the view-point” of sex, he may be employing a little 
 Jewish bravado not unlike that of the man who was 
 going to Cracow. He knows very well that we will 
 not believe they can all be united under the view-point 
 of sex, but he is wilful enough to say they all can, in 
 order to get us to believe that most of them can. 
 
 This statement about the predominance of sex in our 
 unconscious natures is decidedly a minor point in 
 Freud’s book, however, and the manner in which it has 
 been grabbed out and exploited as the essence of his 
 book tends rather to confirm its truth. The essence 
 of his book, as a contribution of something new to the 
 science of humor, is its demonstration that witticisms, 
 whatever their original and more simple nature may be, 
 are peculiarly adapted for releasing suppressed motives 
 from the unconscious, and they are frequently so em- 
 
; 
 
 FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 197 
 
 ployed. Freud was led to realize this fact by the pe- 
 culiar similarity that he observed between wit and 
 dreams. 
 
 A dream when it is interpreted, he says, often seems 
 like a poor attempt at a joke. It shows the same ten- 
 dency to express two or more things by one, to express 
 a thing by its opposite, by something similar to it, by 
 using ambiguous words, or words that have both a lit- 
 eral and a figurative meaning, by twisting words, or 
 making up new ones, or changing their order in a sen- 
 tence. Indeed a dream has all the attributes of a joke 
 except its humor. It seems to be something like a joke 
 turned inside out. And Freud tries to explain this by 
 saying that a dream disguises our forbidden thoughts 
 in order to keep them out of consciousness, while a joke 
 disguises them in order to let them in. In the one case 
 we are trying to avoid the pain of thinking about some- 
 thing that we dread more than we desire it; in the other 
 we are trying to secure the pleasure of something that 
 we desire more than we dread it. Naturally, therefore, 
 dreams are colorless and pointless; their function is 
 negative; their function is not to make seme. The func- 
 tion of witticisms is to make seme, and, in tendency wit 
 at least, to make sense of a very pleasurable kind. In 
 that way Freud explains both the similarity and the 
 difference between wit and dreams, and so seeks to 
 prove and complete his theory of the relation of wit to 
 the unconscious. 
 
 I believe that any one who has read away at Freud’s 
 book with patient endurance will agree that this is a 
 
198 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 true and not incomplete account of his essential explana- 
 tion of wit. And yet the reader who takes up his book 
 for the first time will be surprised to find that at no 
 point does he appear to be discussing the ideas here 
 described, or attempting to prove them. He is always 
 apparently occupied with the thesis that in every ex- 
 ample of wit, and also in comic perceptions, and in 
 emotional humor, there is a sudden “economy of psy- 
 chic expenditure,” and that this is the source of our 
 pleasure, and the cause of our laugh. For that is the 
 idea which he derived from his friend Theodor Lipps, 
 and which Lipps derived from Herbert Spencer. 
 
 It is apparent in the language that Freud himself 
 uses when he is discussing tendency wit, and the rela- 
 tion of wit to dreams, and in many other places, that 
 his own natural conception of the source of our pleasure 
 is “the gratification of tendencies.” 
 
 “ The pleasure in tendency wit,” he says, “results from the 
 fact that a tendency whose gratification would otherwise remain 
 unfulfilled is actually gratified. That such gratification is a 
 source of pleasure is self-evident without further discussion.” 
 
 Here he speaks a language about pleasure which is 
 intelligible and natural to the layman, and which also 
 accords with the best technical attempts to deal with 
 this difficult problem. He speaks the same language 
 again in one of his foot-notes, where he makes a sugges- 
 tion — which I think is wholly erroneous — about the 
 origin of the laugh. 
 
 “According to the best of my knowledge the grimaces and con- 
 tortions of the corners of the mouth that characterize laughter 
 appear first in the satisfied and satiated nursling when he drowsily 
 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 199 
 
 quits the breasts. There it is a correct motion of expression 
 since it bespeaks the determination to take no more nourishment, 
 an ‘enough,’ so to speak, or rather a ‘more than enough.’ This 
 primal sense of pleasurable satiation may have furnished the 
 smile, which ever remains the basic phenomenon of laughter.” 
 
 These statements about our pleasure in “the grati- 
 fication of a tendency” and about a “sense of pleasur- 
 able satiation,” are not only in accord with common 
 sense and good science, but they are also in accord with 
 the original tenor of Freud’s psychology, which dealt 
 with a “libido” and its adventures in gratification and 
 denial, as the source of all psychic weal or woe. They 
 seem, therefore, to justify us in regarding the too labored 
 idea of an “economy of psychic expenditure,” as not 
 only unessential to his theory, but also in some degree 
 alien and opposed to it. 
 
 Since we are writing a history, however, as well as 
 a criticism, we must proceed to show how Freud brings 
 his theory of witty pleasure as a gratification of repressed 
 tendencies, into accord with the theory that it is a re- 
 sult of psychic energy suddenly made superfluous, or as 
 he says economized. He does it in a different way for 
 each of the four kinds, or stages, of wit which he has 
 described. 
 
 (1) That the pleasure of a child’s play with words 
 arises from a kind of psychic economy, he does not 
 really explain at all, but simply asserts it in the follow- 
 ing words: 
 
 “Play — we shall retain this name — appears in children while 
 they are learning how to use words and connect thoughts; this 
 playing is probably the result of an impulse which urges the 
 
200 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 child to exercise its capacities (Groos). During this process it 
 experiences pleasurable effects which originate from the repeti- 
 tion of similarities, the rediscovery of the familiar, sound-asso- 
 ciations, etc., which may be explained as an unexpected economy 
 of psychic expenditure. Therefore it surprises no one that these 
 resulting pleasures urge the child to practice playing and impel it 
 to continue without regard for the meaning of words or the con- 
 nections between sentences. Playing with words and thoughts, 
 motivated by certain pleasures in economy, would thus be the 
 first step to wit.” 
 
 (2) The jest, we remember, is merely a trick of so 
 arranging this childish play-nonsense that it will also 
 make sense, and thus guarding these original pleasure- 
 sources against the censorship of reason. Granted that 
 play-pleasure is mere economy, therefore, it needs no 
 proof that the pleasure of a jest is of the same sort, 
 and no proof is offered. 
 
 (3) With wit, however, even of the “harmless” kind, 
 a very elaborate proof is offered. Indeed almost the 
 first half of Freud’s book is an attempt, by analyzing a 
 great series of more or less familiar witticisms, to show 
 that in them all some sort of “condensation” occurs, 
 so that a given amount of verbal or conceptual effort 
 conveys more than its usual amount of meaning. “A 
 compressing or — to be more exact — an economizing 
 tendency controls all these technics.” 
 
 Freud’s translator offers as an example of this ten- 
 dency the following native witticism: 
 
 “A Tale of Two American Generations 
 Gold Mine 
 Gold Spoon 
 Gold Cure” 
 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 201 
 
 It is an example which disproves Freud’s assertion, 
 so far as I am concerned, for my actual expenditure of 
 psychic force in digging out the meaning condensed in 
 this nonsense was greater than would have been re- 
 quired by a direct and sensible statement, and yet I 
 was not unable to enjoy its wit. In many of Freud’s 
 own examples he is to me equally unconvincing, and 
 his whole labor here seems loose and inconsequential, 
 largely because he shifts vaguely back and forth be- 
 tween his original purpose — to show that the technique 
 of wit is the same as that of dreams — and this adventi- 
 tious one — to show that it is “all a matter of economy.” 
 
 (4) To prove that economy is the source of our 
 pleasure in “ tendency wit” would seem especially 
 difficult, because the very definition of this wit as ful- 
 filling a tendency implies that we enjoy it because of 
 that fulfilment. But here Freud is very ingenious. 
 He tells us that our pleasure does not arise out of the 
 fulfilment of the tendency, but out of the fact that 
 the energy which had been employed in preventing its 
 fulfilment is released. “We observe,” he says, “that 
 the economy of psychic expenditure in suppressions 
 and inhibitions seems to be the secret of the pleasur- 
 able effect of tendency wit.” 
 
 If we set this observation over against the one 
 quoted previously that “the pleasure in tendency wit 
 results from the fact that a tendency whose gratifica- 
 tion would otherwise remain unfulfilled is gratified,” 
 we have at once a sample of the confusion in Freud’s 
 book and an indication of the source of it. He is try- 
 ing to make a theory of laughter as the liberation of 
 
202 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 impulse fit into the forms of the theory that laughter 
 is an overflow of energy. 
 
 In his discussion of what he calls humor Freud sim- 
 ply reproduces one of the clear ideas of his predecessor. 
 It will be remembered that in Lipps’s theory the 
 “small” thing at which we laugh is often small only 
 in the sense of being “less impressive” than the one 
 for which we had prepared ourselves. It is a thing of 
 less emotional importance. And to laughable things of 
 this kind Freud gives the name of “ humor.” The plea- 
 sure in humor, he says, arises from an “economy of 
 expenditure in feeling.” It may be the feeling of sym- 
 pathy, of anger, pain, compassion, or indeed any emo- 
 tion whatever, with which we might be prepared to 
 greet an experience. But when the experience arrives, 
 if we discover that this prepared feeling was excessive 
 or uncalled for, then our souls are relieved at the sudden 
 saving of passion, and laugh with that peculiar parsi- 
 monious pleasure which Freud attributes to them. 
 The fact that these souls also laugh hilariously at the 
 forms of w T it which permit the sudden expenditure of 
 these same passions does not trouble the author, and 
 need not trouble the reader either, if he will remember 
 that all this is simply a rescript of Lipps’s and Spencer’s 
 idea of the “descending incongruity,” and that Freud’s 
 real contribution to the science of humor has nothing 
 whatever to do with it. 
 
 Freud invented the hypothesis of the unconscious, 
 and of the repression of primitive and infantile motives 
 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 203 
 
 into the unconscious, and he discovered that dreams 
 and neurotic and psychotic symptoms, and many little 
 accidents of speech and action in every-day life, are 
 the result of an attempt of these motives to express 
 themselves in spite of the force that represses them. 
 In myth and poetry and the development of language 
 he also discovered signs of these unconscious motives. 
 And he discovered them in certain hilarious forms of 
 wit, where they play so great a part that it will be 
 impossible ever to explain wit, or to explain humorous 
 laughter in general, without at some point employing 
 Freud’s hypothesis of the unconscious. But Freud 
 himself did not explain wit, nor humorous laughter, 
 and it will only delay and hinder the explanation of 
 them if the great respect we have for his genius leads 
 us to think that he did. 
 
