Humorism

“ Humor is the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. Humor, as it is shown in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation, and character; wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view. ”

“ That gives surprise, and this delight, Humour is odd, grotesque, and wild, Only by affectation spoil'd; 'Tis never by invention got, Men have it when they know it not. Our conversation to refine, True humour must with wit combine: From both we learn to rally well, Wherein French writers most excel; [2] Voiture, in various lights, displays That irony which turns to praise: His genius first found out the rule For an obliging ridicule: He flatters with peculiar air The brave, the witty, and the fair: And fools would fancy he intends A satire where he most commends. ”

“ If we, as a nation, have more humor, they have better humorists, and can point serenely to those unapproached and unapproachable writers of the eighteenth century, whose splendid ringing laughter still clears the murky air. It is true, I am told now and then, with commendable gravity, that such mirth is unbecoming in a refined and critical age, and that, if I would try a little harder to follow the somewhat elusive satire of the modern analyst, I should enjoy a species of pleasantry too delicate or too difficult for laughter. ”

“ If you laugh all round him (to wit, the ridiculous person) , tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you, and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is spirit of Humour that is moving you.... The humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the feelings, and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. ”

“ The same covert conceit, the same hidden humor, the same piquant allusion, which, while you read, place the author bodily before you, a quiet old gentleman fond of his ease, but fonder of his joke—not a broad, forced, loud, vacant-minded joke, but a quiet, pungent, sly, laughter-moving conceit, which, at first stirring the finest membranes of your pericardium, at length sets you out into a broad roar of laughter, honest fellow as you are, and which you must be, indeed, a very savage, if you can avoid. ”

“ Comedy is a feigned action, in which is represented the ridiculous, in order to correct it; it rebukes with a smile, and corrects with a facetious stroke: the matter of comedy is civil life, of which it is an imitation: it ought to be every where enlivened with all possible care, to have fine and easy strokes of wit and satire, which present the ridiculous in the most glaring point of view ”

“ But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what we call humour is revealed only to the few who, by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it. The world's humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilisation. One thinks here not of the mere spasmodic effects of the comic artist or the blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really great humour which, once or twice in a generation at best, illuminates and elevates our literature. ”

“ Laughter throws a far more illuminating ray on the laugher than the laughed at, for it indicates not only taste and mood but the trend of one’s philosophy. In betraying a man’s idea of the incongruous, it implies his conception of the congruous, and reveals his whole coördination of life. We may, it is true, define humor by saying that intellectually it is a contemplation of life from the angle of amusement, and emotionally, a joyous effervescence over the absurdities in life ever present to the discerning eye; but we can never quite capture it, any more than pleasure or tragedy. ”

“ The value of comedy as chief ministress to our laughter may be seen by a mere glance at its many resources. It seems able to present to the eye and ear all varieties of the amusing. As a show, it carries on the fun of children’s make-believe play. It can set before us the most grotesque aberrations of dress, carriage and manners. In its human figures, again, it presents to us in forms of its own choosing the full variety of laughable traits of mind and of character. Lastly, it can exhibit in its plots the whole gamut of teasing and practical joke which amuses ordinary men in real life. ”

“ When the cause of our laughter—be it mind, matter, or imaginary circumstance—is merely regarded as something incongruous and amusing, we name it the ludicrous, and a man is called ludicrous as faulty or contemptible. But when the cause of it is viewed as something more than this, as coming from some conscious power or tendency within us—a valuable gift and an element in our mental constitution—we call it humour, a term applied only to human beings and their productions; and a man is called humorous as worthy of commendation. ”

“ These innocent self-revelations meet the watchful eye of the humorist everywhere in the haunts of men. They lie like hoar frost in the sun on his surroundings, on which he unwittingly casts a reflection of the habits of his mind and of the directions of his taste; as when in a large town bizarre juxtapositions of the vulgar heroic strike the observer’s eye in the names of streets, or of loose engines on a railway. ”

“ There are other plays in the collection, however, that are apparently harmless; comedies that will cause you to laugh heartily, ’tis true, but in the middle of the laugh you stop as if some one slapped you in the face. You begin to see, in place of the harmless joke, an insidious dig at something you hold sacred, or, if it is something you think is inspiring and patriotic, right in the midst of the thing that carries you away for a few moments on the wings of your lofty dreams and inspirations some monster of mockery will intrude his ugly face, and again the doubt, “Is it ridicule?” ”

“ A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our civilization is that of the sense of humor. Being so recently returned from barbarism and its beyond, I can confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while they may be laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom of the not very sick, the brightest witticisms seem only studied banalities. There is no comedy in the incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved tragedy. Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor that is lacking, for frequently the situations are appreciated at recovery, and furnish us amusement at intervals for a lifetime. ”

“ We may now better define the attitude of the humorist in its relation to that of the comedian and of the satirist. The comic spirit, placing itself at the social point of view, projects as laughable show an eccentric individual, or group of individuals. Satire, when it attacks the manners of an age, may be said to project the society, turning it into an object of derision. Humour, as we have seen, sometimes does the like, though in its laughter at the social scene it is neither passionately vindictive nor concerned with the practical problem of reforming a world. ”

