Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 641
The opinion may be ventured that such attempts at intensive classification and analysis are out of place. It is characteristic of the psychology of the hour, and of its application to literary criticism, that it tries to emulate the exact quantitative methods of natural science with results worse than useless. You cannot weigh an argument in a balance, measure social forces with a slide rule, and resolve humor with a spectroscope.
Most writers, despairing of a satisfactory condensed definition of humor, fall back on the origin of the word itself. Beginning, then, in this plain way, we may say that humor, in point of etymology, is an elusive word that has come twisting down the centuries and through the languages. As a Latin word it meant simply wetness, a meaning still found in our humid and humidity. But ‘wetness’ took on a special meaning in connection with the medical theories and practice of Hippocrates and his successors and so ‘humour’ came to mean the liquid currents flowing through the human body. On these four humours — the blood, the phlegm, the yellow bile and the black bile — depended all of man’s health and vitality: the humours passed from their ‘crude’ state through ‘coction’ and ‘crisis’ and ‘expulsion’ — things only dimly intelligible to the polite mind. If all went well, the man was in health; if not, disease appeared. The man was then in an ‘ill-humour,’ or ‘out of humour.’ The physician’s task was to help nature to keep the man in ‘good humour.’ But later on, in the Middle Ages, people had forgotten all about Hippocrates, and the word ‘humour’ shifted into a general meaning of ‘disposition,’ ‘temperament.’ The medical idea was out of it. This is the way in which we mostly find it used by Shakespeare’s characters. “You’ll ask me,” says Shylock to the Duke of Venice, “why I rather choose to have a weight of carrion flesh than to receive three thousand ducats? I’ll not answer that, but say, it is my humour.”
From this usage it was easy for the word to branch off in either of two contrasted directions. ‘Humour’ could be used to mean ‘caprice,’ ‘whim,’ ‘wilfulness’; or it could be used to imply something rather odd, or exceptional or incongruous. It was this last meaning which presently vanquished and overcame all others, giving us our modern word humor, which grew at length to imply not merely incongruity but something pleasing and amusingly incongruous. But the word only settled down to this meaning in recent times. In the days between those of Shakespeare and the Victorian age the word still ran a wider gamut of meaning. Dr. Johnson in his famous Lexicon of 1755 gave a list of nine definitions of humor running all the way from ‘moisture’ through ‘temper’ and ‘jocularity’ to ‘caprice.’
Even at the end of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, the word was still used in quaint archaic ways, many of which to-day would themselves strike us as ‘humorous.’ Take this example. There was written about a century and a half ago a goody-goody book (which used to be read to all good children) entitled Sandford and Merton. It told the story of two little boys, Tommy Merton, the rich and spoiled offspring of a West Indian planter, and Harry Sandford, the humble but virtuous son of Farmer Sandford. The rich little boy being placed along with the poor little boy under the tutorship of a Mr. Barlow, himself a paragon of conduct and information, is brought to an entire change of character and reflects the white light of unselfishness in which live Mr. Barlow and little Harry. Mr. Merton, grateful for his son’s moral regeneration, wishes to do something for Farmer Sandford. He offers him a closed pocket-book as “a slight proof of his sentiments.” We are told that: —
“Mr. Sandford, who was a man of sense and humour, took the book, and examining the inside found that it contained bank-notes to the amount of some hundred pounds. He then carefully shut it up again and returned it to Mr. Merton.” Just where the fun came in, we are not told. Perhaps it was because Merton in the sequel gave the farmer a team of horses worth a good deal more than the pocket-book.
So much for the etymology and the changing meaning of the word humor. If we, then, ask what the origin and what the development of the thing we now call humor, we can find light by shifting the enquiry from humor itself to the parallel and cognate phenomenon of laughter. Humor itself, as we know it now and as we have defined it above, with the element of human kindliness as its most essential ingredient, could not have existed in the twilight of primitive civilization. But laughter, a physiological phenomenon, appears earlier in a definite and recognizable form and laughter is at least closely connected with humor. It is true that many humorous people seldom laugh and that many people with little sense of humor laugh a great deal. Yet the two go together. A very good practical test of a funny story, for example, is whether people laugh at it.
It will be found, indeed, that the discussions of an earlier time from Aristotle to Hazlitt, turn rather on what is laughter than on what is humor. Now laughter is as old as human speech and no doubt far older. Our use of language grew up, like everything else in our make-up and our actions, from imperceptible beginnings. Just how speech started is a matter on which scholars fail to agree. Perhaps it began with attempts at vocal imitation of nature’s sounds — splashes and crashes and whizzes and of the bow-wow’s and baa’s of our animal cousins. Perhaps it began with physical exclamations as when a man says ‘Whoof!’ on a terribly hot day, or in a sort of rhymic nerve stimulus to action as when sailors work to a ‘chanty,’ or a clown hops on the stage with a ‘ta-ra-ra-boom-de-eh!’ No doubt the definite significance of words was preceded by the understood significance of undertones, of whines and growls and barks, that we still instinctively use when we talk to a dog or a baby or to a sweetheart. These undertones, indeed, still lie beneath our speech and a lot of its meaning and emphasis is derived from them. Professors bark. Bankers grunt. Retired colonels snort. Lovers purr, and dowagers neigh. Take all the growls and grunts out of language, and you have the toneless talk of the radio announcer — vox et praeterea nihil — admirable for information, but powerless to persuade.