 Freud’s long labor of pseudo-empirical proof that 
 witticisms have the same technique as dreams is not 
 important, for it is clear from his definition of them 
 that dreams and witticisms will both employ any and 
 every technique by which a given set of words or ideas 
 can make formal nonsense, and yet imply or symbolize 
 something intelligible. The important thing is his 
 definition, his statement that dreams and tendency wit 
 are practically the same thing, and that dreams lack 
 pleasantness merely because they are employed to 
 keep ideas out of consciousness instead of to bring them 
 in. I think there is one other difference between 
 dreams and the jokes which release an impulse from the 
 unconscious — namely, that jokes, besides being pleas- 
 
204 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 ant, give rise to a comic emotion, and that dreams, even 
 when they are interpreted and the forbidden idea thus 
 brought into consciousness, do not give rise to such an 
 emotion. And that raises, of course, the fundamental 
 objection to Freud’s theory of wit. He does not at 
 any point explain, or even apparently perceive, the 
 existence of this quality of feeling. He says that the 
 original pleasure which children have in nonsense is 
 not a comic or humorous pleasure, and yet elsewhere 
 he says that it is a pleasure derived from “ economy.” 
 Why should this economy-pleasure be without humor 
 when it is enjoyed in a simple manner by children, and 
 yet acquire a humorous quality when it is come back 
 to by adults, who only bring with them a slightly more 
 complicated kind of economy? That is what Freud’s 
 elaboration of Lipps’s theory fails altogether to explain. 
 
 And if we drop away the Lippsian apparatus, and 
 consider Freud’s theory in its own simplicity, there is 
 still the same failure. He is compelled, in his search 
 for the original simple experience from which witty 
 values are derived, to postulate a pure “ pleasure in 
 nonsense.” And nonsense, for one whose interest is 
 engaged upon a pursuit of meaning, is just the same as 
 nothing at all. It is intellectual nothing. Therefore 
 Freud is not here in essential disagreement with Kant. 
 But for Freud this nothing does not acquire a comic 
 value until it is combined with something. Children 
 are without humor, according to him, and nonsense is 
 not “ funny” until it also makes sense. And yet why 
 it is funny then, he never attempts to explain. 
 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 
 
 205 
 
 He could not explain it upon the assumptions he 
 has made, any more than he can explain why dreams 
 are not funny when they are interpreted. But the 
 whole difficulty is resolved at once if we acknowledge 
 that children have a more lively though crude sense 
 of humor than we have, and that their pleasure in 
 nonsense h the pure evidence of this trait. As they 
 become more serious, more critical, purposive, self- 
 conscious, this play-instinct is less responsive, and in 
 mature life positive meanings are brought in, not to 
 “protect” the humorous pleasure against “the censor- 
 ship of reason,” but to reinforce and flavor it to the 
 adult taste with the satisfaction of a more serious in- 
 terest. That, I think, is the truth which Freud gropes 
 after in the confusion of these pages. His whole sys- 
 tem of psychology is at fault in that it does not recog- 
 nize the original variety of the instincts, nor explain the 
 different qualities of emotion. It deals only with 
 pleasure and pain. Naturally, the same failing makes 
 inadequate his explanation of wit. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF MERRY LAUGHTER 
 
 We have seen that in the Dark Ages men were fa- 
 miliar with the connection between laughter and states 
 of joy or satisfaction. Lactantius even associates 
 laughter more precisely with satisfactions of the social 
 instinct, asserting that animals as well as men are en- 
 dowed with this faculty and express their “mutual love 
 and indulgence” with “a kind of smile.” It was only 
 after the Revival of too much Learning that this ob- 
 vious truth disappeared out of literature, and all the 
 philosophers began to identify laughter with comic en- 
 joyment. They all followed in the footsteps of Aris- 
 totle, until Charles Darwin with his gift of pure obser- 
 vation set out to make a science of the emotional ex- 
 pressions of men and animals. He rediscovered the ob- 
 vious truth that men laugh when they are happy, and 
 laid a new basis for the understanding of this whole 
 subject. 
 
 “ Laughter,” said Darwin, “seems primarily to be the expres- 
 sion of mere joy or happiness. We clearly see this in children 
 at play, who are almost incessantly laughing. With young 
 persons past childhood, when they are in high spirits, there is 
 always much meaningless laughter. The laughter of the gods 
 is described by Homer as ‘the exuberance of their celestial joy 
 after their daily banquet.’ A man smiles — and smiling, as we 
 
 206 
 
DISCOVERY OF MERRY LAUGHTER 207 
 
 shall see, graduates into laughter — at meeting an old friend in 
 the street, as he does at any trifling pleasure, such as smelling a 
 sweet perfume. Laura Bridgman, from her blindness and deaf- 
 ness, could not have acquired any expression through imitation, 
 yet when a letter from a beloved friend was communicated to 
 her by gesture-language, she ‘ laughed and clapped her hands, 
 and the color mounted to her cheeks.’ On other occasions she 
 has been seen to stamp for joy. Idiots and imbecile persons 
 likewise afford good evidence that laughter or smiling primarily 
 expresses mere happiness or joy.” 
 
 Darwin does not, of course, fail to observe that there 
 exists another kind of laughter — a laughter at the lu- 
 dicrous — and he is contented with Hobbes’s account of 
 it. But he rightly perceives this to be a secondary 
 thing. Laughter is for him primarily, and in the most 
 general sense, an expression of human pleasure and 
 satisfaction. “ A graduated series,” he says, “ can be fol- 
 lowed from violent to moderate laughter, to a broad 
 smile, to a gentle smile, and to the expression of mere 
 cheerfulness.” 
 
 Now the prevailing way in which Darwin seeks to 
 explain emotional expressions is this: he shows that 
 these expressions are survivals or surviving remnants 
 of complete acts which were useful to the species at 
 some point in its earlier history. The attitude of in- 
 dignation, for instance, is what remains of a prepara- 
 tion for battle; the sneer is an uncovering of the canine 
 tooth for action; the upraised eyebrows and wide open- 
 ing of the mouth and eyes in fear are an effort “to see 
 as quickly as possible all around us, and to hear dis- 
 
208 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 tinctly whatever sound may reach our ears.” In ways 
 similar to this all the “emotional expressions” were ex- 
 plained by Darwin. And his explanations have been 
 authenticated, and raised almost to the height of cer- 
 tainty, by our modern understanding of the relation 
 between acts and emotions. For we see now that those 
 acts or beginning of acts which he described, are the 
 primary and essential thing, and that emotions are 
 but the interior quality which belongs to them. We 
 no longer say that the attitude of alertness and a 
 preparation for flight “expresses the emotion” of fear. 
 We say that fear is a feeling which attends this attitude 
 and those preparations — a feeling which is perhaps 
 more intense the more we inhibit them, or fail to carry 
 them out into overt action. We say that anger is our 
 feeling of the instinctive attitude of pugnacity. In 
 this way we verify but reinterpret all of Darwin’s 
 careful observations. 
 
 Therefore it is very significant that when he arrived 
 at laughter, Darwin was not able to apply his mode of 
 explanation at all. He was at a complete loss to dis- 
 cover any useful instinctive activity, which occurred 
 at moments of special satisfaction, and would account 
 for the innervation of all the various muscles employed 
 in smiles and laughter. He simply asserted his belief 
 in the possibility of such an explanation. 
 
 “ Although we can hardly account for the shape of the mouth 
 during laughter, which leads to winkles being formed beneath 
 the eyes, nor for the peculiar reiterated sound of laughter, nor 
 for the quivering of the jaws, nevertheless we may infer that all 
 
DISCOVERY OF MERRY LAUGHTER 209 
 
 these effects are due to some common cause. For they are all 
 characteristic and expressive of a pleased state of mind in various 
 kinds of monkeys. ,, 
 
 It was at this point that a true beginning for the 
 solution of the problem of laughter remained to be 
 found. We had to discover what instinct it is, whose 
 functioning is colored with an emotion almost like 
 happiness or pleasure itself, and whose characteristic 
 expression is an agreeable diverse activity of the counte- 
 nance and of the vocal organs. And to state the prob- 
 lem in that way was almost to make the reply that it is 
 the gregarious or social instinct, the instinct which finds 
 its stimulus in mere companionship or friendly meeting, 
 and its characteristic satisfaction in seeing the smiling 
 laughter in the eyes of others and hearing them re- 
 spond. Laughter differs from the other expressions 
 in that it is not the mere suggestive relic of an act. It 
 is an act — a fulfilment in its own proper degree of the 
 social instinct. To exchange a smile is to do some- 
 thing, and short of kissing or devouring one another, 
 nothing more with these particular muscles can very 
 well be done. But with that slight difference laughter 
 is susceptible of the same explanation as the other 
 forms of emotional expression. 
 
 Darwin himself, it seems, was almost on the point of 
 naming the social or gregarious instinct, and reach- 
 ing this explanation of how laughter came to be em- 
 ployed as an expression of satisfaction in general. 
 
 “ We can see in a vague manner,” he said, “ how the utterance 
 of sounds of some kind would naturally become associated with 
 
210 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 a pleasurable state of mind; for throughout a large part of the 
 animal kingdom vocal or instrumental sounds are employed 
 either as a call or as a charm by one sex for the other. They are 
 also employed as the means for a joyful meeting between the 
 parents and their offspring, and between the attached members 
 of the same social community.” 
 
 These words of the great biologist seem to put the 
 origin of laughter in its true place, and we may well 
 distrust any theory of humor — no matter how mechan- 
 ical or neuro-dynamic or psycho-pathological it may be 
 — which does not find itself in accord with them. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 
 
 As the laughter of satisfaction and the laughter of 
 disappointment have both had their champions in 
 modern philosophy, so has the laughter that arises in 
 a combination of satisfaction with disappointment. A 
 great many philosophers, impressed by the doubleness 
 of mature jokes, have tried to define humor in general 
 as a “contrast,” or “conflict,” or “mixture” of desir- 
 able with undesirable qualities. The first one to re- 
 vive in our modern world this old opinion of Plato — 
 the first, and I am inclined to add the best — was that 
 physician to the king of France, L. Joubert, the author 
 of the “Traite du ris.” Written in the century before 
 Descartes, and yet conceived entirely in the spirit of 
 physiological psychology, this little book deserves a 
 place among the classics of the science. Doctor Jou- 
 bert tells us, in the first place, that the faculty of comic 
 laughter is not located in the brain, but “sits in the 
 heart with the other passions,” and if our own theory 
 is correct, that is the most sensible statement that the 
 whole literature of the subject affords. Doctor Jou- 
 bert is also wise enough to know — what most of those 
 who followed him found it necessary to forget — that 
 any true science of humor must carry with it the ex- 
 planation of our pleasure in tickling; and he is clearly 
 
 211 
 
212 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 aware of the inseparable connection between humor and 
 that light way of taking things which we describe as 
 play. 
 
 The “Traite du ris” accepts, as we have already ob- 
 served, an Aristotelian account of the ludicrous object. 
 It is always an ugly or unseemly object. But our 
 derisive feeling about this object, according to Doctor 
 Joubert, instead of being altogether happy, is invariably 
 mixed with pain, and this mixture is what causes the 
 peculiar phenomenon called laughter. 
 
 “ When an object at once pleasant with drollery and sad with 
 ugliness presents itself the heart is stirred very quickly and un- 
 evenly, because it wishes to make at the same time two contrary 
 movements, the one of joy and the other of sorrow. Each one 
 is short, through being suddenly interrupted by its opposite 
 which obstructs the path : at the same time the dilation surpasses 
 the contraction, as in the ridiculous there is always more pleasure 
 than pain.” 
 
