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Between Laughter
and Satire
Aspects of the Historical Study of Humour
Conal Condren
Between Laughter and Satire
Conal Condren
Between Laughter
and Satire
Aspects of the Historical Study of Humour
Conal Condren
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-031-21738-8 ISBN 978-3-031-21739-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
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Cover Credit: IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To
J.M.D.
&
M.R.
Acknowledgements
As substantial parts of this work have been developed from previous essays,
I am happy to express my appreciation to the editors and publishers.
Jessica Milner Davis encouraged me to develop my chapter in Satire and
Politics (Palgrave, 2017). Daniel Derrin and Hannah Burrows allowed me
to extend and reorganize my contribution to The Palgrave Handbook of
Humour, History, and Methodology (2021). In both cases I am also grateful
to the publishers, Palgrave Macmillan. A shorter version of the third essay
was originally an invited contribution to Humor: International Journal of
Humor Research (2012). My thanks to the copyright holders Mouton de
Gruyter for permission (excluding open access) to use this, and to Sophie
Schmale for expediting matters. In each case the arguments have been
amended, corrected and expanded and the evidence to support them
increased. Each is now the basis of two chapters.
Additional thanks are due to Jessica Milner Davis, who has long been a
source of kindness and critical consideration; Daniel Derrin provided con-
structive engagement with my ideas; Mark Rolfe is always helpful and
informed, as is Margaret Rose; Richard Fisher has given expert advice on
the bewildering changes in the publishing industry; he and Massih Zekavat
have helped me negotiate them. Delia Chiaro (University of Bologna)
directed me without fuss to reading I should have known, as have Indira
Ghose (University of Fribourg) and Kerry Mullen (RMIT). Mon-Han
Tsai (Chiba University) and Ron Stewart (Daito Bunka University) have
helped with all matters touching Japan and China. Their knowledge has
given me an undeserved garnish of learning. Caroline Cousins commented
on an early draft, and without Ryan Walter (University of Queensland) I
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
might not have got this far. Suzanne Foster (archivist, Winchester College)
speedily answered questions, as did Andrew Riley (Thatcher Papers archi-
vist) at Churchill College, always willing to go beyond the calls of duty.
Andrew, Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre,
Mark Goldie and Piers Brendon are all Churchill College friends from
whom I always learn. This too must be said of my business partners
Damian Grace and Roger Coombs.
Thanks are due also to the Institute of Advanced Studies in the
Humanities, University of Queensland (alas now abolished) for research
travel support. Lina Aboujieb has been a most supportive editor, and the
anonymous reviewers she chose did me the honour of reading the manu-
script with care and critical acumen. As I was not able to take up all their
suggestions for improvement, I hope they think it was still worth all the
effort. Saving the best for last, my wife Averil constructed yet another index.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Laughter and the Study of Humour 5
2 Laughter and the Formation of a Concept of Humour 7
3 The Universality and the Genealogy of Humour 41
Part II Method and Its Limits in the Historical Study of

Humour 67
4 Context and Intention 69
5 Translation and Reception 85
Part III Defining Satire and Satiric Humour 109
6 Definition by Dictionary, Origin and Implications111
7 Definition
by Adjacent Terms, Genre and Satiric
Definition131
ix
x Contents
Part IV Satiric Humour in Popular Culture: The

Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister Television
Satires 149
8 Theory and the Absent Political System151
9 The Satiric Presence of Political Discourse181
10 Conclusion201
Bibliography209
Index233
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
I
This work examines closely related topics to which I was initially attracted
by the challenges of understanding humour in history. The very designa-
tion of something as humorous is still apt to marginalize it. Occupying a
place towards the edges of the academic world, the study of humour can be
of secondary interest even to those who pay it due attention. By the same
token, the historical study of humour has hardly been central to humour
studies, dominated as it has been by research in psychology, linguistics and
sociology. There have been some notable historical studies, to be sure, but
for the most part what has passed for history has been a matter of instru-
mental, even glib genealogy, or the retrospective application of the domi-
nant theories established by psychology and linguistics. The purpose here
is to go further in rectifying an imbalance, not by writing a history of
humour, or humour studies, but by exploring the potential, the problems
and implications of a more thorough historical approach to humour. To do
so is to cast doubt on a good deal that has been taken for granted, not least
by disengaging notions of humour, satire, comedy and laughter that are
too often tumbled together unreflectively—a curious situation given
humour’s recognized potential for encouraging reflexivity. Principally, the
four essays that follow constitute a ground-clearing exercise, the last being
a detailed case study of humour in contemporary history.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_1
2 C. CONDREN
In Part I, I focus on the uncertain intersection between laughter and