But most of all, we laugh. This is a physiological trick carried down from our monkey days. Aristotle is scarcely correct when he says that man is the only laughing animal. There is good ground for saying that the primates all laugh — the word here being used to include not only archbishops and bishops, but orangoutangs, gorillas and chimpanzees. The ‘laughing jackass’ is another case in point, while the loon of the Canadian lakes emits a sardonic laugh more mocking than anything human. It would be distressing to have one in a lecture audience.
But the laughter of mankind was more and more specialized to one particular line of development. Its first origin, if we may believe what seems the likeliest physiological conjecture, was in a sort of shout of exultation or triumph, the cry of the savage over his fallen enemy, the ‘Ha! Ha!’ of the stage villain, or its mild and gentle transformation into the ‘merry ha! ha!’ given to a man in a minor discomfiture. This idea, that laughter originated in ‘exultation,’ at least fits in with the familiar dictum of Plato that we laugh at the misfortunes of others for joy that we do not share them. It squares exactly with the remarks of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, of the seventeenth century, who expressed his incisive thought with a point and brilliance given to few. “The passion of laughter,” he says, “is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the inferiority of others, or with our own formerly.” This is wonderful, and carries us all the way from the exulting laugh of the triumphant savage to the ‘mocking laugh’ of the melodrama.
It thus appears that our sense of humor, like so much else about us, sprang from lowly and even discreditable origins. With certain races of mankind, humor never seems to have got beyond this primitive brutal stage of cruel exultation. This is the laughter of the original American Indian, a being well calculated to carry off the Solemnity Prize in the history of mankind. From all we read of him he was a creature without humor. “A Roman Senate,” says the historian Francis Parkman, “might have taken a lesson from the grave solemnity of an Indian council. In the midst of his family and friends he hides his affections under a mask of icy coldness. . . . In his feasts and drinking bouts we find none of that robust and full-toned mirth which reigned at the rude carousals of our barbaric ancestry. He is never jovial in his cups, and maudlin sorrow and maniacal rage are the sole result of his potations.”
A contemporary writer has added to the words of Parkman a similar judgment expressed in verse.
The Painted Indian rides no more,
He stands — at a Tobacco Store,
His cruel face proclaims afar
The terror of the cheap cigar.
The Indian, indeed, has not been without his defenders. Modern scholarship is seldom content to let a good thing alone. So we find a recent American writer in an entertaining Clinic on the Comic telling us that the Indian “is given to abundant laughter in the seclusion of his own wig-wam or camp-fire.” It may be so. Few of us have been privileged to penetrate the seclusion of the wig-wam; and to be secluded in a camp-fire seems a little painful. In any case the remarks could only refer to the Indian of later times, damaged by contact with the whites. The laugh of the original Indian was limited to his yells of exultation.
But it would be a great error to build up a theory that primitive races laugh less or have less sense of humor than civilized peoples. In many cases it appears the other way. Negroes — whether in African forests, or in slave-gangs in the rice-fields, or on the west side of Chicago — can always laugh more and at much less than white people. Their sense of humor, if we look at the sheer quantity of it as compared with its texture, is no doubt greater. It is like electricity measured by flow, not force. There’s an awful lot of it but at a low voltage. Probably most of our ancestors were more or less of this type, their huge guffaws over nothing contrasting with our modern audiences half ashamed to laugh, and our Nestors disdaining even to smile. It is probably that with all the exquisite development of our humor from primitive fun to refined reflection, the power to laugh at it grows less — the hearty, open and unrestrained laugh passing out of our common possession and becoming a rarity or a stage trick.
We are saying, then, that humor had its origin in exultation. This theory has of course been frequently denied as has every other theory about everything else. But taking it by and large, and with all the hypothetical character that goes with all discussion of primitive beginnings, it can at least stand as something between a working hypothesis and an accepted truth. Humor meant exultation, the sense of personal triumph over one’s adversary, or the sense of delight in seeing something — anything — demolished or knocked out of shape. In such a form it was older than written language, and no doubt older than language itself, belonging in the age of grunts and barks out of which language arose. It expressed itself in action, not in words. We can find still plenty of traces of this primitive humor existing to-day. A broken umbrella with the ribs sticking out through the cloth looks ‘funny’: a clown with a mouth far too big and a little pill-box hat far too small, looks ‘funny.’ He stands for the demolition or destruction of the human face as it is and the hat as it should be. A practical joke such as putting a bent pin on a schoolmaster’s chair, or having a water-pot upset on an unsuspecting head, a cigar which lights only to explode — all these effects recall to us the wordless humor of primitive man. The moving pictures in their comic effects contain bucketfuls of it. They turn the world upside down when Mickey Mouse and such defy, and demolish, in their speed and their transformations, all the laws of the physical universe. They take a laugh out of Isaac Newton.