 The doctor further assures us, upon the basis of cer- 
 tain authentic anatomical investigations, that the hu- 
 man heart, in distinction from that of the animal, is 
 attached to the diaphragm, and thus it follows by a 
 simple mechanical necessity that men shake their 
 diaphragms when they perceive a ridiculous object, 
 while animals do not. That they do the same thing 
 when they are tickled is subject to a similar explana- 
 tion, for tickling likewise arouses in our heart an oscil- 
 lating combination of pleasure with pain. 
 
 “ The strange touch brings some pain and annoy ment to the 
 parts unaccustomed to it, but being light it causes some kind of 
 
CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 213 
 
 false pleasure, namely, that it does not truly offend, and that 
 nature enjoys diversity.” 
 
 Granted the perfect identity of our heart and its 
 motions with our experiences of passion, and I see but 
 one difficulty in Doctor Joubert’s explanation of laugh- 
 ter. That is the fact that, both in tickling and in our 
 perception of the comic, this organ is observed to di- 
 late more than it contracts. 
 
 ‘ The joy which we experience,” he says, “ knowing that there 
 is nothing to weep over (except in false appearance), has more 
 force upon the heart than has the light sorrow . . . for it is 
 necessary to laughter that the pleasure exceed the sadness.” 
 
 I do not see quite why this should be necessary upon 
 the physiological side, nor why it should be true upon the 
 psychological. If laughter is to be explained as the re- 
 sult of a rhythmic alternation between two opposite feel- 
 ings, I do not see how we can account for the fact that 
 one of these feelings wholly prevails over the other. 
 And I suspect the doctor himself of a little uneasiness 
 upon this point, for he is careful in one chapter to ex- 
 plain that we take a special pleasure in the mixture of 
 pleasure and pain, because they each compel the other 
 to be moderate, and so eliminate the danger of our 
 either laughing or crying ourselves to death ! 
 
 It seems likely that Descartes was familiar with 
 Joubert's book, and that his own definition of humor 
 as “a species of joy mixed with hate,” and his more 
 simple explanation of the laugh, was a modification of 
 what he had read there. Aside from that, however, 
 
214 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 this early attempt at a conflict-mixture theory com- 
 bined with a physiology of laughter, never caught the 
 interest of men, and we find the theory arising again 
 in a purely psychological form in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury among the followers of Christian Wolff. Moses 
 Mendelssohn, in his “ Philosophische Schriften,” says 
 that laughter is not a sure sign of pleasure, but that it 
 is “ grounded rather, as well as weeping, in a contrast 
 between perfection and imperfection. Only this con- 
 trast must be of no weight and not come home to us 
 too strongly, if it is to be laughable.” . . . 
 
 “ Every lack of harmony between means and end, cause and 
 effect, between the character of a man and his conduct, between 
 thoughts and the manner of their expression, above all, every 
 contrast of the great, venerable, pompous, and significant, with 
 the valueless, contemptible and little, whose consequences put 
 us in no embarrassment, is laughable.” 
 
 Lessing accepted this account of the matter, and gave 
 it literary pre-eminence by improving it a little in his 
 “Laocoon”: 
 
 “ The ridiculous,” he said, “ requires a contrast between per- 
 fections and imperfections. This is the explanation of my friend, 
 to which I would add that this contrast must not be too sharp 
 and decided, but that the opposites must be such as admit of 
 being blended into each other.” 
 
 The emotional content of this idea was exploited to 
 the full by the priests of the romantic movement in 
 German literature. 
 
 “Humor,” they said, “is the kiss which joy and sorrow give 
 each other; it has for its device a smiling tear, it has the head- 
 
CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 215 
 
 dress of a Folly adorned with crepe, while shod with the tragic 
 sandal and the comic sock; it is also the electric spark which 
 plays between the two poles of the contrary words, sentimentality 
 and raillery; and we know finally that Joy and Grief, meeting 
 in the nocturnal forest, loved without recognizing each other, 
 and there was born to them a son, who was Humor.” 
 
 It would seem that this theory of the conflict-mixture 
 was peculiarly adapted to the trends of German specu- 
 lation, for Goethe also described the laughable as a 
 contrast — “a moral contrast,” he said, “which is 
 brought into unity for the mind in a harmless fashion.” 
 And Novalis defined it as “a mixture which comes to 
 nothing.” Jean Paul, as we remember, set out with 
 the assertion that this mixture is always of the sublime 
 with the trivial, but he described what he called “wit” 
 more generously as “the disguised priest who marries 
 all couples.” To this Theodor Vischer added that he 
 prefers to marry those whose relations do not approve 
 of the match. For to Vischer the idea of contrast was 
 not enough; there must be a contradiction. The two 
 members must actively antagonize, and yet ultimately 
 assimilate each other, resolving their differences, Hegel- 
 wise, in the formation of a third which comprises them 
 both. And this contradiction, fully comprehended, is 
 nothing less than “a contradiction of self-consciousness 
 with itself.” For when we laugh at the errors of others, 
 said Vischer — borrowing again the ideas of Jean Paul 
 — it is only because we lend or impute to them our 
 own insight, and thus they appear as “conscious of 
 their error and yet at the same moment erring, or as 
 conscious and unconscious at the same time.” 
 
216 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 Hegel himself, as we have seen, was wiser than his 
 disciples, for he did not pretend that all laughable 
 things contain a contrast — but he too seemed to be 
 aware that something of objective importance is at 
 times implied by the apparently subjective caprice of 
 the joker. Schopenhauer also perceived the doubleness 
 of the more excellent kinds of jokes, and called them 
 “ humor’ ’ in opposition to the other forms of the comic. 
 In humor, he said, there is a “ concealed seriousness.’’ 
 And even Lipps after frequently asserting that the 
 small and ridiculous side of the comic contrast is “a 
 relative nothing,” was constrained to add that in the 
 best kinds of the comic, which he too called “ humor,” 
 this relative nothing turns out to be something after all. 
 
 It appears, according to Lipps, that when we are 
 prepared for a sublime thing and encounter a little 
 one, not all of our energy runs off in laughter, but a 
 "psychic damming” occurs, which leaves this energy 
 all the more ready to invest with value a really sublime 
 thing, supposing that one turns up. And we are 
 moved, too, by the presence of this energy to look back 
 over the matter, and see if after all there is not some 
 truth in the pretense of sublimity that has been of- 
 fered. And supposing we find that there is, then how 
 much more enjoyable and lovable is that sublimity 
 than if our energy had not just been dammed up for 
 the purpose of appreciating it ! 
 
 “ The mission of humor is to make the sublime appear lovable, 
 while on the other hand its mission is to seek out the sublime 
 in the concealed, in narrowness and oppression, in the ill-con- 
 
CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 217 
 
 sidered and disdained, in every kind of smallness and lowli- 
 ness. . . . Sublimity in the comic defines the essence of humor.” 
 
 With this idea of “ psychic damming” Lipps is still 
 trying to answer the question that troubled the author 
 of the “Traite du ris” — the question why the mixture 
 of a negative with a positive should increase the value 
 of the positive. And this same question has troubled 
 every one of those Germans, both metaphysicians and 
 scientists, who have earnestly attempted to explain the 
 comic as a conflicting mixture of two elements. 
 
 Solger tried to solve it by declaring that the comic 
 conflict, which for him is one between “reality and the 
 idea,” has a kind of “restfulness” in the perception 
 that the Idea is everywhere present, and so “even in 
 our temporal being we live ever in the beautiful.” 
 Another sesthetician, August Wilhelm Bohtz, declared 
 that the artist enters into this conflict in order by means 
 of the negation to ennoble and give body to his affirma- 
 tive ideal, which else w T ere a “mere empty abstrac- 
 tion.” Carriere confessed that the negation would 
 shock and bewilder us if it persisted, but explained 
 our liking to have it arise and then give way to an 
 affirmation, by saying that the experience “cheers us 
 with the assurance that only the Good, the Beautiful 
 and True are also the Enduring and the Real.” Lotze, 
 as we have seen, acknowledged that the “Idea” at 
 which a joke arrives is not the same one it was looking 
 for — there is both failure and success — and he explained 
 our liking this combination better than a mere success. 
 
218 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 by saying that it proves the world to be a reasonable 
 harmony. 
 
 “Only in this happy contemplation of the indestructibility of 
 the universal for-each-other-ness of things can I find the charm 
 of the absolute comic.” 
 
 Julius Bahnsen took an opposite view of the univer- 
 sal for-each-other-ness. A tragic self-contradiction, he 
 declared, in the ultimate and only law of life, but humor 
 lifts up this contradiction into an intellectual sphere, 
 where it can be contemplated with aesthetic freedom 
 and so enjoyed in spite of itself. A freeing of the soul 
 from interest in either side of the contrast, according 
 to his view, is what gives this contrast a value greater 
 than that of either of its members. 
 
 In all these various ways the philosophers of the con- 
 flict-mixture theory have tried to extricate themselves 
 from the difficulty of finding too much joy on their 
 hands in a joke. And we might sum them all up by 
 saying that each one attributed this joy to the enthusi- 
 asm of mankind for the proof of his particular philos- 
 ophy. 
 
 The scientists who have endeavored to explain hu- 
 mor as a conflicting mixture have found themselves in 
 the same difficulty, and they have not had the same 
 success in getting out of it. The most elaborate of 
 them is Doctor Ewald Hecker, who is generally consid- 
 ered the inventor of the idea that comic feeling consists 
 of “ a rapid oscillation back and forth between pleasure 
 and pain.” We can hardly deny the full credit for 
 
CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 219 
 
 this invention to the French doctor, but we must con- 
 fess that Hecker made some improvements upon 
 Joubert’s physiology. Hecker’s contemporaries had 
 proven with experiments upon animals that a stimulus 
 of the peripheral nerve-endings produces, through the 
 action of the sympathetic nervous system, a contrac- 
 tion of the blood-vessels and consequent lowering of 
 blood-pressure throughout the body. He observed in 
 men when they are tickled a dilation of the pupils of 
 the eyes, which also, he said, indicates a stimulation of 
 the sympathetic nerves. And from these two facts he 
 inferred that a lowering of the blood-pressure in the 
 brain is what innervates the muscles of the diaphragm 
 which cause laughter, and that the function of laughter 
 in tickling is to compensate for that dangerous brain- 
 condition by narrowing the thoracic cavity, submitting 
 the heart and lungs and greater blood-vessels to a 
 strong pressure, and so increasing the force of the cir- 
 culation. 
 
 Being satisfied that this was the true explanation of 
 tickling, Hecker turned to the problem of the comic. 
 And he defined the comic as the simultaneous stimula- 
 tion from one source, of two feeling-qualities, pleasure 
 and pain, of approximately equal strength. There re- 
 sults from their equality of strength an oscillation of 
 the attention back and forth between these two feelings, 
 and that oscillation has the character of an “inter- 
 mittent joyful surprise.” A single joyful surprise, 
 Hecker declares, causes us to turn pale for a moment, 
 not only in our faces, but all over our bodies, and this 
 
220 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 indicates a stimulation of the sympathetic nerves simi- 
 lar to that which is caused by a peripheral contact. 
 An intermittent joyful surprise would naturally there- 
 fore cause an intermittent stimulation of the sympa- 
 thetic nerves, and thus set in motion the same adjustive 
 apparatus that is set in motion by tickling. 
 