what came to be called humour in English from the late seventeenth cen-
tury, and on the genealogical rewriting of that relationship to project
humour as a universal human attribute subject to philosophical scrutiny
since the times of Plato and Aristotle. Whatever it might mean, the fre-
quently proclaimed universality of humour has no historical warrant, but
has aided the creation of an august, promotional lineage for humour stud-
ies. I conclude Chap. 3 by taking Hobbes, a byword for the ‘superiority
theory’ of humour, to exemplify the sort of myth-making involved in aca-
demic genealogies.
As a corollary, in Part II I discuss the methodological difficulties of
studying humour with more historical rigor and sensitivity. The specific
question of definition is put to one side until Part III where I consider
satire, once independent of humour, but now, at least in English, seen
predominantly as subsumed by it, and so definable in various ways. Thus,
the chapters survey the problems in determining satire’s scope and equally
what satire might show about definition. For those indifferent to the mat-
ter, the conclusion might suffice—that for the historian, definition is
unhelpful when dealing with the range of satire. For others, how I get to
that point may be of interest.
Part IV examines the extraordinarily popular Yes Minister and Yes,
Prime Minister political satires, initially televised in Britain in 1980–84
and 1986–88, respectively. They constitute the genesis of a whole subfield
of popular culture and are arguably still the richest example of it—justifica-
tion enough for sustained attention. In these relatively recent works visual
and written forms of satire come together, and the coalescing notions of
humour, comedy and even satire might be fairly reliable because chrono-
logically and culturally constrained. Part IV also shifts from largely theo-
retical arguments about the history of humour to theory in humour, albeit
with an emphasis on theories that have origins in an earlier world. The
argument in Chap. 8 is that the satires carried well-digested political con-
ceptions and beliefs into popular culture as representations of political
reality that have to be taken largely on faith. The satires also had a propa-
gandistic force that their theoretical dimension makes clear. In Chap. 9,
however, we have theories of language that critically inform the manifest
presence of an available aspect of politics. In the end, it is theory itself in
relation to practice that humour helps render problematic. The trajectory
of the whole volume is, however, less chronological than one of increasing
specificity.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Those who work on humour are usually acutely aware that it can be a
means of exploring matters of wider interest. Even the arcane and arid
regions of social science methodology might be grist to humour’s mill.1
And so it is in what follows: from the exemplification of academic myth-
making, and philosophical problems of historiographical inference and
intentionality, to the variable nature and limits of definition, the relation-
ship between political theory and practice and the character of political
argument. One purpose, then, is to illustrate how humour can become a
valuable trace through complex issues that are frequently simplified by
ignoring it. The concomitant risk is that those principally interested in
humour will think that I have strayed too far into alien territories, while
those at home on such terrains will think I have not trodden far enough.
Balance arising from compromised assiduity is always precarious for the
interstitial essayist, and it is particularly so in using satire to explore
definition.
Arising from the mid-1970s, the academic study of humour also pro-
vides a sub-theme, for it is an easily neglected context for what is often said
of humour past and present.2 Indeed, I suggest that the misrepresentation
of the history of humour theory illustrates familiar processes in the politics
of institutionalization. That is, humour theory putatively dating back to
antiquity is analogous to the lineal imagination that created the history of
political thought and of international relations, so garnishing nascent dis-
ciplines with suitably impressive pedigrees. An additional aspect of estab-
lishing an academic presence concerns the often necessary but sometimes
distorting divisions of labour in university aggregations of activity. We
usually call them disciplines, although some are not. The understanding of
satire has not conspicuously been aided by being regarded conventionally
as a literary phenomenon, let alone a genre and therefore the responsibil-
ity of departments of literature, concomitantly to be shunned in political
science, sociology and philosophy. This is certainly less the case than it
used to be, and as I hope to show by example, some interdisciplinarity is a
helpful supplement to overspecialized diets.
Humour studies is necessarily interdisciplinary. How the subject matter
of humour is studied varies considerably, and so that other crucial mark of
an academic identity, a specialized argot, has not been established.
Approaches to humour can be so different that they have little in
1
Lockyer and Weaver, ‘On the Importance of the Dynamics of Humour’, 1–13.
2
Attardo, Encyclopedia, xxxi; Chapman and Foot, It’s a Funny Thing.
4 C. CONDREN
common. The sociological study of networks behind the Weimar night-

club would seem to be a world away from the use of Magnetic Resonance
Imaging to understand cataplexy when stimulated by cartoons. Yet for the
most part those studying humour have shared enough to nurture some of
the attributes of a common enterprise of understanding: humour is taught
in a range of universities, there are research institutes, scholarly journals,
monographs, encyclopaedias, handbooks and volumes of edited essays. In
recent years introductory studies have helped consolidate and display
some sense of intellectual cohesion. There are international conferences,
societies, networks and doctoral students. Sometimes there is even money,
at least an accepted entitlement to apply for it. The falsification of what is
presented as a shared intellectual inheritance stemming from antiquity
may be a condition for such flourishing.
What follows is cohered above all by attention to vocabularies in use
and is best read sequentially as an expression of an approach to a demand-
ing area of study, but the topics are sufficiently distinct for its four parts to
have some independence as related essays within the highly accommodat-
ing essayical form. In keeping with its spirit, there is no pretence to being
definitive. In other respects, the essay is ideal for those of a sceptical dispo-
sition (which I am), for the young not wishing to appear arrogant (which
I am not), for the overworked with less time than they would like (ditto)
or for the older with more experience than they wish to share of failing to
be definitive. As I have noted in the acknowledgements, a good deal of
what follows has been developed from previous iterations of arguments
needing extensive rewriting to create a cohesive whole. The first part,
however, has had a former existence largely in my head, where it was fleet-
ingly the last word.
PART I
Laughter and the Study of Humour

CHAPTER 2
Laughter and the Formation of a Concept

of Humour
I
Discussions of laughter echo from antiquity, and are now widely taken as
encompassing humour. Certainly, the relationship between the two is for-
mally recognized to be asymmetrical. As Alexandre Mitchell briskly states,
humour is an intellectual construct, laughter a physiological response.1
Nevertheless, the differences are often blurred with the collocation laugh-
ter and humour almost suggesting a single topic. Alfred L’Estrange set a
precedent in the late nineteenth century, and more recently G.B. Milner
encapsulated the conventional slippage in his coinage homo ridens: a sense
of humour revealed in laughter helps define homo sapiens.2 Similarly, a
large-scale history of humour can be written by attention to whatever
makes us laugh or smile—another questionable collocation.3 Laughter
1
Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting, 8; see also Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 70–1, 77–9; Glenn,
Laugher in Interaction; Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation; Parvulescu, Laughter:
Notes on a Passion; Leffcourt, Humor The Psychology of Living, 23; Morreall, Taking Laughter
Seriously, 1–3; Eagleton, Humour, 1–3; Nel, ‘He Who Laughs Last’, 1–2; Rosen, ‘Laughter’,
455–6; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 10–13; Trouvain and Truong, ‘Laughter’, 340; Ruch,
‘Psychology of Humor’, 23.
2
L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1–22; Milner, ‘Towards a Semiotic Theory of Humor
and Laughter’, 1–30.
3
Bremmer and Roodenberg, A Cultural History of Humour, 1; Trouvain and Truong,
‘Laughter’, 341.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 7

