An outline of humor Being a true chronicle from prehistoric ages to the twentieth century — A Reader’s Guide

A general understanding of the humorous element is all we are after and that has now been set forth.

A question closely akin to What is Humor? is What is a Sense of Humor?

The phrase seems self-explanatory, and is by no means identical with the thing itself. Nor are the two inseparable. Humor and the sense of humor need not necessarily lie in the same brain.

Two erudite writers on this subject have chosen to consider the phrase as a unique bit of terminology.

Mr. Max Eastman says; “The creation of that name is the most original and the most profound contribution of modern thought to the problem of the comic.”

While Professor Brander Matthews says; “Ample as the English vocabulary is today, it is sometimes strangely deficient in needful terms. Thus it is that we have nothing but the inadequate phrase _sense of humor_ to denominate a quality which is often confounded with humor itself, and which should always be sharply discriminated from it.”

Now it would seem that the phrase was simply a matter of evolution, coming along when the time was ripe. Surely it is no stroke of genius, nor yet is it hopelessly inadequate.

It must be granted that a sense of the humorous is as logical a thought as a sensitive ear for music, or, to be more strictly analogous, a sense of moderation or that very definite thing, card sense.

Sense, used thus, is almost synonymous with taste, and a taste for literature or for the Fine Arts in no way implies a productive faculty in those fields. A taste for humor would mean precisely the same thing as a sense of humor, and the taste or the sense may be more or less natural and more or less cultivated, as in the matter of books or pictures.

A taste for music is a sense of music, and one may appreciate and enjoy music and its rendition to the utmost without being able to sing a note or play upon any instrument whatever.

One may be a music critic or an art critic, or even a critic of literature, without being able to create any of these things.

Why, then, put forth as a discovery that one may have a sense of humor without being humorous and _vice versa_?

Humor is creative, while the sense of humor is merely receptive and appreciative.

Many great humorists have little or no sense of humor. Try to tell a joke to an accredited joker and note his blank expression of uncomprehension. It is because he has no sense of humor that he takes himself seriously.

Such was the case with Dickens, with Carlyle, with many renowned wits. The humorist without the sense of humor is a bore. He tells long, detailed yarns, proud of himself, and not seeing his hearers’ lack of interest.

The man with a sense of humor is a joy to know and to be with.

The man who possesses both is already an immortal.

Now as the sense of humor is negative, recipient, while humor is positive and creative, it follows that a sense of humor alone cannot produce humorous literature.

These mute, inglorious Miltons, therefore, have no place in our Outline, but they deserve a passing word of recognition for the assistance they have been to the humorists, by way of being applauding audiences.

For humor, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One with an acute sense of humor will see comic in stones, wit in the running brooks,--while a dull or absent sense of humor can see no fun save in the obvious jest.

“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him who hears it. Never in the tongue Of him who makes it.”

in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ proves that Shakespeare understood the meaning and value of a sense of humor.

Although it was at a much later date that the word humor came to be used as now, to mean a gentle, good-natured sort of fun.

All types of humor are universal and of all time. But the first definitions were arrived at by the men of Greece and Rome, who were scholarly and analytical, hence the hair-splitting and meticulous efforts to treat it metaphysically.

Humor today rarely is used in a caustic or biting sense,--that is reserved for wit.

Which brings us to another great and futile question,--the distinction between wit and humor.

There is not time or space to take up this subject fully here. But we can sum up the decisions and opinions of some few of the thinking minds that have been bent upon it.

As the best and most comprehensive is the dissertation by William Hazlitt, most of this is here given.