 All of Hecker’s admirable physiology rather goes to 
 pieces when we remember that tickling is a very pe- 
 culiar form of peripheral stimulation, and that laughter 
 follows it only in certain moods and conditions. But 
 his psychology remains significant — and particularly 
 the skilful manner in which he passes from the idea of a 
 conflict between two incombinable feelings “of equal 
 strength,” one pleasant and the other unpleasant, to the 
 idea of an intermittent pleasure: He puts his reliance 
 here upon the analogy between this conflict of feelings 
 and our way of perceiving a variation between light 
 and dark. 
 
 “ In that rapid alternation of fields of vision which we call a 
 Glanz,” he says, “the clear light becomes to a certain extent 
 more strongly emphasized, and in exactly the same way in the 
 rapid alternation of feelings which forms the comic, the pleasant 
 feelings prove mainly effective, and we can for the purpose of 
 examining the physiological effect of the comic, so far ignore 
 the unpleasant feeling — which must never rise to the point of 
 psychic pain — that we may regard the comic as an intermittent, 
 rhythmically interrupted, joyful excitation of feeling.” 
 
 That this is a frail analogy upon which to build so 
 elaborate a doctrine as Hecker’s physiology of laughter 
 is obvious enough. Light is an effective stimulus, and 
 
CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 221 
 
 dark is rather the absence of it, but the equal strength of 
 the two feeling-qualities in the comic — preventing either 
 one of them from gaining the mastery — had been the 
 essence of Hecker’s assumption. He is in exactly the 
 same difficulty, therefore, with Doctor Joubert, and 
 with every other scientist or philosopher who has ever 
 attempted to define humor as a conflict-mixture. His 
 definition rules out that very surplus of pleasure which 
 it is supposed to explain. 
 
 In spite of this too evident failing, however, Hecker’s 
 general account of humor has held its own in German 
 psychology. It determined the opinions both of Krae- 
 pelin and of Wundt. And I believe the reason for this 
 is that Hecker did come nearer than any other psy- 
 chologist to formulating a true definition of the point 
 of a joke. “The simultaneousness of the birth of the 
 two feelings,” he said, “ constitutes the so-called point, 
 without which the comic effect even of a joke or an 
 anecdote is lost.” 
 
 Kraepelin did not substantially improve upon Heck- 
 er’s psychology of the comic, but only attempted again 
 to locate the source of this passion in the brain. It is 
 always an “unexpected intellectual contrast,” accord- 
 ing to him, which gives rise to this conflict of feelings, 
 “in which finally one’s pleasure over the object in 
 question gains a greater influence upon his mood 
 than his displeasure arising from the same source.” 
 And Wundt seems to have followed Kraepelin in this 
 judgment. In the fourth edition of his “Grundziige 
 der Physiologischen Psychologie,” he inserted the fol- 
 
/ 
 
 222 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 lowing statement, which may be regarded as the official 
 deliverance of German psychology upon the subject of 
 humor: 
 
 “ In the comic the separate ideas which enter into a totality of 
 perception or of thought are partly harmonious and partly 
 contradictory either to each other or to the manner in which 
 they are united. Thus arises an oscillation of feelings, in which, 
 however, the positive side, the pleasure, not only prevails, but 
 gains the mastery in a particularly strong way, because it is 
 like all feelings elevated through the immediate contrast.” 
 
 With all respect to the official psychology, we may 
 dismiss this “oscillation of feelings” as an interesting 
 myth. But the fact remains — and it seems to have 
 been the special German contribution to insist upon 
 it — that in the adult and artistic forms of humor an 
 apparent combination of a source of pain with a source 
 of pleasure produces a more pleasant feeling than 
 would arise from the pleasure-source alone. Obviously 
 it is no explanation of this, simply to assert that the 
 pleasure “ prevails,” and then becomes increased through 
 its contrast with the pain. For in order to make it 
 plausible that the one does not merely crowd the other 
 out of consciousness, it is necessary to assume a certain 
 equilibrium between them, and granted such an equi- 
 librium, there is nothing in any scientific conception of 
 these affections to explain why the pleasure and not the 
 pain should be elevated through contrast. We find 
 then, in this ultimate dictum of the nineteenth-cen- 
 tury psychology, the same unanswered question that 
 troubled Doctor Joubert in the days before Bacon, the 
 
CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 223 
 
 same question, indeed, that Plato first failed to answer: 
 Why does an apparent combination of a pain-source 
 with a source of pleasure produce a peculiar pleasure? 
 It can be answered by observing that the apparent 
 pain-source alone, when our attitude is playful, is in 
 reality the source of an emotional interest that is 
 pleasant, being greeted with a tendency to laughter by 
 an elementary instinct which our language has already 
 discerned and described as the sense of humor. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 HUMOR AS INSTINCT 
 
 A form of knowledge that has developed all too 
 quietly in this modern world, considering its vivid im- 
 portance, is the science of human behavior resting upon 
 the idea of hereditary instincts. I cannot explain all 
 that is implied in my theory of humor without some 
 recollection of the outlines of that science. Just as our 
 understanding of chemistry was set forward into a new 
 era by the discovery that the material world is made 
 out of a limited number of elements, and by the gradual 
 identification of these elements, so our understanding 
 of morals, or education, has been set forward by the 
 discovery and identification of those primary instincts 
 out of which all human motives and emotions are 
 compounded. It was Robert Boyle who conceived 
 the idea of irreducible elements in matter, and it was 
 his contemporary, Malebranche, who made the first 
 significant attempt to isolate and define certain “ in- 
 clinations or natural motions of the mind.” The 
 speculations of Malebranche were not decisive, be- 
 cause, like Boyle, he lacked any definite standards by 
 which to distinguish elements from their compounds. 
 But his guesses were not substantially improved upon 
 until our own time, when William McDougall, in his 
 
 224 
 
HUMOR AS INSTINCT 
 
 225 
 
 “Social Psychology,” did propose tests by which in- 
 stincts that are innate and universal can be distin- 
 guished from the more complex and fragile conditions 
 of feeling and impulse which develop in the passage of 
 a life. 
 
 McDougall defined an instinct, in accordance with 
 the general scientific usage, as “ An inherited or innate 
 psycho-physical disposition which determines its pos- 
 sessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of 
 a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement 
 of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, 
 and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or, 
 at least, to experience an impulse to such action.” He 
 proposed to identify these instincts, first, by the 
 unique and irreducible quality of the emotional excite- 
 ment; second, by their occurrence not only in man 
 but also in the higher animals; and third, by their 
 occasional morbid exaggeration in human beings who 
 seem otherwise perfectly sane and healthy — for it would 
 seem, he said, “that each instinctive disposition, being 
 a relatively independent functional unit in the constitu- 
 tion of the mind, is capable of morbid hypertrophy or 
 of becoming abnormally excitable, independently of the 
 rest of the mental dispositions and functions.” 
 
 The principal instincts whose existence McDougall 
 believed he had ascertained in this manner, and the 
 corresponding primary emotions so far as these have 
 been identified with a name, were these: 
 
 1. Flight fear. 
 
 2. Repulsion disgust. 
 
226 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 3. Curiosity wonder. 
 
 4. Pugnacity anger. 
 
 5. Self-abasement subjection. 
 
 6. Self-display elation. 
 
 7. Parental instinct tender emotion. 
 
 8. Sexual instinct. 
 
 9. Gregariousness. 
 
 10. Acquisition. 
 
 11. Construction. 
 
 These specific instincts, supplemented by certain 
 “general innate tendencies” — sympathy, suggestibility, 
 imitation, play, rivalry — and by the law of habit, are 
 supposed to comprise all the elements that enter into 
 the complex of human motivation. They supply the 
 material, according to McDougall, for explaining our 
 conduct and our emotions. His lists have been 
 altered, of course, and his account of the causes of 
 action complicated somewhat by the contributions of 
 other psychologists. 1 But it will hardly be denied 
 that there is a basic distinction such as he described 
 between the emotion of fear, for instance, and that of 
 reproach, which he says arises from a combination of 
 anger with tender emotion, or scorn which seems to be 
 almost an accurate name for disgusted anger. 
 
 The position that I have taken in this book is that 
 humor is an element. The sense of humor is a primary 
 instinct of our nature, functioning originally only in 
 the state of play, and related not remotely in its devel- 
 
 1 As an example of the present complication of these theories, 
 and to suggest the free play of opinion about them, I give the 
 
HUMOR AS INSTINCT 227 
 
 opment to that gregarious instinct of which smiles and 
 smiling laughter appear to be an inherent part. 
 
 That humorous laughter belongs among the heredi- 
 tary instincts is indicated by the fact that it appears 
 so early and so spontaneously. We never have to 
 teach children when to laugh; we have to teach them 
 when not to laugh. And if some little argument is 
 required to show them the superiority of clever jokes 
 over crude humor, that is because their gift of laughter 
 is lustier than ours, and they are not so agile in per- 
 ception and the apprehension of meanings. Only an 
 instinctively humorous creature could, without warn- 
 
 following table from a recent excellent volume by James Drever, 
 called “Instinct in Man”: 
 
 Innate Tendencies 
 
 “Appetite” Tendencies “Instinct” Tendencies 
 
 General Specific 
 
 
 
 General 
 
 (Seeking of Pleasure (Hunger 
 
 
 
 (Play 
 
 Avoidance of Pain) Thirst 
 
 
 
 Experimentation 
 
 Sleep 
 
 
 
 Imitation 
 
 Sex 
 
 
 
 Sympathy 
 
 Nausea) 
 
 
 
 Suggestibility) 
 
 
 Specific 
 
 1 
 
 
 i 
 
 “Pure” 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 “Emotional” 
 
 (Probably numerous though difficult to 
 
 
 (Fear 
 
 distinguish from reflexes and 
 
 may 
 
 
 Anger 
 
 perhaps be classified as: 
 
 
 
 Hunting 
 
 Reactions of Adjustment and At- 
 
 
 Acquisitive 
 
 tention 
 
 
 
 Curiosity 
 
 Reactions of Prehension 
 
 
 
 Gregarious 
 
 Reactions of Locomotion 
 
 
 
 Courtship 
 
 Reactions of Vocalization) 
 
 
 
 Self-display 
 
 Self-abasement 
 
 
 
 
 Parental) 
 
228 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 ing or instruction, enjoy seeing a trusted countenance 
 turn suddenly into a grinning ape or gargoyle, and 
 laugh instead of crying out in pain. And yet this 
 humor of the “ comic masque/’ which Aristotle cited 
 as the type of mature comedy, is the first thing we rely 
 upon when a baby is by some relentless destiny com- 
 mitted to our care and entertainment. We rely upon 
 his having so keen a lust for the absurd and ludicrous 
 in play that we need only by laughing a little ourselves 
 to intimate that we are not to be taken seriously, and 
 then contrive any very negative programme of shocks 
 and disappointments — things which would clearly irri- 
 tate if they did not in their own nature satisfy the in- 
 tense interest he gives them. 
 