Switzerland AG 2023
C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_2
8 C. CONDREN
and smiles, as L’Estrange wrote, are the signs of humour.4 The psycholo-
gist D.E. Berlyne distinguishes between the laughter of relief, agreement,
comprehension, triumph, embarrassment and scorn, yet does so in the
context of treating laughter and humour as much the same.5 Apparently in
societies lacking a word for humour, laughter can still be a ‘key’ to it.
Couched in Austinian terms, laughter becomes humour’s perlocutionary
effect.6 Or, the word humour can simply replace laughter, presumably in
the interests of stylistic variety.7 In numerous ways, laughter becomes tes-
timony to humour’s universality. It springs, like Minerva, fully armed from
the brain, a taste for it being ‘fixed to the very nature of man’.8
Affirmations of the universality of humour have amounted almost to an
article of faith in anglophone humour studies, thus Humor: International
Journal of Humor Research simply announces in its scoping statement that
‘humor is an important and universal human faculty’. Such a relentlessly
repeated claim can cover a multitude of sins (Chap. 3), but at least
humour’s being tied to laughter narrows the field to what is ubiquitous
and commonly recognizable. In being promoted as the seventh sense or a
faculty, humour has been made as natural as laughter. It has even been said
to be genetically encoded.9 Yet, as Daniel Derrin has recently remarked,
such beliefs are increasingly vulnerable to historiographical scepticism.10
Indeed, it is the historical plausibility of this broad species of proposition
about laughter and humour’s universality that I wish to examine in these
first two chapters.
A sense of humour entails self-awareness. That is, we can do or say
things that are found amusing, but only apparent self-understanding enti-
tles someone to conclude that we have a sense of humour. The antics of
4
L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1, 14–15; see also Holland, Psychology of Humor, 15–17;
for more caution Ruch, ‘Psychology of Humor’, 21–3.
5
Berlyne, Conflict, 256–9; see also Holland, Psychology of Humor, 16–18, collapsing both
laughter and humour into the comic.
6
Morreall, ‘The Philosophy of Humour’, in Attardo, ed. Encyclopedia, 2, 266; see also
‘The Philosophy of Humor’, in Zalta ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Attardo,
Linguistic Theories, 12–13; Carrell, ‘Historical Views of Humor’, 302, 305.
7
For example, Gruner, The Game of Humour; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule; Pollio, ‘Notes
towards a Field Theory of Humor’, 1, 213–30.
8
L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1, 6; also Guidi, ‘Humor Universals’, 18; Swift,
Intelligencer, 3 (1728), Works, 8, 232.
9
Forabosco, Il settimo senso; Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 300; for more caution, Ruch,
‘Psychology of Humor’, 77–9.
10
Derrin, ‘Introduction’, 11.
2 LAUGHTER AND THE FORMATION OF A CONCEPT OF HUMOUR 9
animals might amuse, but we do not because of our reactions attribute to

them senses of humour. To accredit chimpanzees with such a sense is to
hypothesize self-consciousness from observed behaviour. It is to test the
range of our firmly established concept of humour regardless of whether
the evidence is anecdotal, gathered under controlled conditions, or is ana-
logically inferred from the study of children.11 The precondition for evi-
dence of the requisite reflexivity in humans I take to be the availability of
at least a rudimentary conceptual vocabulary through which a sense of
humour can be isolated, articulated and deposited in the records of human
activity.12 That is, to state what should be obvious: the primary evidence
for any concept lies in the language from which concepts are formed.
Humour is no exception. It is a necessary condition for asserting or deny-
ing that humour is universal. As I shall suggest, however, this condition
appears to have been established in English during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The universality is in part a function of convenient
academic amnesia.
Thus, we need to ask where and when people start reflecting on
humour. If laughter is simply presupposed to be the key to humour, then
discussions of laughter in antiquity can be regarded as an outcome of a
pre-existing phenomenon, what Swift called ‘the thing itself’, and ques-
tions of hard evidence are simply begged.13 Or more specifically, as
Aristotle, discussing tickling, held (disputably) that only the human ani-
mal laughs, so we might conclude, or imply, that he recognized humour’s
universality.14 Yet, in both evolutionary and historical terms, the path, as
Gruner states, from tickling to humour is tortuous and uncertain. The
seismic shift Indira Ghose finds in the history of laughter is, I shall argue,
11
Gamble, ‘Humor in Apes’, 163–79; McGhee, ‘Chimpanzee and Gorilla Humor’,
408–49; Ruch, ‘Psychology of Humor’, 78.
12
Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’, 534–548, for a specific discussion; cf. Ruch,
‘Forward and Overview’, 3–14; on humour’s importance for conceptual reflexivity, Lockyer
and Weaver, ‘On the Importance of the Dynamics of Humour’, 7–11.
13
Swift, Intelligencer, 231; see also, for example, Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 3,
who, starting with a not unreasonably broad notion of humour, write as if it were shared
by others.
14
Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 673a 8–10; Andreoni and Magelhaes, ‘Humor, Laughter
and Rhetoric in the Corporate Environment’, n.p. [2]; Malecka, ‘Humor in the Perspectives
of Logos’, 1, 495–506, 503–5; Grossman, ‘Jokes in Psychotherapy’, 148, although without
specific reference to Aristotle; Darwin apparently identified laughter among chimpanzees;
see Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 3; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 180–1.
10 C. CONDREN
very largely a matter of its conjunction with something quite recent, a

