The American Passion for Humor

Abstract

The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. By Daniel Wickberg. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. 267 pages. $35.00. Jonathan Swift once observed that "What Humor is, not all the Tribe / Of Logick-mongers can describe." Despite its apparent wisdom, Swift's admonition has done little to discourage philosophers, dramatists, social scientists, social critics and clergymen from investigating the nature of humor. Modern-day historians and American studies scholars, however, have been less willing to take up the challenge. Although multiple authors have addressed comic literature and film comedy, very few have attempted to define, as Constance Rourke did seventy years ago, humor's larger place within American culture. This fact makes Daniel Wickberg's ambitious cultural history--an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation--all the more welcome. The subject of Wickberg's study is the "sense of humor," that unique personality trait and cultural value that has obsessed Americans ever since the late nineteenth century. To explain how and why the concept of the sense of humor evolved, Wickberg traces the meaning of humor back to the Middle Ages. During this period, medical practitioners defined humors as those four fluids (blood, phlegm, choler and bile) whose balance or imbalance within the body determined the individual's temperament. Slowly, humor lost its physiological association and acquired meaning as an interiorized state of mind or feeling. By the nineteenth century, English dramatists and critics commonly represented humor as a subjective perception, a creative talent, a trait of one's distinctive perspective and personality. [End Page 151] As Wickberg correctly points out, the social acceptability of humor was facilitated in large part by the development of several new perspectives on laughter. For many centuries, the prevailing view held that laughter was triggered by the inherent ugliness or deformity of the object laughed at. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes departed from this Aristotelian view by relating an object's risibility to the subjective evaluation of the individual laughing. For Wickberg, the emphasis Hobbes placed on the psychological causes of laughter is particularly significant since it reinforced the process by which humor was evolving as a subjective passion. Enlightenment thinkers further elevated the intellectuality and, hence, respectability of laughter when they located its origins in the juxtaposition of incongruous elements or circumstances. The principle of incongruity sanitized laughter's "harmful and antipathetic elements" by "making laughter a result of abstract relations in the mind, by turning ridicule into a victimless game" (53, 57). Like other surveys of comic theory, most notably Stuart Tave's The Amiable Humorist, Wickberg's account concludes that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humor had become firmly yoked to the middle-class culture of benevolence and sympathy. 1 In 1827, Thomas Carlyle defined humor's sympathetic intent perfectly when he claimed that the essence of "true humour" was "sensibility," "tender fellow-feeling" and "love" (65). Middle-class Victorians who followed Carlyle's logic believed that humor in civilized society accentuated sympathy, not ridicule. In short, "true humor," as nineteenth-century Britons and Americans understood it, encouraged one to laugh "with" rather than "at" another person or object. By the 1840s, Wickberg contends, the idea of sympathetic laughter was so firmly established in Anglo-American culture that humor was elevated into one of the senses. By outlining the cultural formation behind the sense of humor, Wickberg has made several valuable contributions to historical scholarship. Few authors who have addressed this subject have worked through the thicket of comic theory as competently and skillfully as he has. Readers familiar with the voluminous literature on comic theory will particularly appreciate the manner in which Wickberg has historicized the terms "humor" and "laughter." Prior to now, most studies of the concepts of humor, wit, and the comic have paid little attention to the intellectual and cultural trends that influenced their evolution. No one, certainly, has taken such care to explain the relationship between the sense of humor and the emergence of the modern self. [End Page 152] Wickberg's primary...