 “As children only do we laugh,” said Balzac, “and 
 w r hen we travel onward laughter sinks dowm and dies 
 out like the light of the oil-lit lamp.” It sinks down 
 and dies out, and we have to revive it then, and make 
 it flare up with little extra breaths of hidden meaning, 
 and little victories and hostilities and exposures of the 
 flesh, that give point to our droll stories. And if we are 
 proud of these momentary accomplishments, we can 
 hardly look back with scorn upon the days wdien they 
 were unnecessary. We can, at most, permit ourselves 
 to believe that if age inhibits the free flow of this play- 
 instinct, that inhibition increases our inw 7 ard feeling 
 of it, and the positive thing toward which w T e do re- 
 lease our laughter is a little more suffused w r ith humor- 
 ous emotion. 
 
 A further indication that humorous laughter be- 
 
HUMOR AS INSTINCT 
 
 229 
 
 longs among the instinctive emotions of mankind is 
 the fact that it can be communicated from one to an- 
 other through sympathy. Primitive and fundamental 
 sympathy is an adjustment of our nervous systems by 
 virtue of which we experience an impulse and emotion, 
 not only upon perceiving its appropriate object, but 
 also upon perceiving its characteristic expression and 
 activity in others of our kind. Thus we experience 
 fear when we see people frightened, tender emotion 
 when we see them tender. It seems that every one of 
 the primary instincts is so capable of sympathetic in- 
 duction. And there is no one of them, unless it be 
 the very condition of sociability itself, which surpasses 
 the sense of humor in this characteristic. I have been 
 very careful to observe that when I hear or see a group 
 of people laughing heartily at some funny tale or in- 
 cident, although I have not heard or seen the thing at 
 which they laugh, my own response is not only laugh- 
 ter but humorous emotion. And this fact completely 
 refutes the theory of Lipps and Spencer, that humorous 
 laughter is a mechanical result of the passage of atten- 
 tion over a defined series of objects or ideas. It re- 
 futes also the theory that such laughter is a mere sign 
 of release, for no matter what one’s own condition 
 when he notices that others are enjoying a joke — 
 whether he is tense with enterprise or some attempt at 
 propriety, or whether he is relaxed and perhaps half 
 asleep in a railroad berth — that subtle and incompara- 
 ble enjoyment steals through him just the same. 
 Humorous laughter is infectious — and that alone is 
 
230 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 sufficient to establish it among the other instinctive 
 adjustments of mankind to his environment. 
 
 And this infection can be conveyed, not only by the 
 process properly called sympathy, but also by the al- 
 lied process of suggestion. Humor depends, indeed, 
 more than any other quality strived after in art or con- 
 versation, upon the existence of a favorable atmosphere. 
 The books which tickled us out of our senses when 
 we thought they were funny, taste as flat as lime- 
 water when somebody points out that they are not. 
 And if we are competently assured that a great comical 
 entertainment is in progress, it matters little what an- 
 tique fribble and monkey-shine is gone through with. 
 No reputation is more secure, once it is established, 
 than that of the national humorist or comedian. The 
 mere report that one of these great men will appear, 
 sets in action the machinery for enjoying his jokes, 
 however poor they may be. Our sense of humor is 
 subject to stampede — and that too places it in the same 
 general class with fear and anger. 
 
 That it stands parallel with these instincts as a 
 primary element in our emotional life is proven in the 
 first place by the perfect uniqueness of the humorous 
 emotion. None of the other instincts, not even these 
 two, have a feeling-quality that is less possible to 
 analyze, or reduce through examination, into more 
 simple components. We remember how Lipps refuted 
 the theories of his predecessors with the statement that 
 “The feeling of the comic is a feeling of the comic and 
 nothing else,” and how it seemed possible to refute the 
 
HUMOR AS INSTINCT 
 
 231 
 
 theory of Lipps with the same statement. This would 
 not have been possible if the feeling we were discussing 
 had been something like reproach, or gratitude, or rever- 
 ence. And the importance of Lipps’s statement is that 
 it separates the comic from such feelings, and brings it 
 successfully past the first of McDougall’s three tests 
 of the elementary-instinctive. 
 
 As to his second test — the occurrence of the same in- 
 stinct in the higher animals — we have here only a very 
 ancient doubt. The scholastic and literary opinion of 
 mankind has been that laughter, and more especially 
 humorous laughter, is a distinguishing attribute of men 
 and gods. Aristotle, Rabelais, Voltaire, Balzac, Bacon, 
 Milton, Hazlitt, Lamennais, Schopenhauer, Bergson — 
 the list is long of those distinguished humans who have 
 flattered their species with this attribution. But the 
 simple and childlike judgment of the race is entirely 
 upon the other side. Professor G. Stanley Hall found 
 among all the seven hundred responses to his ques- 
 tionnaire about laughter, both from adults and chil- 
 dren, “the almost unanimous opinion that animals 
 laugh.” And it happens that this popular opinion has 
 received more support from trained scientific observers 
 than the classic tradition. Darwin in “The Descent 
 of Man” said that “Dogs show what may be fairly 
 called a sense of humor, as distinct from mere play,” 
 and his statement was supported and illustrated by 
 G. J. Romanes. Leon Dumont said that “In playing 
 with a young dog, when we make the gesture of seizing 
 him by one ear and really seize him by the other, we 
 
232 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 are persuaded that we awaken in his consciousness the 
 same phenomena which in man express themselves by 
 laughter.” James Sully is convinced that both dogs 
 and certain kinds of monkeys have the germ of our 
 sense of the ludicrous, although he does not clearly 
 distinguish this from the more general sense of fun. 
 And C. Lloyd Morgan, in his “ Animal Life and Intelli- 
 gence,” quotes both Darwin and Romanes, and adds 
 a further example from his own observations of 
 the apparent humor of dogs, although he is too cau- 
 tious to assert that dogs actually experience such a 
 feeling. 
 
 His caution is but the symptom of a general change 
 of temper in comparative psychology. It is no longer 
 the fashion to imagine what animals have in their con- 
 sciousness; we try to content ourselves with describing 
 how they behave. Darwin assures us that monkeys 
 make a noise and a motion somewhat like human 
 laughter when they are tickled, and any one who plays 
 with children and with dogs can observe that many of 
 the simple tricks and trippings which give comic 
 amusement to children are welcomed by dogs, and 
 excite them so that instead of going away they dance 
 about as though asking for more of the same experi- 
 ence. We can say at least that when a playing dog 
 “ gets the worst of it,” he “ takes it in good part.” And 
 therefore if our account of the humorous instinct is 
 correct, we can assert that its rudiments do exist in 
 dogs — as no doubt in a few other complex and playful 
 animals. But we cannot very well employ that asser- 
 
HUMOR AS INSTINCT 233 
 
 tion in proof that our account is correct. We can only 
 observe that there is no evidence here to oppose it. 
 
 It happens, however, that we can well dispense with 
 this particular point of proof. For our most formida- 
 ble opponents are those who would explain humor as a 
 manifestation of some universal property of neural and 
 cerebral activity — the state of release, of overflow, of 
 economy — and for the confirmation of their theories 
 it is essential that all fairly advanced animals should 
 make the same or a similar manifestation. But for 
 us it is in a peculiar way unessential, because if the 
 sense of humor is instinctive, and its biological value 
 and history such as we have said, this instinct would 
 surely be one of the latest to evolve. It would have no 
 value except as other instincts began to be inadequate, 
 and life became so various and experimental as to de- 
 mand a long period of practice in play. It would be 
 an equipment only of complex, alert, and delicate or- 
 ganisms, and of these perhaps only in their infancy. It 
 would be so swift and rudimentary a reaction that we 
 could hardly recognize its operation. The mild doubt 
 which exists about this question, therefore, while re- 
 futing our principal opponents, leaves us the more sure, 
 not only that humor is instinctive, but that it is such 
 an instinct as we have declared it to be. 
 
 The third test of the elementary-instinctive which 
 McDougall proposed — its occurrence in exaggerated 
 form in some morbid condition not involving a general 
 exaggeration of nervous functions — is met by the sense 
 of humor as perfectly, I think, as by any of the in- 
 
234 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 stincts. The spasm of mad laughter is so frequent a 
 form of morbid convulsion that to the popular mind this 
 is the meaning of the word hysteria. And in these con- 
 vulsions the laughter, although sometimes preceding or 
 following or merely accompanying a more general 
 muscular spasm, is frequently the sole essence of the 
 attack. In an article composed as though to prove 
 this very point, Doctor Jose Ingegnieros classifies the 
 forms of the “rire hysterique” in such a way as to make 
 this clear, and to make clear also that it is not only the 
 act of laughter, but the humorous laugh, which is 
 subject to this morbid intensification. He has him- 
 self observed a case in which a mood of comedy con- 
 tinued during the waking hours for twenty days, and 
 he recalls the example described by Binet and Ray- 
 mond of a woman who suffered for more than four 
 months from a perpetual laugh. “Everything around 
 her seemed to her ridiculous.” It is well known that 
 these seizures of comicality can be induced in a healthy 
 person by administering about a fifth of a grain of the 
 extract of hashish or Indian hemp. Gautier, in “Le 
 Club des Hachischins,” has described for the imagina- 
 tion the effect of this essence of comedy circulating in 
 the blood-vessels through the brain. It was described 
 in a more scientific way, but also upon the basis of 
 personal experience, by Doctor Binet-Sangle. We do 
 not need pathology or poison, however, to make us 
 see the humorous reaction carried to a point where it 
 must be considered an “ independent functional unit,” 
 for we can all remember being seized with fits of ecstati- 
 
HUMOR AS INSTINCT 
 
 235 
 
 cally comic laughter, not unlike the entranced par- 
 oxysms of love and anger. They carried us out of 
 reality, out of ourselves and our sureness of ourselves. 
 They were mad, but they were not morbid. The mere 
 recollection of the bliss of these mad moments ought 
 to convince us that as long as the other besieging pas- 
 sions are explained upon the theory of hereditary in- 
 stinct, humorous laughter will be so explained by those 
 who properly esteem it. 
 
 And so here again it seems to be an inadequate ap- 
 praisement of the subject-matter which has set the 
 philosophers and pundits of abstract human nature off 
 the track of the true explanation of laughter. They 
 have failed to realize, not only how continual laughter 
 is, but how intense the humorous passion. And if this 
 is due in some cases to a slenderness of that passion 
 in their own constitutions, then their very theories of 
 laughter may be offered in evidence of its functional 
 independence. For no doubt a marked depression of 
 any emotional function, without the general poverty of 
 feeling, offers as good proof of the primary among our 
 instincts as the more startling testimony of the mad- 
 house. And whatever may be true of these philoso- 
 phers, there are at least many estimable and warm, 
 and even merry-hearted, acquaintances of ours who 
 “have no sense of humor,” just as there are others 
 who “cannot get mad,” and even a few who “do not 
 know what it means to be afraid.” And whenever we 
 describe these acquaintances as lacking in that sense, we 
 put in doubt the Mechanical Theory, and the Theory 
 
236 
 
 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 of Laughter as Liberty, and Freud’s Theory. And 
 since we most often so describe the ones who are well 
 possessed of pride and self-estimation and glory, both 
 sudden and gradual, we put in doubt also the Derision 
 Theory. We speak of the sense of humor as a distinct 
 hereditary emotional endowment, and that is what an 
 instinct is. 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 3 
 
 “A pert challenge”: The quotation is from Henri Bergson’s 
 “ Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” translated 
 by Brereton and Rothwell, p. 1. 
 