Even in our written literature of humor, in that part of it which we call comic, we can still reach back to these primitive effects. That cheerful genius, the late Captain Harry Graham of the Ruthless Rhymes, could turn us all back into laughing savages by the happy trick of turning back the clock a few thousand years and inviting us to participate in a simple joy at the misfortunes of others.
Grandpapa fell down a drain,
Couldn’t scramble out again.
Now he’s floating down the sewer,
There’s one grandpapa the fewer.
We call such things as this comic, little thinking how far back it reaches and how thoroughly it would be appreciated by a Potawatami Indian.
But from the earliest stages of human development malice had to take account of the contrary principle of sympathy. It was a conflict of light and darkness, long as the ages. Most of us would agree, though some would try to deny it, that the human race on the whole has improved in moral outlook; not so much perhaps in spirituality of outlook, ‘other-worldliness,’ for this seems to be slipping away; but at least in an increased sense of sympathy with the pain and suffering of others. The notion of the deliberate infliction of pain disturbs us as it seldom disturbed the earlier races of mankind. In us are yet tendencies that can still sweep us into mob-brutality, and wild and sudden cruelty. But what was once the rule is now the exception and what was once indifference is now distress.
As a consequence humor, all through the period that we call civilization, has been undergoing a refining process. The ‘exultation’ must somehow keep away the reality of harm and arise as it were out of the appearance of it. It is no longer funny if grandpapa disappears down a sewer, but if he sits down in a puddle, it is. A man with a broken leg trying to walk is not comic, as it seems to have been to the Greek gods whose sense of humor was low. They laughed, it will be recalled, when Hephaestus fell out of heaven and went limping round with a broken leg. But we of to-day would keep our ‘Homeric laughter’ for a man who had slipped on a banana peel, or limped with ‘pins and needles’ and wasn’t really hurt.
Humor, in other words, changed from a basis of injury or destruction, to what one may describe as a basis of ‘incongruity’ or ‘maladjustment.’ It is in this form that it began to find its place more and more with the rise of literature when the spoken and written word becomes the prevalent method of communication of human beings in place of the pantomime and grunts and direct action of primitive beings. And more and more it became possible to derive humorous satisfaction out of the incongruities of speech itself, queer inconsistencies and oddities of speech. So that ‘wit’ comes into being as the general name for humorous expression, turning upon or accompanied by, verbal effects. In later chapters these will be considered in further detail.
It becomes therefore a principal thesis of this treatise that both the sense of humor and the expression of it undergo in the course of history an upward and continuous progress. Its advance has necessarily been rather in zigzags and spirals than in a straight line. No one would suppose that everything in each century is better than in the one before. But viewed in a broad way, as seen from a great altitude, the movement is recognized to be of that sort. But as with every attempt to reduce our knowledge to an orderly and regular outline, we meet serious difficulties at the very outset. Many classical scholars would assure us that the comic drama of the Greeks, as exemplified by Aristophanes, has never been surpassed, just as they hold that the tragic drama also, to say nothing of history and philosophy, were cast in a mould that broke when Athens fell.
It is a point that is discussed later on in this volume. But at least few will claim that the ‘humor’ of the Romans — whether we mean by it what they had inside them or what they managed to express, was in any way on a par with ours. Humor cannot smile at an arena.
The Dark Ages may have been the age of inner light. But it was not an era of lambent wit. Mediæval scholars got little further than the mere wit of pedantry, anagrams and acrostics, with no other merit than that of getting fun out of grammar, which is like getting water out of sand. Rude fun, of course, there was in the ‘people’s plays’ that helped, along with God’s miracles, to create our drama. But it was rude: it was horseplay — what horses would write if they could. We reach the time of Chaucer and again the scholars shake their heads at us and defy us to produce again the humor of the Canterbury Tales. To answer would be to quarrel. But we may at least hint that their judgment is historical and relative. Only when we reach the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan age, with Shakespeare and Molière, are we in the presence of humor of the highest class. But it is still the eminence of the single mountain, all the taller for its isolation. The general level is far lower. Indeed as the land rises the mountains lose their apparent height and no new eminence seems to be equal to the old.
We observe how human converse and manners soften with the later Stuarts. Here breathes the soft atmosphere of tobacco, quickened with the genial stimulus of the coffee berry, and moist with the soft dew of the tea-plant, replacing the everlasting bellyful of semialcoholic swill on which our ruder ancestors were roused to fury and soused to slumber. The new age sees the beginning of real toleration, of inquisitive science, and of the geniality in literature that finds voice in the humor of the Steeles, the Addisons and the Goldsmiths.
As we pass into the nineteenth century we seem to move from sun-flecked shadow into the open sun. For the modern world it is high noon when the century is well in, and with Charles Dickens the sun is at its very zenith. With the great humor of the nineteenth century, with Mr. Pickwick, with Huckleberry Finn, with Tartarin, we find ourselves in our own world. We are still in its sunshine. But whether it is lessening we cannot tell. With our descent to our own day, we have lost our altitude of vision.