conception of humour.15
Certainly, the functions of laughter (γελαω) in Aristotle’s world can
coincide with the present broad scope of humour.16 L’Estrange noted that
Hesiod had Zeus laughing with delight at fine singing. In the Odyssey
Homer has serving girls laughing together with merriment, although the
construction ‘both’ (τε και) that joins laughter and merriment indicates
that they are quite distinct. More typically, Penelope’s suitor Antinous
bursts out laughing (εκγελασας) while inciting violence.17 Cognate forms
of γελαω designate jesting, buffoonery, mockery (κατα-γελως), the ridicu-
lous (καταλεγεστος), being a sneerer (γελαστες) and doing something for
laughter’s sake (επι γελωτι); ευτραπελια often meant wit, and ευτραπελος
was a man of a pleasant even playful disposition, a characterization redo-
lent of what we call humour. Several words with the root σκω designate
jibes, scoffs and jeering. But of all the terms Liddell and Scott list with the
root γελ, only γελοιος (laughable) is glossed as having a secondary mean-
ing of facetious or humorous, and most are heavily freighted with the
aggression that is so often taken as inimical to humour. It is epitomized in
Antinous’s spontaneous laughter as he relishes the prospect of a humiliat-
ing injury to a beggar. In short, the discussion of laughter was without any
word directly or persistently corresponding to humour. Mitchell’s intel-
lectual construct is, linguistically speaking, missing.
Greek is nevertheless sufficiently suggestive of what would later be
regarded as humour to make the importation of the term into ancient
culture almost inadvertent, even among scrupulous scholars.18 In context,
this may sometimes be harmless enough, but to ignore the absence of a
direct expression for humour, let alone a vocabulary organized around its
conceptual functioning, is hardly a triviality when humour is the object of
our attentions. It is to misrepresent evidence, and for such falsification
only redescriptive invention is required. The sleight of pen in the colloca-
tion laughter and humour easily enough prepares the ground, smuggling
15
Gruner, The Game of Humor, 124; Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 1.
16
Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 279–96; Lombardini, ‘Aristotle on
the Political Virtue of Humor’, 203–30, reconstructing Aristotle’s arguments as
about humour.
17
L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1, 28; Homer, Odyssey, Bk 20, l. 8; Bk 18, l. 35.
18
Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 460, 465, 466, 467; Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek
Culture’, 283, just after warning against the importation of modern categories into antiq-
uity; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 198 for a sense of humour.
humour into the picture when laughter is discussed. Any assumption that
comedy must be an expression of humour has the same effect. Plato’s
critique of laughter and comedy are massaged into modern shape simply
by calling them theories of humour.19 Such peremptory reformulations
might be necessary if Plato’s arguments were otherwise unintelligible, but
they are not, and so it is worth outlining something of his treatment of
laughter without reprocessing it through a later notion of humour.
Laughter features significantly in Phaedo, the early dialogue between
Socrates and his friends in his cell on the occasion of his execution in
399 bce.20 It is also prominent as mockery and self-mockery in the early
Hippias Major in which the question of the beautiful is discussed in part
through fear of appearing ridiculous. Plato addressed laughter most exten-
sively, however, in his late dialogue Philebus, on pleasure. In this he pre-
sented a paradox of laughter: what appears pleasurable and (among
friends) can be harmless, or physically beneficial, is largely a symptom of
the disordered soul. It evidences a self-delusional and malicious sense of
superiority and of passion over reason. To display such disorder on the
stage is to give politically resonant force to the claims to wisdom voiced by
poets and rhetors. True pleasure, he held, is thus not just experienced, it
is, like so much else, fully known only by philosophers. In some dialogues,
as Katarzyna Jazdzewska points out, it is laughter that Plato uses to signal
resistance to philosophical truth,21 though in the Theaetetus (174 c–b), he
briefly entertains the idea that philosophers are to be laughed at, sounding
like Lucian avant la lettre, but harking back to the heavy Socratic irony of
Hippias Major. Generally, Plato’s reliance on tropes such as irony and lito-
tes, associated with or designed to provoke laughter, are devices employed
in leading people towards rationality, a feature of many of his dialogues—
The Republic explicitly defends the practice. Only by the conversion of his
vocabulary into ours can he appear to trip over a contradiction, of using
humour though condemning it.
Similarly, Sir David Ross routinely replaced Aristotle’s γελαω (laughter)
in the Nicomachean Ethics with humour, even adding a sense of humour
19
Shelley, ‘Plato on the Psychology of Humor’, 351–67; cf. Naas, ‘Plato and the Spectacle
of Laughter’, 13–24; Morreall, ‘Humor and Philosophy’, on Plato’s critique of humour
actually going beyond Aristotle’s objections to it, 306; Carroll, Humour, 7; Chao and
Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 1, 10–11.
20
Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 201.
21
Plato, Philebus, 48–50; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s
Symposia’, 191–2.
12 C. CONDREN
to the text (1128a34).22 In what is actually purported to be a historical

survey, Amy Carrell tells us that comedy is Aristotle’s term for humour.
Clearly, we have ways of making him humorous.23 Thus Attic comedy is
misunderstood in being conflated with a putatively more general phenom-
enon. Aristotle’s Rhetoric elliptically discussed jests, buffoonery, the ridic-
ulous and irony, and referred to a lost passage in the Poetics for further
discussion.24 What survives from the Poetics (mainly 1449–1450) is con-
cerned principally with distinguishing the specifically dramatic forms of
comedy and tragedy, both modes of poetic imitation derived from reli-
gious festivals. Aristotle’s attention to the provocation of laughter in com-
edy was to the ridiculous. This he called a type of ugliness. Responsive
laughter, ridicule of those on the stage, was recognition of a failing. As he
states, it was to treat people as worse than ourselves. It was an understand-
ing that made comedy close to what the Romans would call satire, and
implicitly comedy was thus given the ethical purpose and rationalization of
isolating and demeaning the ugly. It is little wonder that Aristophanic
comedy is considered satiric. But for Aristotle’s conception of comedy, no
notion of humour was really required. That is, comedy did not begin as an
expression of humour but, as I shall outline, would prove vital in the for-
mation of a concept of it. There remained, however, later understandings
of comedy that are independent of humour.25
Nevertheless, scattered remarks in Rhetoric, Poetics and Nicomachean
Ethics have been enough to take Aristotle as providing the archetype of the
superiority theory of humour, together with hints of other major theories
of incongruity and release. These are sometimes recognized as
complementary,26 and so it is not surprising that they might seem variously
suggested by Aristotle. For Lisa Perks, all the major conceptions of humour
22
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. Ross, 1128a–1128b; most recently, see also
Eagleton, Humour, 80, 94; Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, quoting Aristotle as refer-
ring to ‘humour’, 10–11, rely on the translation of Roger Crisp (Cambridge University
Press, 2000); cf. the Rackham translation that manages perfectly well without humour.
23
Carrell, ‘Historical Views of Humor’, also quotes him as discussing satire, 306.
24
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1419b–1420.
25
Dante’s Commedia is a comedy because it is a narrative of redemption; on George
Farquhar’s almost humourless conception of comedy, see sect. III.
26
Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms, 40; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 46–9, recognizing them
to be modern.
are explicit in Plato and Aristotle, so modern scholars might learn to com-
bine them as flexibly as they did.27
Each theory has also been given a later, though not necessarily more
plausible, founding father. Like Greek, Latin had no direct word for the
modern humour, but had a vocabulary with affinities to what in English is
now subsumed by that portmanteau term. Umor referred to dampness
and moisture, but as in Greek, the crucial notion, usually with the same
associations of hostility, was risus (laughter). In its ambit are found facetia
(jest or wit), hilaritas (cheerfulness or merriment) and sometimes the
Greek loan words, comedia and ironia. This gathering of terms has proved
encouragement enough to treat risus as an expression of humour. Yet both
Cicero and Quintilian need creative paraphrase or modernizing translation
for them to be accommodated to any theory of humour, for each remained
tied to Platonic and Aristotelian concerns, explicating the use and misuse
of laughter in persuasion or dramatic performance. Each assumed it to
have an aggressive function requiring justification and decorum or urbani-
tas in its stimulation, and aware that its provocation involved some devia-
tion from the expected. Latin terms such as hilaritas and facetia were used
by them almost incidentally.28 Thus the awkwardness of Attardo’s asser-
tion that Quintilian provides the first coherent treatise of humour, though
it was not actually about humour. Even for this ambiguous accolade
Quintilian’s discussion of risus has first to be rendered ‘humor’.29 Later
commentators on Aristotle’s Poetics such as Giangiorgio Trissino, whom
Attardo helpfully cites and quotes, exhibit no more than intimations of
what we call humour in dealing with laughter, its causes and the comedic
stage.30 To translate them as referring to humour is to create a theoretical
focus of attention from something close to thin air. It also sits ill with
Attardo’s acceptance that laughter and humour are actually distinct.
27
Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humour, 19–25; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 5, for the
three great theories of humour: superiority, incongruity and release; Morreall ed., The
Philosophy of Laughter and Humor; Taking Humor Seriously, sets them out in chronological
order; Perks, ‘Ancient Roots of Humor Theory’, 119–32; see also Chao and Westbrook,
‘Introduction’, 1.
28
Cicero, De oratore, Bk 2, sect. 58, 235–7; Quintilian, Institutia oratia, Bk 6, chap. 3;
Perks, ‘Ancient Roots of Humour Theory’, for persistent paraphrases importing humour
into the texts.
29
Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 29–30; Linguistics of Humor, 19; Waisanen, ‘A Funny
Thing Happened’, 29–52, is not so reflective.
30
Trissino, Le Sei divisione della poetica, Sesta, 126–7.
14 C. CONDREN
In the following chapter I shall outline the significance of such genea-

