Shakespeare called a man "humorous" he meant that he was changeable and
capricious, not that he was given to a facetious turn of thought or to a
"sportive" exercise of the imagination. When he talks in "The Taming of
the Shrew" of "her mad and head-strong humor" he doesn't mean to imply
that Kate is a practical joker. It is interesting to note in passing
that the old meaning of the word still lingers in the verb "to humor." A
woman still humors her spoiled child and her cantankerous husband when
she yields to their capriciousness. By going hack a step further in
history, to the late fourteenth century, we met Chaucer's physician who
knew "the cause of everye maladye, and where engendered and of what
humour" and find that Chaucer is not speaking of a mental state at all,
but is referring to those physiological humours of which, according to
Hippocrates, the human body contained four: blood, phlegm, bile, and
black bile, and by which the disposition was determined. We find, too,
that at one time a "humour" meant any animal or plant fluid, and again
any kind of moisture. "The skie hangs full of humour, and I think we
shall haue raine," ran an ancient weather prophet's prediction. Which
might give rise to some thoughts on the paradoxical subject of _dry_
humor.
Now in part this development is easily traced. Humor, meaning moisture
of any kind, came to have a biological significance and was applied only
to plant and animal life. It was restricted later within purely
physiological boundaries and was applied only to those "humours" of the
human body that controlled temperament. From these fluids, determining
mental states, the word took on a psychological coloring, but--by what
process of evolution did humor reach its present status! After all, the
scientific method has its weaknesses!
We can, if we wish, define humor in terms of what it is not. We can draw
lines around it and distinguish it from its next of kin, wit. This
indeed has been a favorite pastime with the jugglers of words in all
ages. And many have been the attempts to define humor, to define wit, to
describe and differentiate them, to build high fences to keep them
apart.
"Wit is abrupt, darting, scornful; it tosses its analogies in your face;
humor is slow and shy, insinuating its fun into your heart," says E. P.
Whipple. "Wit is intellectual, humor is emotional; wit is perception of
resemblance, humor of contrast--of contrast between ideal and fact,
theory and practice, promise and performance," writes another authority.
While yet another points out that "Humor is feeling--feelings can always
bear repetition, while wit, being intellectual, suffers by repetition."
The truth of this is evident when we remember that we repeat a witty
saying that we may enjoy the effect on others, while we retell a
humorous story largely for our own enjoyment of it.
Yet it is quite possible that humor ought not to be defined. It may be
one of those intangible substances, like love and beauty, that are
indefinable. It is quite probable that humor should not be explained. It
would be distressing, as some one pointed out, to discover that American
humor is based on American dyspepsia. Yet the philosophers themselves
have endeavored to explain it. Hazlitt held that to understand the
ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is. And to apprehend the
serious, what better course could be followed than to contemplate the
serious--yes and ludicrous--findings of the philosophers in their
attempts to define humor and to explain laughter. Consider Hobbes: "The
passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from the
sudden conception of eminency in ourselves by comparison with the