“ She laughed with her whole body and soul, and burst the abscess, and was well.
Humor, if genuine (and if not, it is not humor) , is the very flavor of the spirit, its rich and fragrant ozmazome—having in its aroma something of everything in the man, his expressed juice; wit is but the laughing flower of the intellect or the turn of speech, and is often what we call a “gum-flower,” and looks well when dry. ”

“ But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce—the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. ”

“ But Humor floods you to the brim with measureful content. Wit sends you a sharp, sudden, electric shock, that leaves you tingling from without. Humor operates from within, with its slow and prolonged excitation of your risible soul. ”

“ When we pass from Goldsmith to Hazlitt—one of the greatest names in English criticism—we find that “humour” has grown in meaning, without quite reaching its full development. In the introduction to his Lectures on the English Comic Writers he attempts a classification of the comic spirit into wit and humour. “Humour,” he says, “is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. ”

“ The joke was worthy to produce one,
To think, by favour of his wit,
How well a dentist had been bit{507}
By one old stump, and that a loose one!
The thing was worth a laugh, but mirth
Is still the frailest thing on earth:
Alas! how often when a joke
Seems in our sleeve, and safe enough,
There comes some unexpected stroke,
And hangs a weeper on the cuff! ”

“ And the comedy at the close is added by way of counterpiece to the light, delicate fancies of the dream. It is the thoughts we have thought, the painfully-wrought products of the waking mind, given in a sparkle of mocking laughter against the background of nightly visions. ”

“ It is of some importance to understand that in play, fun, and humor, there is a delicate counterpoise of opposing sentiments, an attempt to make the most of both worlds—love and anger. The great masterpieces of humor in literature, the amenities of every-day society, the innocent joyousness of laughter—all attest the success of the hazardous combination. ”

“ The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, [Pg 139] the break of continuity in the intellect, is comedy; and it announces itself physically in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds, there is no seeming, no halfness in nature, until the appearance of man. ”

“ I divide all witnesses into two classes: those who, while giving testimony or being examined or cross-examined, cause laughter in the courtroom at others. The second class turn all laughter against themselves. That is why the gift of humour is so grave—it keeps us from making ourselves ridiculous. A Frenchman (still my French) has recently pointed out that the reason we laugh is to drive things out of the world, to jolly them out of existence and have a good time as we do it. Therefore not to be laughed at is to survive. ”

“ For the true satirical humorist, seeing life steadily and whole, observes that while certain parts of it are unquestionably absurd, whether flauntingly or subtly so, these ludicrous shreds and patches, absolutely integral and ineradicable as they are, are nevertheless only a portion and not so large a one, of the stupendous whole. ”

“ In Humour we have a burlesque appeal to the sense of human fortune, making of it nothing but fun; doing this by means of sheer blunder, stupidity, and miscarriage. The reason of the perennial popular charm of Humour is at once seen when this is remembered—it lies in comicality utterly resting the ordinary efferent-activity and relaxing the Brain of every sensory nervous co-ordination. Comedy, taken in the broad meaning, asks for its full success even moderate ugliness in the persons most concerned in it, with awkwardness of gesture, inexact speech, irrelevancy of doing. ”

“ Certain moral deformities and vices have always been a special dish in the feast of laughter. We have only to think of popular jokes, the contes of the Middle Ages, and the large branches of literature known as comedy and satire, to see how eagerly the spirit of mirth has looked out for this source of gratification. ”

“ Humor lightens right to the heart of the matter at once, without by-play. Wit will show you the live sparks rushing red-rustling from the chimney, and prettily dancing away in the dark, a 'moment bright, then gone forever.' But Humor shall give you a pleasanter peep through the lighted window, and show you the fire glowing and ruddy—the smiling heart of home—shining in the dear faces of those you love, who are waiting to overflow in one warm embracing wave of love the moment the door is opened for your coming. ”

“ But in a general way nobody is particularly keen on definitions, provided they can get for their amusement and exhilaration either humor or wit. During the past few decades we have heard a vast deal of the advantages which accrue from the possession of what is called a sense of humor. This especial sense or faculty for appreciating a joke is nowadays cultivated, and consciously cultivated, by all sorts and conditions of people. ”

“ That the satirical element in this romantico-realistic form of fiction should be characterized by humor, exposure, and comparative rarity, instead of wit, exaggeration, and ubiquity, is inevitable, since the former qualities accord not only with realism but with one another.
Humor is the comic sense which is amused by things as they are, whereas wit either creates the absurdity or ferrets it out of obscurity. ”

“ And as for our Comic, of course—whatever laughter may be in itself—laughter will be most strongly called forth by anything that merely calls and vanishes. Such things are jokes, burlesques, humor. They state nothing: they assume inaccuracy: they cry aloud and vanish, leaving the hearer to become awakened to his own thoughts. They are mere stimuli—mere gesture and motion, and hence the very truest, very strongest form of human appeal. ”