logical fabrications in the history of theorizing humour, for they help
explain otherwise untenable articles of faith. In the meantime, if philoso-
phers like Aristotle, Cicero and later even Hobbes (putatively the superior-
ity theorist of humour par excellence) never mentioned humour, we need
to reconsider previous understandings of laughter, and the stages at which
humour gradually takes on the sort of modern conceptual functions that
make the very idea of having a sense of humour an expressed possibility.
II
Presupposing the universality of humour is, then, a condition for falsifying
the record, and requires bypassing more than two millennia of reflection
that treated the complexities of laughter differently. There were three
principal strands to this, but I need to concentrate on outlining the first.
This concerns the denigration constitutive of ‘superiority theory’, some-
times styled aggression, hostility or disparagement theory. It roughly cor-
responds to Berlyne’s laughter of triumph and scorn, and is what I shall
call rhetorical laughter, for although it extended beyond accounts of per-
suasion it is in rhetorical theory that it is most discussed, and in political
and religious rhetoric that it is persistently evidenced. Expressed at its sim-
plest, such laughter helped unify an audience with the speaker by subject-
ing others to ridicule, isolating victims as a means to some persuasive or
socially consolidating end, and in cultures like that of ancient Greece
exhibiting acute sensitivity to shame, laughter was a powerful weapon of
control or exclusion. As I have noted, much of its vocabulary was decid-
edly negative.31 Consequently, laughter might indicate argumentative suc-
cess, but for centuries it was regarded with ambivalence or outright
hostility. It would come to be associated with sin, folly, licentiousness and
devilry.32
This ethos of denigration was effectively personified in Democritus and
(especially as elaborated by Lucian) Demonax, the laughing philoso-
phers—brutal and unsympathetic castigators of human folly.33 Heraclitus,
31
Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 286–9; Zekavat, Satire, Humour,
for a survey of the issues of identity formation.
32
See for example, Quintilian, Institutio, Bk 6, chap. 3, 7; Ghose, Shakespeare and
Laughter, 1, 27–8.
33
Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, 93, 90–112.
who wept in sympathy for humanity, provided the crucial counterpoint.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) would popularize this long-standing
topos of laughter or tears for the human condition. It did little to palliate
laughter’s reputation. Montaigne’s preference for the disposition of
Democritus, his scornful humeur, was precisely because laughing is
disdainful and rightly damning, ‘we laugh at the worthless [sans prix]’.34
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) was less severe, taking Democritus as try-
ing to ‘laugh the times into goodness’, but thought him ‘as deeply hypo-
chondric’ as the bewailing Heraclitus.35
Implicitly this assessment assumed a mean between the two reactions,
and indeed, Aristotle had held that laughter could find an acceptable if
precarious place between boorishness and buffoonery. So, from antiquity,
what Rosen refers to as a fundamental cause of anxiety in Greco-Roman
culture had been variously subject to the uncertain control of decorum.36
Plato, recognizing that it might have some benefit, had sought to restrict
laughter to fit activities in his late dialogue, The Laws, and the mythic
satyrs had provided suitable risible targets decorating Attic domestic pot-
tery. Stephen Halliwell has stressed the importance in Greece of festive
occasions on which playful laughter was shared and with luck contained.37
The theatre staging the provocation of largely rhetorical laughter was one
such place of lasting importance; but so too was the assembly. The sympo-
sium with its eating and drinking was an unreliable one,38 and, according
to Plutarch, the Spartan mess hall was another where youngsters went to
be toughened up by insult and ridicule. Effectively it was bullying as a
form of educative play.39 The very predication of some laughter as play, or
a game (in one sense of παιδια), at once recognized aggressive norms and
34
Montaigne, ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’, Essays, 221; the French specifically refers to
mocking here, not laughing, but the context makes clear that laughter is mockery.
35
Browne, Religio medici, 164.
36
Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 458; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’,
187; Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachaea, 1128a10–1128b10; Cicero, De oratore, Bk 2, sect. 58,
237–8; Parvulescu, Laughter, 29–57, following Norbert Elias; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule,
189–94; Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 283–5.
37
The depiction of risible satyrs constitutes a large part of what Mitchell discusses as vase-
painting humour: Greek Vase-Painting; see also Naas, ‘Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter’,
at length; Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 285, 290–1.
38
Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 187–207, contrasting Plato
and Xenophon in their attitudes to laughter.
39
Plutarch (46–119 ce?), Parallel Lives, Lycurgus, sect. 12, 237–41; Rosen, ‘Laughter’,
for the uncertain restraint of the symposium.
16 C. CONDREN
modified or rationalized them.40 As Jazdzewska has illustrated from