 Page 5 
 
 “So delicate an employment of the features”: Paolo Mante- 
 gazza in his “Physiognomy and Expression,” chap. IX, gives a 
 “synoptical table of the expression of pleasure,” containing 
 thirty-nine elements. The laugh itself was described by Charles 
 Darwin in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani- 
 mals,” and with still greater detail by C. Vanlair in an article on 
 “La physiologie du rire” in the Bulletin de la Classe des Sciences 
 of the Academie Roy ale de Belgique , 1903, no. 12, p. 1295. Van- 
 lair calls it “The effective act of laughter.” 
 
 “The two cannot be distinguished”: This is the opinion of 
 such divergent observers as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud 
 (see pp. 207 and 199 of this book), of W. Preyer (see note to p. 7), 
 and of Vanlair and Mantegazza (see note above) . Leon Dumont, 
 Robert de Lamennais, and L. Dugas (see notes to pp. 157, 147, 
 and 133) are among those who have taken the opposite view, al- 
 though their own native tongue, like many others, might have 
 taught them that the smile is a “sub-laugh” — sourire , sorridere , 
 subridere , lacheln , sonreir. The Hindu philosophers distinguished 
 six different grades in the expression of mirth, beginning with 
 the smile and ending with the convulsive laugh. (See references 
 in note to p. 163.) 
 
 “ Charles Fourier never smiled”: See “Albert Brisbane, A 
 Mental Biography,” by R. Brisbane. 
 
 “Laugh with the lips”: a Greek phrase for insincere laughter, 
 239 
 
240 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 7 
 
 “Sardonic”: This derivation was suggested by Salomon 
 Reinach (see note to p. 9), after rejecting the two classic tradi- 
 tions — that sardonic laughter was named after a Sardinian herb 
 which “screwed up the face of the eater,” and that it was named 
 after the people of Sardis who laughed when they sacrificed their 
 babies to the gods. 
 
 “The fortieth day”: It was Aristotle, I believe, who said that 
 babies smile on the fortieth day, and to judge by their modern 
 biographers, that is a fair statement of the average. Darwin’s 
 two sons smiled on the forty-fifth day; Mantegazza’s five chil- 
 dren between the fortieth and sixtieth day; Preyer’s child on the 
 twenty-sixth day, and the heroine of Miss Shinn’s “Biography 
 of a Baby” was “jolly” in the second month. Zoroaster is sup- 
 posed to have been born laughing — a more convincing sign of 
 divinity, perhaps, than the immaculate conception. 
 
 “Smile of dawning welcome”: The reader will understand that 
 I do not mean to attribute to the consciousness of the baby the 
 values that this smile has for his parents. All that we can say 
 about the baby is that human faces interest him peculiarly, and 
 cause him to smile oftener than other objects, and that the smile 
 he directs toward them is very early distinguishable from the 
 mere expression of cheerful interest. It soon becomes a definite 
 and conscious act. To me the facts about babies recorded by 
 W. Preyer and Miss Shinn and James Sully and others, although 
 not so interpreted by them, seem to accord with the assumption 
 that the smile directed toward a friendly countenance is not 
 merely imitative nor due to an association of bodily comforts 
 with this apparition, but has the character of an instinctive re- 
 sponse. The parents were babies once, and if the baby’s smile 
 is so rich with emotional meaning for them, that is some indi- 
 cation of its intrinsic nature. 
 
 A good many different acts of laughter have been distinguished 
 by various observers — a laugh of sexual and hostile glee (see p. 
 42), a laugh caused by chilliness, by fear (the “laughter of the 
 damned”), hysterical laughter, maniac laughter, the mimic re- 
 flex laughter of idiots, a laughter caused by chemical exhilarants, 
 and even a peculiar laugh at the moment of deliverance from 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 241 
 
 danger (Harold Hoff ding — see note to p. 141, and Salomon 
 Reinach — see note to p. 9); and in addition to these, of course, 
 the laughter that is merely a general expression of pleasure. 
 
 Aside from observation, my reasons for regarding an act of so- 
 cial welcome as the “original” laugh, are, first, that it has a very 
 great biological importance, and, second, that it explains the 
 laughter which is an “expression of pleasure” in a way similar 
 to that in which other expressions have been explained. (See 
 chap. IX of Part II.) The reader should understand, however, 
 that my opinion here is not supported by any authority, and it 
 is not vital to my explanation of humor. For that, he need only 
 recognize that laughter has somehow become, in a very general 
 sense, “an expression of joy or pleasure.” And upon this all 
 modern observers are agreed. 
 
 See W. Preyer, “Die Seele des Kindes,” pp. 193-7; also the 
 translations, “Mental Development in the Child” and “The 
 Mind of the Child”; James Sully, “Essay on Laughter,” chap. 
 VI, pp. 164-170; Millicent W. Shinn, “The Biography of a 
 Baby” and “Notes on the Development of a Child”; G. Stanley 
 Hall (note to p. 132) and Paolo Mantegazza (note to p. 5). 
 
 Page 9 
 
 The quotation is from Edmund Spenser. 
 
 The fact about ritual laughter, with others equally interest- 
 ing, is to be found in an article by Salomon Reinach called “Le 
 rire rituel” in the Revue de L’Universite de Bruxelles for May, 
 
 1911. 
 
 Page 12 
 
 As I have not entirely respected any of the established “the- 
 ories of play,” I refer the reader to the following books and 
 articles where he can find out about them : “The Play of Animals,” 
 by Karl Groos, translated by J. Mark Baldwin, and “The Play 
 of Man,” by the same author, translated by Elizabeth L. Bald- 
 win, will give him a fmll account of the Practice Theory. This 
 theory is interestingly criticised by H. M. Stanley in an article 
 called “Professor Groos and Theories of Play” in the Psychologi- 
 cal Review , vol. 6, pp. 86-92. 
 
 The so-called Recapitulation Theory he will find suggested by 
 
242 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 G. Stanley Hall in his “ Adolescence,” vol. I, chap. Ill, p. 160, 
 and vol. II, chap. XII. 
 
 The theory of play as an overflow of superabundant nervous 
 energy, originated by the poet Schiller and by Herbert Spencer, 
 is developed in a modern way by H. A. Carr in an article on 
 “The Survival Values of Play” in the Investigations of the De- 
 partment of Psychology and Education of the University of Colo- 
 rado, vol. 1, no. 2, November, 1902. These theories are in turn 
 criticised by G. T. W. Patrick in an article on “The Psychology 
 of Play” in the Pedagogical Seminary, vol. XXI, no. 3. Patrick 
 says that “play is just the name we give to the child’s activities,” 
 and this view is supported by Lilia Estelle Appleton in her “Com- 
 parative Study of the Play Activities of Adult Savages and Civ- 
 ilized Children.” She thinks that an impulse to act and an 
 organism at a certain stage of development is all that is needed 
 to explain play. From which we may infer that professional 
 psychologists are approaching the wisdom of Mark Twain, whose 
 second chapter of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” deserves a 
 place among the classics of this discussion. “If Tom had been 
 a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book,” says 
 Mark Twain, “he would now have comprehended that work 
 consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play con- 
 sists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” 
 
 W. Preyer, in his famous book on “The Mind of the Child,” 
 said that a satisfactory theory of play is wanting, and perhaps 
 the statement is still true. But it seems to me that the descrip- 
 tion of play in McDougall’s “Social Psychology” is at least the 
 proper point of departure in the search for such a theory. It is 
 significant that in his first book, “The Play of Animals,” Karl 
 Groos described play as instinctive, and J. Mark Baldwin stated 
 in the translator’s introduction that “Play is a veritable in- 
 stinct.” As instincts are supposed, however, to be responses to 
 some specific objects or situations, this view was a good deal 
 criticised, and in his second book, “The Play of Man,” Groos 
 adopted a more vague and non-committal attitude that is even 
 less satisfactory. McDougall found a way between these two 
 errors with his conception of “General Innate Tendencies,” and 
 his statement that we must recognize “some special differentia- 
 tion of the instincts which find expression in playful activity.” 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 243 
 
 It is from the vantage-ground of this conception that I have been 
 able to describe play as I have. 
 
 Page 13 
 
 “We do not know much in a scientific way”: See note to p. 
 58, or read the chapter on “Pleasure and Pain,” or “The Affec- 
 tions,” in any text-book of psychology. “The psychology of 
 feeling is still, in large measure, a psychology of personal opinion 
 and belief.” — E. B. Titchener, “A Text Book of Psychology,” 
 p. 226. An interesting recent opinion is that of Edward J. 
 Kempf in “The Autonomic Functions and the Personality.” 
 
 Page 14 
 
 “A different act”: Preyer tells us that he was able to dis- 
 tinguish in the next room the laughter of his child at tickling 
 from the laughter that was an expression of pleasure. (“Die 
 Seele des Kindes,” p. 197.) 
 
 Page 15 
 
 “A chronic habit of violent laughing”: Described by the 
 Danish psychologist Lange in his book on the Emotions, and 
 cited by L. Dugas in “La psychologie du rire.” 
 
 Page 16 
 
 Plato: “ Philebus.” 
 
 “A modern scientist”: G. Stanley Hall — see note to p. 132. 
 For other opinions upon this subject, see pp. 158-161 of this book. 
 
 Page 18 
 
 Rabelais: Prologue to book IV. My acquaintance with Ra- 
 belais is through the translation by Thomas Urquhart and Peter 
 Motteux, itself one of the great achievements of English litera- 
 
 ture * Page 23 
 
 “Sad documents”: “What is Man?” published anonymously 
 in 1906; “The Mysterious Stranger,” published after Mark 
 Twain’s death, and also the “Autobiography.” 
 
 Page 24 
 
 This description of the religious state of mind I first suggested 
 in an article on “The Religion of Patriotism” in The Masses for 
 July, 1917. 
 
244 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Lamennais and Johann Erdmann : See note to p. 147. In oppo- 
 sition to them we have the authority of the Right Reverend, the 
 Bishop of Tasmania, for the assertion that God laughs and en- 
 joys an occasional joke (“The Theology of Laughter,” Hibbert 
 Journal, vol. 9, p. 296). The Bishop sets us wondering whether 
 God enjoyed that one of Oliver Wendell Holmes about the 
 “Right Reverend Successors of Him who had not where to lay 
 his head.” 
 
 Page 35 
 
 Aristophanes: “The Frogs.” 
 
 For an example of the difference between scorn and ridicule 
 compare Tolstoy’s account of Wagner’s operas in the appendix 
 of his book “What is Art?” with that of Mark Twain in “A 
 Tramp Abroad,” chap. IX. 
 
 Page 39 
 
 “Uncle Toby”: Tristram Shandy, Book II, chap. VII. 
 
 Page 43 
 
 Aristophanes: “The Acharnians,” 644-5. Compare “The 
 Knights,” 510, and “The Satires of Horace,” book I, no. 1, 1. 24: 
 “What prevents our telling truth with a laugh?” 
 