Plutarch’s Convivium, the rhetorical functions of laughter could extend to
mitigating or disguising hostility, sometimes signalling a potentially
offensive comment.41 It is a possibility that further complicates the niceties
of laughter and its control. Not surprisingly, Cicero and Quintilian had
both given much attention to the contours of oratorical propriety as con-
ditions for persuasive effect in a law court or assembly. Centuries later, the
bedroom could also be a safe zone. Browne would have no qualms about
laughing himself awake in the privacy of his bedchamber after the jests and
conceits imagined within the confines of his own dreamed comedies.42
Yet even when justified, wrote George Puttenham in the sixteenth cen-
tury, there remained ‘undecencie’ in laughing. The Christian emperor
Philippus Arabicus (204–49), he adds, was rightly rebuked by his son for
doing so in public.43 The witnessed laugh of an emperor could forewarn
of tyranny. No man, Samuel Butler stated, fully laughs without barring his
teeth. Jesus was commonly held never to have laughed. He was a pattern
for a theologically grounded hostility to laughter among those deemed
puritans, with one consequence that their opponents would resort to the
provocation of laughter in derisive criticism.44 In religious iconography
Jesus’ sadness is persistently reinforced, although, if only once for Leonardo
(?), he is a chuckling infant, while Mary smiles enigmatically.45
Indeed, it is because we take for granted a prior or underlying sense of
humour that we can treat laughing and smiling as closely aligned expres-
sions of it. Lacking that presumption, smiling, like weeping, could provide
a contrast.46 Some sort of oppositional relationship between the two seems
implicit in Antonio’s reflection (Merchant of Venice, act 1, sc.2) that while
40
Παιδια and its cognate forms were much associated with the young and their education.
To translate playful laughter as a play frame for humour is thus suggestive but a little forced.
41
Jazdzewska, ‘Plutarch’s Convivium’, 75, 79.
42
43
Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 291; the Emperor may not have formally
converted; Samuel Butler, quoted in Farley Hills, The Benevolence of Laughter, 8.
44
Basu, ‘Levelling Laughter’, 95–113.
45
The recently attributed terracotta sculpture ca. 1465 is in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London; Nel, ‘He Who Laughs Last’, 4–6, on the contrast between the Synoptic
Gospels and Gnostic texts.
46
For a discussion of the differences, Parvulescu, Laughter, 23–5; Pollio, ‘Notes towards a
Field Theory’, 222; Trouvain and Truong, ‘Laughter’, 341; Attardo, Linguistics of Humor,
raises a passing doubt about the relationship, but regards it as beyond the scope of a study of
humour (17–18).
some laugh ‘like parrots at a bag-piper’ others of ‘vinegar aspect’ will ‘not
show their teeth in way of a smile’, no matter how laughable a jest may be
(act 1, sc.1). Explicitly, and sharing persistent attitudes linking laughter to
vulgarity, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1763) asserted that smiling evidenced
love, laughter disdain. It was ‘illiberal and ill-bred’. A gentleman never
laughed, for ‘it is the characteristic of folly’ fit for the mob.47
Certainly, amusements stimulating smiling and delight were com-
mended from antiquity onwards. A reader, as Thomas Wilson argued, is
rapidly wearied if not delighted.48 Again, however, laughter was apt to
provide a negative contrast. For Sir Philip Sidney, it was close to being a
contrary: ‘Delight hath joy in it’, laughter was only ‘scornful tickling’,
often cruel, unfitting and sometimes painful; rarely do we hear of ‘delight-
ful laughter’.49 Its associations with joy and simple merriment, central to
what we have come to call humour are, then, the exception, not the norm.
To be sure, Shakespeare has Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
remember joyous laughter at sails billowed by the wanton wind (act 2, sc.
1). To illustrate his unaffected nature, Don John says in Much Ado about
Nothing (act 2, sc. 1) that he laughs when he is merry, but such associa-
tions are rare and Don John is a villain, made merry by villainy.
Shakespeare’s Falstaff, for example, is now largely carried on wafts of
benign laughter. Since the early twentieth century he has been depicted as
‘simply and naturally unmoral’, an English Bacchus of ‘broad rollicking
humour’, of blissful rejoicing humour celebrating freedom.50 It is a view
familiar from stage and scholarship alike.51 Certainly he carries traces of a
festive fool voicing a comic inversion of important themes, but innocent
good humour is a long way from Shakespeare’s hulk of riot and iniquity.52
It is unlikely that Shakespeare would have expected much sympathy for
47
Quentin Skinner has thoroughly explored this theme; see for example, ‘Why Laughing
Mattered in the Renaissance’, 418–47; ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’,
114–76, on Lord Chesterfield, 150, 174; see also Buckley, The Morality of Laughter, 54,
quoting Chesterfield (letter dated 9 March 1748) at length; Chesterfield, Letters, 4, 1,
cxii, p. 303.
48
Thomas Wilson (1525–81), The Art of Rhetoric, cited in Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 84.
49
Sidney (1554–86), An Apology for Poetry (1595), 47–8.
50
Mabie, Shakespeare, 237–8; Andrew Bradley, The Rejection of Falstaff (1902) discussed
by Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 10–14.
51
Rackin, Stages of History, 38–42; Tave, The Amiable Humorist, for more detail; cf.
Cazamian, Development of English Humour, 41.
52
Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, 17–35; cf. Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter,
149, 154–60; Derrin, ‘Comic Character’, 139–41, 146–7.
18 C. CONDREN
Falstaff when the fat man was rebuffed by young King Henry: ‘I know
thee not, old man. / Fall to thy prayers’ (Henry IV Pt 2, act 5, sc. 5); even
less that the icy rejection indicated any authorial ambivalence about the
new monarch.53 To have embraced Falstaff would have marked complicity
in corruption and incipient tyranny, as Shakespeare makes abundantly
clear.54 Corbyn Morris (1710–69), writing of wit and humour in the mid-
eighteenth century, understood the point well enough. Our pleasure in
Falstaff is distinct from Shakespeare’s character, for we can overlook the
moral turpitude essential to his creation.55 Only his gaiety, wrote Dr
Johnson, makes Falstaff’s malignant and contemptible licentiousness
acceptable on stage.56 The confusion of our enjoyment of a riotous figure
with historicity is aided by overlooking the altered resonances of laughter,
and this in turn blunts the dramatic point of Falstaff’s banishment. It
announces the emergence of heroic virtue from the dubious polarities of
Eastcheap and the court. The confusions involved in the domestication of
Falstaff were common from the late eighteenth century, and the trans-
formed figure became a vehicle for the valorization of benign humour and
benevolent laughter by the early nineteenth.57 Johnson’s sense of a miti-
gating mirth intimates what was to come. At the end we have Bradley’s
conversion of malignant licentiousness into the celebratory laughter of
liberty.
We might then, better turn to other sources of delight in search of
humour than to laughter that floated over time largely under a cloud. Yet
the fundamental rationale of denigration gave rhetorical laughter instru-
mental salience as a weapon in satire, political discourse and religious
polemic from antiquity onwards. So, vitriolic mirth and jests were casuisti-
cally justified in the apologia for the seven Marprelate tracts (1588–89) as
necessities in a war against the evils of episcopacy, and as part of a
53
Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 154.
54
On hearing of Henry’s ascent to the crown (Henry IV 2, act 5. sc. 4), Falstaff behaves in
a quintessentially tyrannous way. He expects to be able to do as he pleases, and is happy to
steal horses to get more quickly to the king so that his own effective reign will start the
sooner. Rejoicing in cronyism, he is merry at the thought of revenge upon the Chief Justice,
whose courageous integrity Henry will reward, so demonstrating his own fitness for office.
The contrasts could hardly be more pointed (cf. also Cloten’s merriness at the thought of
revenge in Cymbeline).
55
Morris, An Essay, 25–7, 33–4.
56
Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 12.
57
Tave, Amiable Humorist, 118–37.
scaturient response, London wits were mobilized to retaliate in kind.58

During the Civil War period the Leveller Richard Overton would echo
Marprelate targeting oppressive priests in general through his ‘Comick
and … Satyrical stile’.59 Overall, laughter might be at once both unsavoury
and an irresistible critical reaction to some aspect of the world. ‘To laugh,
were want of Goodness and of Grace, / And to be grave exceeds all Pow’r
of Face.’60
Second, the most obvious aspect of laughter is its often mysterious and
wayward physicality that indeed can exceed ‘all Pow’r of Face’, bringing
forth air and noise, a ‘corporeal involuntary affection’.61 It is at the ‘inter-
face of biology and culture’ and has widely been accepted as physically
beneficial.62 But an unhealthy side to it was also acknowledged. In antiq-
uity, laughter could be taken to indicate insanity. It could be given variable
meaning in the face of death and disease. It might ridicule the afflicted, or
the affliction itself to diminish suffering, hence perhaps its reverberations
around Socrates’ death cell.63 Rarely, what is now regarded as the neuro-
logical disorder of pathological laughter could occasion death. Both
Chrysippus (206 bce) and Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) were held to have
died from a surfeit of laughter. Predominantly, however, it was physical
benefit that attracted attention. Robert Burton (The Anatomy of
Melancholy, 1621) would treat laughter as a remedy for melancholia.
This curative potential placed laughter at odds with its animadverted
rhetorical functions, and provides some grounding for the nexus of laugh-
ter and what we now call humour. What aided health could be joyous and
unabashed. The French physician Laurent Joubert was apparently the first
to explore the physical benefits of laughter in his Traité du ris (1579), but
it is with another physician, François Rabelais (ca. 1494–1553) with whom
beneficial laughter is more famously associated. Although writing what
was regarded as satire, he looked beyond denigration.64 His readers should
58
Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 145–8; more generally, Murray, ‘Dissolving into
Laughter’, 27–47; Morton, ‘Laughter as Polemical Act’, 107–32.
59
William Walwyn (1649), quoted in Basu, ‘Levelling Laughter’, 112–13.
60
Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, lines 35–6.
61
Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 70–1.
62
Kozintsev, The Mirror of Laughter, 80.
63
Kazantzidis and Tsoumpra, ‘Morbid Laughter’, 273–97; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato
and Xenaphon’s Symposia’, 201.
64
Urquhart and Matteux, Works of F. Rabelais, 1, xxvii, cxxix-cxxxij; Williams, ‘Embodied
Laughter’, 298–308; Rayfield, ‘Rewriting Laughter’, 80–2.
20 C. CONDREN
regard laughter as a natural antidote to sorrow. The text, as Alice Williams