 Page 45 
 
 Cicero : “ De Oratore.” 
 
 Page 50 
 
 Mark Twain: “A Tramp Abroad,” chap. XIII. 
 
 Page 53 
 
 “The Theory of the Leisure Class”: A book most inappro- 
 priately named, for it will tell any one in any class why he does 
 most of the futile things he does. 
 
 Page 54 
 
 Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy,” book I, chap. VII. 
 
 Page 55 
 
 Mr. Dooley: “On Making a Will.” 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 245 
 
 Page 56 
 
 Henry Fielding: “Tom Jones,” book I, chap. V. 
 
 Page 58 
 
 “A painful or unpleasant feeling may arise in us in two differ- 
 ent ways”: This fact is expressed a little more physiologically in 
 the lines I have italicized in this paragraph from Thorndyke’s 
 book on “The Original Nature of Man,” p. 128: “I believe that 
 the original tendencies of man to be satisfied and to be annoyed 
 — to welcome and reject — are described by these three laws of 
 readiness and unreadiness: (1) That when a conduction unit [a 
 given path, that is, in the brain and nervous system] is ready to 
 conduct, conduction by it is satisfying, nothing being done to 
 alter its action; (2) that for a conduction unit ready to conduct not 
 to conduct is annoying , and provokes whatever responses nature 
 provides in connection with that particular annoying lack ; (3) that 
 when a conduction unit unready for conduction is forced to conduct , 
 conduction by it is annoying. 1 1 
 
 That paragraph will indicate to the reader how little, and 
 how vaguely, the psychologists have succeeded in understanding 
 pain and pleasure, and the consequent limits of our own explana- 
 tion of humor. 
 
 Page 59 
 
 “The range of our enjoyment”: “It would be hard to find 
 any disaster so great that it has not been a source of genuine 
 mirth.” — G. Stanley Hall. (See note to p. 132.) 
 
 Page 61 
 
 “Absurd”: This word is very commonly used to describe 
 those poetically humorous perceptions which I call ludicrous , 
 and my restriction of its meaning here is arbitrary. 
 
 Page 64 
 
 “Repartee”: To prove that the “coming to nothing,” and not 
 the “sudden glory,” is what gives humor to these exchanges, we 
 need only remember that the same game can be played in the 
 reverse fashion, the original thesis being an assertion of playful 
 humility, and the victory going to him who demeans himself 
 the most. 
 
246 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 69 
 
 Addison: The Spectator (see note to p. 144). 
 
 Page 74 
 
 “Choice and comparison”: In my “Enjoyment of Poetry,” 
 chaps. Ill, IV, V, and VI, I have explained upon this basis the 
 psychology of poetic figures. What I have said there about 
 poetry underlies all that I say here about poetic humor. 
 
 Page 77 
 
 “Degradation”: This is James Sully’s expression in his “Essay 
 on Laughter.” 
 
 The incident of the angel — from the heaven scene in Charlie 
 Chaplin’s film, “The Kid” — is a better example of his humor 
 than his acting. The incident of the cow is from an earlier 
 film called “Sunnyside.” I hope that the “movie fan” who 
 reads this will not identify the change I have described with the 
 appearance of serious dramatic pathos in “The Bad.” It was 
 both a more gradual and a more unusual change than that. 
 
 Page 80 
 
 “A tortoise-shell cat”: This was Mark Twain’s description 
 of the picture. 
 
 Page 86 
 
 “Smile talk” is a literal translation of a Chinese word for 
 “joke.” 
 
 Page 93 
 
 “Peculiar Disaster”: 
 Catullus. 
 
 “Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.” — 
 Page 94 
 
 Rabelais: “Put me on my domino, for I am cold — besides I 
 want to die in it, for Beati qui in Domino Moriuntur.” 
 
 Heine : Speaking to a priest who urged him to make his peace 
 with God, he said: “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son metier.” 
 
 Page 97 
 
 Mark Twain : The story is told by his biographer, Albert Bige- 
 low Paine, and the speech published in the volume called “Mark 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 247 
 
 Twain’s Speeches.” Whoever wishes to know this man should 
 read Van Wyck Brooks’s admirable study, “The Ordeal of Mark 
 Twain.” 
 
 Page 98 
 
 Rabelais: Prologue to book I. 
 
 Page 102 
 
 The quotation is from Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV.” 
 
 Page 109 
 
 De Quincey: “Essay on Conversation.” 
 
 Page 114 
 
 Aristophanes: “The Frogs.” The lines in verse are from Gil- 
 bert Murray’s translation. The prose translation is my own. 
 
 Page 115 
 
 Cephisophon: see Dunster’s translation of “The Frogs.” Gil- 
 bert Murray says that Cephisophon was a kind of secretary to 
 Euripides. Benjamin Rogers says that he was a friend. J. H. 
 Frere says that he was an actor in the plays. 
 
 Page 117 
 
 Shakespeare: “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” 
 
 Page 119 
 
 “Sentimental Tommy”: by James M. Barrie, pp. 19 and 35. 
 
 Page 123 
 
 “Theories of Humor”: In this history I have not attempted 
 to rake up and make record of everything that has been written 
 about laughter or the comic, but only to give a true general 
 picture, and omit no particular idea that is of unique value or 
 interest. 
 
 When not otherwise described in the notes, the translations 
 are my own. 
 
 Plato: “Philebus,” Jowett’s translation. 46-50. Compare 
 “The Republic,” V, 452. 
 
 Page 124 
 
 Aristotle: “Poetics,” V, translated by S. H. Butcher. 
 
248 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 125 
 
 Plato: “Republic/’ III, 388; “Thesetetus,” 174. See also 
 “Cratylus,” 645. 
 
 Page 126 
 
 Rabelais: Prologue to book I. 
 
 Plato: “Symposium/’ 177. 
 
 Page 127 
 
 Plato: “Symposium,” 189. 
 
 Page 128 
 
 Aristotle: “Rhetoric,” book III, chap. XI. 
 
 Page 130 
 
 Cicero: “De Oratore,” book II, 54-71. Some of the transla- 
 tions from Cicero are my own, others from the book by W. 
 Guthrie. 
 
 Page 131 
 
 Quintilian: “Institutes of the Orator.” Translated by J. 
 Patsall, book VI, chap. III. 
 
 Page 132 
 
 Hume: “A Treatise of Human Nature.” 
 
 Jean Paul: See note to p. 169. 
 
 “The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing and the Comic”: by 
 G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, American J ournal of Psychology, 
 October, 1897. See also the remarks of H. M. Stanley in the 
 same journal for January, 1898. 
 
 Page 133 
 
 Ribot: “Psychology of the Emotions.” Translated in the 
 Contemporary Science Series, pp. 352-7. 
 
 L. Dugas: “Psychologie du rire,” 1902. 
 
 Croce: “L’Umorismo,” Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 
 I, no. 3. 
 
 Cazamian: “Pourquoi nous ne pouvons definir rhumour,” 
 Revue Germanique for 1906, 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 249 
 
 Page 136 
 
 Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Translated by Benjamin Rand in his 
 “Classical Psychologists/’ p. 127. 
 
 Page 137 
 
 The quotations are from “The Courtier/’ by Baldassare Cas- 
 tiglione, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, anno 1561. 
 The original book was completed in 1516. 
 
 Page 138 
 
 The statements about Tresseno, Maggi, and Robertelli are 
 made on the authority of J. E. Spingarn in his “History of 
 Literary Criticism in the Renaissance.” 
 
 Page 139 
 
 L. Joubert: “Traite du ris,” 1579. 
 
 Hobbes: “Leviathan,” part I, chap. VI. 
 
 Page 140 
 
 “Sudden glory”: Compare the phrase “Selbstgefiihl in statu 
 nascendi,” used by the German psychologist Heymans to ex- 
 press a similar idea, Zeitschrift fur Psychol, und Physiol, der 
 Sinnesorgane f XI, 31-43, and XX, 164-173. 
 
 De Lamennais: See note to p. 147. , 
 
 Page 141 
 
 Hobbes: “Human Nature,” part I, chap. IX, 13. 
 
 Descartes: “Passions de Fame,” III, 178. 
 
 A. Zeising: “iEsthetische Forschungen,” 1855. 
 
 Karl Groos: “Einleitung in die iEsthetik,” 1892, quoted 
 by Franz Jahn (see note to p. 218). “Die Spiele des Men- 
 schen,” 1899. 
 
 Harald Hoff ding, in his “Outlines of Psychology,” and also in 
 his book on “Den Store Humor,” translated into German under 
 the title “Humor als Lebensgefiihl,” combines the derision and 
 the disappointment theories in a manner similar to that of Groos 
 
 and Zeising. _ „ ^ 
 
 & Page 142 
 
 Th. Ziegler: “Das Gefuhl,” 1893, pp. 142-7. Kuno Fischer 
 had also emphasized the playfulness of the comic attitude, de- 
 
250 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 fining wit as “playful judgment ” in his essay “Ueber den 
 Witz,” 1889. 
 
 Stephan Schiitze: “Versuch Einer Theorie des Komischen,” 
 
 1817. 
 
 Page 143 
 
 Otto Schauer: “Ueber das Wesen der Komik,” Archiv fur die 
 Gesamte Psychologie, XVIII, 1910. 
 
 Lillien J. Martin: “Psychology of ^Esthetics — Experimental 
 Prospecting in the Field of the Comic,” American Journal of 
 Psychology, January, 1905. 
 
 Page 144 
 
 Dugas: “Psychologie du rire.” 
 
 Addison: The Spectator , April 10, 1711, no. 35. 
 
 Page 145 
 
 Lord Shaftesbury: “On the Freedom of Wit and Humor.” 
 (See also p. 184.) 
 
 Bain: “The Emotions and the Will,” chapter on “The Emo- 
 tion of Power.” 
 
 Page 147 
 
 De Lamennais: “Esquisse d'une Philosophic,” book IX, chap. 
 II, p. 369. See also Professor J. E. Erdmann's “Ernste Spiele,” 
 in which we are advised that we should not speak of hearty 
 laughter, because “laughter is in fact heartless.” 
 
 Page 148 
 
 Henri Bergson: See note to p. 1. Compare with Bergson's 
 statement the opinion of Walter Pater that “pity” is “of the 
 essence of humor.” (Postscript, p. 254.) I know of no better 
 way to disprove Bergson's assertion than by reading to a person 
 of quick sympathy Stephen Leacock's little masterpiece, “My 
 Financial Career.” (See “Literary Lapses,” p. 9.) 
 
 Page 149 
 
 Irvin Cobb: “The Trail of the Lonesome Laugh,” Everybody's 
 Magazine, April, 1911. 
 
 Page 151 
 
 Voltaire: Preface to “L'Enfant Prodigue.” 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 251 
 
 Page 152 
 
 Spinoza: “Ethics,” part IV, prop, xlv, note. 
 
 Pascal: Quoted by Dugas in “La psychologie du rire.” 
 
 Page 153 
 
 Kant: “The Critique of Judgment,” translated by J. H. 
 Bernard, p. 223. 
 
 Page 154 
 
 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: “Sammtliche Werke,” 
 First Part, vol. V, p. 711. 
 
 Schopenhauer: “The World as Will and Idea,” translated by 
 Haldane and Kemp, 1819. 
 
 Page 156 
 
 London Spectator , June 29, 1907. 
 
 Page 157 
 
 “Conflict of habit systems”: A phrase employed by H. Heath 
 Bawden in an article on “The Comic as Illustrating the Sum- 
 mation-Irradiation Theory of Pleasure-Pain,” in the Psychologi- 
 cal Review , September, 1910. 
 
 Leon Dumont: “Des causes du rire,” 1862. Chapter on 
 “Le risible” in “La Theorie scientifique de la sensibilite,” 1877. 
 
 Page 159 
 
 Oswald Kiilpe: “Outlines of Psychology,” sec. 23, p. 14. See 
 also p. 89. 
 
 Page 160 
 
 James Sully: “Essay on Laughter,” chap. Ill, pp. 50-65, 1902. 
 
 Page 161 
 
 Lillien J. Martin: See note to p. 143. 
 
 H. L. Hollingsworth: “Experimental Studies in Judgment; 
 Judgments of the Comic,” Psychological Review , March, 1911. 
 
 Page 163 
 
 “Dasarupa”: Translated by George C. O. Haas. 
 
 “Sahitya Darpana”: Translated by Ballantyne and Mitra. 
 
 William Hazlitt: “On Wit and Humor.” 
 
252 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 165 
 
 “1475”: The date of the first quotation given in Murray’s 
 New English Dictionary. 
 
 Page 166 
 
 “In the century following Shakespeare”: Murray’s Dictionary 
 dates the use of humor in the sense of the laughable or jocose 
 from 1682. 
 
 Page 169 
 
 Carlyle: “Essay on Jean Paul Richter.” 
 
 Jean Paul: “Vorschule der iEsthetik,” 1804. 
 
 Page 170 
 
 Aristophanes: See p. 43. 
 
 Rabelais: See p. 18. 
 
 Voltaire: See p. 151. 
 
 Page 171 
 
 Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy,” book IV, chap. XXII. 
 
 Charles Lamb spoke of our enjoyment of “being cheated” as 
 the value of a joke (Popular Fallacies, no. IX), and Mark 
 Twain seemed to regard “surprise” as the essence of it (“How 
 to Tell a Story”). 
 
 Byron: “Don Juan,” canto IV, stanza IV. 
 
 Heine: “Fresko-Sonnette an Christian S.” 
 t Hegel: “Philosophy of Fine Art,” translated by F. P. B. 
 Osmaston, vol. IV, p. 302. See also Bryant’s briefer translation. 
 
 Page 172 
 
 Sahitya Darpana: See note to p. 163. 
 
 Chr. W. Weisse: “System der iEsthetik,” 1830. See also 
 Arnold Ruge, “Neue Vorschule der iEsthetik,” pp. 58-59, 1837. 
 
 Page 173 
 
 Lotze: See note to p. 217. 
 
 M. Lazarus: “Das Leben der Seele,” 1856. 
 
 Page 175 
 
 Herbert Spencer: “The Physiology of Laughter,” in “Essays,” 
 vol. II. 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 253 
 
 Page 176 
 
 Theodor Lipps: “Komik und Humor, Beitrage zur Asthetik,” 
 1898. 
 
 Page 179 
 
 “One of Lipps’s critics”: Herckenrath, author of the “Pro- 
 blemes d’estetique et de morale,” 1898. 
 
 Page 183 
 
 “Real contribution to the science of humor”: The attempt to 
 make a quantitative mechanics of the psychology of feeling, ex- 
 emplified in this theory of Lipps, in the article on “Play,” by 
 H. A. Carr, based upon H. R. Marshall’s “Pain, Pleasure, and 
 ^Esthetics” (see note to p. 12), and also in H. Heath Bawden’s 
 article on the comic (see note to p. 157), expresses a pious scien- 
 tific aspiration, and I have no desire to judge of its value in 
 general. But since in so far as it relates to humorous pleasures, 
 it ignores, rather than explains, their essential qualitative differ- 
 ence, it can be dismissed here as nothing in its present simplicity 
 but an aspiration. 
 
 Page 185 
 
 Alexander Bain: “The Emotions and the Will,” chap. XIV. 
 
 Charles Renouvier: “La nouvelle monadologie,” note 73 to 
 part IV. 
 
 Page 186 
 
 A. Penjon: “Le Rire et la Liberte,” Revue Philosophique, vol. 
 XXXVI, August, 1893. 
 
 John Dewey: “The Theory of Emotion,” Psychological Review , 
 beginning November, 1894. See also the article of H. Heath 
 Bawden (note to p. 157) for a mature statement of the liberty 
 theory. Sir Arthur Mitchell, in a book on “Dreaming, Laughing, 
 and Blushing,” went so far with the liberty theory as to describe 
 laughter as “a state of mental disorder.” Giulio A. Levi, on 
 the other hand, in “II Comico” (1913), declares that we enjoy 
 the comic because in that moment of freedom from the disci- 
 pline of ends and interests we recognize the ethical reality of 
 our persons. 
 
254 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 187 
 
 The quotation is from “The Psychology of Humor,” an article 
 by L. W. Kline, American Journal of Psychology , October, 1907. 
 
 Page 188 
 
 “Hegel’s wisdom”: See also in the American Journal of Psy- 
 chology, April, 1911, Horace M. Kallen’s article on “The Authen- 
 tic Principle in Comedy.” He describes comedy as “a relation 
 in which we are harmoniously and completely adapted to what 
 is in itself a disharmony, a maladjustment.” 
 
 Page 190 
 
 Sigmund Freud: “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Un- 
 bewussten,” 1905. Translated into English by A. A. Brill. 
 
 Page 206 
 
 Lactantius: “The Divine Institutes,” book III, chap. X. 
 
 Darwin: “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani- 
 mals,” chap. VIII. 
 
 Page 211 
 
 L. Joubert: See p. 139. 
 
 Page 213 
 
 Descartes: See note to p. 141. Descartes explained the laugh 
 as due to the suddenness with which these two passions are 
 aroused, causing the blood to rush from the right chamber of 
 the heart into the lungs, and so forcing the air out in a gust. 
 
 Page 214 
 
 Moses Mendelssohn: “Philosophische Schriften,” vol. II, 
 p. 23. 
 
 Lessing: “Laocoon,” 23. 
 
 “Humor is the kiss”: The quotation is from F. Baldensperger, 
 who so describes this phase of German literature in his essay on 
 “Les definitions de l’humour,” Etudes d’Histoire Litteraire, first 
 series. 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 255 
 
 Page 215 
 
 Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, 13. 
 
 Novalis: “Schriften,” Verlag. von G. Reimer, Berlin, 1837, 
 vol. II, p. 223. 
 
 Theodor Vischer: “iEsthetik,” 1846. 
 
 Page 217 
 
 K. W. F. Solger: “ Erwin, vier Gespraehe iiber das Schone und 
 die Kunst,” 1815. Also “Vorlesungen iiber iEsthetik,” 1829. 
 
 Bohtz: “Ueber das Komische und die Komodie,” p. 75, 1844. 
 
 Moritz Carri&re: “iEsthetik,” 1859, p. 197 of the second edi- 
 tion. 
 
 Hermann Lotze: “Geschichte der iEsthetik in Deutschland/’ 
 book II, chaps. IV and V, 1868. 
 
 Page 218 
 
 Julius Bahnsen: “Das Tragische als Weltgesetz und der 
 Humor als asthetische Gestalt des Metaphysischen,” 1877. For 
 an account of this book and of those of Weisse and Zeising I am 
 indebted to a little volume by Doctor Franz Jahn entitled “Das 
 Problem des Komischen in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung.” 
 
 Ewald Hecker: “Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens 
 und des Komischen/’ 1873. In Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” 
 (see note to p. 153) the idea of an “oscillation” of the attention 
 in comic states is also introduced, and related in some cumber- 
 some way to the rhythmic motions of laughter. 
 
 Page 221 
 
 “Point of a joke”: See also “Neue Vorschule der iEsthetik,” 
 by Arnold Ruge, and “A Syllabus of Lectures on the Psychology 
 of Pain and Pleasure,” by Benjamin Ives Gilman, American 
 Journal of Psychology , October, 1893. 
 
 Emil Kraepelin: “Zur Psychologie des Komischen,” in Wundt’s 
 “Philosophische Studien,” II, p. 128, and p. 327, 1886. 
 
 Wundt: “Grundziige der physiologischen Psychologie,” 4th 
 edition, vol. II, p. 249. Also p. 607, where he still suggests a 
 connection between this oscillation and the rhythmic motions 
 of laughter. 
 
256 
 
 NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 Page 224 
 
 Malebranche: “The Search after Truth/’ 1674. 
 
 Page 225 
 
 The Definition of Instinct: In James Drever’s “Instinct in 
 Man” the history and contemporary status of this concept is 
 fully set forth. 
 
 Page 226 
 
 “Humor is an element”: Since I have quoted Bernard Shaw 
 in opposition to the idea of this book, I must quote further his 
 unconscious indorsement of its thesis. I had already written 
 this sentence when his letter came, stating that “Humor is an 
 element, not a product nor a compound. It makes you laugh: 
 that is how you detect its presence. Dirt, cruelty, disaster are 
 rich in it; happiness and generosity abound in it; mere folly ab- 
 sorbs it freely; it attaches itself to every kind of event with com- 
 plete moral indifference, having no sort of bias one way or 
 another between the adventures of Saint Francis and those of 
 Mr. Charles Chaplin.” 
 
 Page 227 
 
 “So early and so spontaneously”: James Drever adds this to 
 McDougall’s three tests of the primary instincts. 
 
 “Their gift of laughter”: Freud says that “The child lacks all 
 feeling for the comic,” but it is evident that he derived this 
 opinion from his theory of the comic and not from his observa- 
 tions of children. A contrary opinion is expressed by Harald 
 Hoff ding in his “Outlines of Psychology” and by Stephen S. 
 Colvin in an article on “The Educational Value of Humor” in 
 the Pedagogical Seminary , vol. 14, no. 4, December, 1907. I 
 think those people themselves are a little too grown-up, or per- 
 haps they were born grown-up, who cannot see humor in the 
 eyes of children, and by some slight play of memory and imagi- 
 native sympathy know how comic are the things at w T hich they 
 laugh. 
 
 Page 231 
 
 Lipps: See p. 176. 
 
 G. Stanley Hall: See note to p. 132. 
 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
 
 257 
 
 Darwin: “Descent of Man/’ p. 71. 
 
 G. J. Romanes: “Animal Intelligence,” p. 444. 
 
 Leon Dumont: See note to p. 157. 
 
 Page 232 
 
 C. Lloyd Morgan: “Animal Life and Intelligence,” p. 406. 
 
 Page 234 
 
 Jose Ingegnieros: “Le rire hysterique,” Journal de Psychologie, 
 vol. 3, 1906, p. 501. 
 
 Binet Sangle: Revue Scientifique, March 2, 1901. For further 
 bibliography see Victor Robinson’s “Essay on Hasheesh,” pub- 
 lished by The Medical Review of Reviews , New York, 1912. 
 

 
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