puts it, could be a ‘therapeutic artefact’.65 But, reader be warned, Rabelais’s
early translator Thomas Urquart also allegedly died of laughter on hearing
that Charles II had been put back on the throne in 1660. Faith in laughter’s
benefits was widespread, hence also a title for expanding volumes of face-
tiae during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Laugh and be fat.
Or, an antidote against melancholy.66 Early modern anatomy paid more
balanced attention to muscular and pulmonary involvement and what
might be inferred from them about the body’s functioning.67 Laughter
was also recognized to be a reaction of spontaneous release, as when old
friends unexpectedly meet, or babies chuckle.68
Third, by extension, the release was sometimes seen as also socially
valuable, having a place in the ritual calendar—the slender basis for
Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque inversion of, or escape from, oppres-
sion. Comedy had originated in religious festivals, and the attention to fit
occasions and locations for laughter in ancient Greece has already been
noted. A concern with controlling laughter’s aggression persisted from
Rome through to medieval Christendom. Parodic ecclesiastical and secu-
lar ceremonies survived as occasions for mockery and laughter for many
generations, but to what end, if there was any singular end over such a
long span of time, is another matter. Some customs seem to have been
specific to élite circles, while others may have survived only because they
dwindled into occasions for having fun, and might stimulate community
cohesion and trade.69 Certainly, however, the theatre remained, as it had
been in antiquity a location in which the laughter might be contained and
relished, to the extent that attention to the commedia del arte or the the-
atrical history of England and France can give a disproportionate emphasis
to festive laughter per se.70 Yet in this context it is worth distinguishing
laughter in the plays from the sort of laughter they might have occasioned
in performance. We know little about the latter, certainly not enough to
merge both into evidence of one sort of, or function for, laughter.
65
Williams, ‘Embodied Laughter’, 305–6.
66
Anon., Laugh and be fat, 1700; the expression was in use throughout the century.
67
John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, 104–26; Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 52–6; Rayfield,
‘Rewriting Laughter’, 82–3.
68
Castelveltro, Poetica d’Aristotele, pt 2, pp. 34b–62.
69
Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense, 118–20; Roud, The English Year, 237, 298–300;
Hole, English Custom, 30, 83.
70
Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, at length.
Nevertheless, as I shall outline below, the English stage was a crucible for
the formation of an initial conception of humour, forged of comedy and
laughter.
In the meantime, Geoffrey Chaucer can bring together these mingled
themes of laughter in the absence of a concept of humour. In the
Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) he creates a pilgrimage as a moving space
for moments of festive laughter intended to foster the physical and spiri-
tual well-being of being merry,71 but the laughter provoked is largely rhe-
torical, isolating fictive victims to be ridiculed. ‘The Miller’s Tale’, told by
a pilgrim in his cups, is the obvious case: it is a comedy in which an elderly
carpenter is cuckolded by his young wife, Alison, and her lover Nicholas,
and in which her surplus admirer Absolon is crudely humiliated. It is typi-
cal of what would later be seen as Chaucerian humour. But Chaucer’s
Reeve, who had been a carpenter, is unimpressed by the tale and calls it
‘ribaudye’, using the recent French loan word as an abstract noun to refer
to the ‘nice cas’ at which other ‘folk hadde laughen’.72 In revenge he pro-
vides more of the same in which the victim is a dishonest miller. Even
passing expressions, such as The Wife of Bath’s recollection of once being
as ‘joly as a pye’, seem to resonate with humour.73 Yet it is only later that
ribald would become an adjective qualifying the humour for which
Chaucer is now renowned, and words like jolly and merry become expres-
sions of it. In Middle English also, cheer might refer to any mood or coun-
tenance, with Chaucer, for example, referring variously to ‘angry’, ‘pitous’,
‘drery’ and ‘ful trouble cheere’.74 Only later with its cognates cheery and
cheerful would it become as firmly associated with humour as the jollity
of a pie.
Thus far, then, I have outlined the predominant attitudes to laughter
that were established and refined from antiquity in European society.
Sometimes tensile and discordant, sometimes harmonious, they lacked a
cohering concept of humour. To assimilate them to one, to make them
expressive of it is certainly question-begging, and at the least a remarkably
simplistic abridgment of complicated and often obscure patterns of cul-
tural practice. A fortiori, if humour is taken to be a positive phenomenon
71
Maddern, ‘It is full Merry in Heaven’”, 21–38, see Chap. 4.
72
Chaucer ‘Reeve’s Prologue’, Canterbury Tales, lines 3866, 3855, 55; ‘Introduction’ to
‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, line 324, 148.
73
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, line 456, 80.
74
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ‘Summoner’s Tale’, line 2158, 98; ‘Clerk’s Tale’, line 141,
102; lines 514, 465, 106.
22 C. CONDREN
to be celebrated—for some humour theorists it is almost by definition

benign75—then it would seem imperative not to project a prior concept of
humour that laughter expresses, or simply conflate the two.
Overall, however, during the later seventeenth century, increasingly
explicit attention was paid to innocent merriment. Importantly, however,
this was sometimes independent of the possible contaminations with
laughter itself.76 The word humour began to be used in conjunction with
jollity, cheerfulness, jesting or newer coinages such as raillery and banter;
and spasmodically, then commonly, it became associated with laughter as
humour acquired the general and accommodating range it now enjoys. In
this flow of semantic change, laughter’s connotations were also altered.
The general shape of these shifts in usage and concept formation may be
familiar but still need some unravelling. Starting at a mid-point is
convenient.77
III
In an essay originally published in 1709, the Earl of Shaftsbury
(1671–1713) treated raillery as a kind of humour, yet did so with a casual-
ness suggesting that the usage was familiar.78 So too, his friend Joseph
Addison (1672–1719): humour is diverse and like wit difficult to define
being best understood through contrast; but regardless of its guise,
humour makes us laugh. He is careful, however, to differentiate a socially
acceptable true from a false humour. The distinction immediately modifies
any disapproval of laughter. True humour appears serious yet makes us
laugh, and false humour always laughs while those around are serious. He
cites Poet Laureate Thomas Shadwell (1642–92) who has ‘an empty Rake,
in one of his plays … surprised to hear one say that breaking of Windows
was not Humour’.79 The immediate issue is how and why this expanded
meaning of humour embracing some laughter might have come about,
and why the change appears to have originated in England.
75
Drever and Wallerstein, Dictionary of Psychology, 123; for a measured historical critique
of benign violation theory, Derrin ‘Comic Character’, 133–50.
76
Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing, 2, 24–5.
77
See, for example, Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, at length.
78
Ashley Cooper, Sensus communis, in Characteristicks, 1. sect. 1, 40–1.
79
Addison, The Spectator, 35, 10 April 1711, 128–31; this could be a reference to William
Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), act 5, sc. 2.
We are taken to the fate of humoral medical theory and what Louis
Cazamian called one of the most fascinating transformations in the history
of language.80 Familiar as this is, the chronology remains imprecise.
Theories of the bodily humours (blood, yellow and black bile and phlegm)
date from antiquity in Greek, Latin and Arabic works, and vernacular ref-
erence to the humours as giving rise to specific dispositions proved long-
standing. Chaucer was certainly familiar with some medical and humoral
theory. It informs The Book of the Duchess and in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, for
example, he casually refers to ‘humour malencolik’.81 By the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries the humours are made common currency in
popular books on herbal lore and medicine. They helped vulgarize the
more cautious use of humoral theory in professional medical texts in which
it was held that humoral balance provided only some of the explanatory
possibilities for any given disposition. Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) cal-
culated that there were thousands of explanatory variables. Sanctorius
Sanctorius (ca. 1600) (mis)calculated that there were some 80,084 equi-
probable combinations of explanatory potential.82
In the light of such conclusions, professional reliance on humoral the-
ory by the early modern era may have been less than vernacular references
to the humours might suggest. Nevertheless, in the popular writings of a
number of European languages, humoral theory had a lively independence
resulting in diverging, but sometimes conjoined, oversimplifications. The
fluidity of the humours was apt to flow into the putative consequences of
mood and disposition.
When Montaigne contrasted the humours of Democritus and
Heraclitus, he was averting the character or philosophical persona of each
in giving a consistent reaction to the human condition. In contrast,
humours could also designate instability of mood, hence George
Chapman’s An Humerous Dayes Myrth (1597, 1599), a work that cer-
tainly associates humour with comedy and mirth, but the humour is
mood, character and, initially the liquid heavy in the sky.83 Ben Jonson’s
comedies Everyman in and out of his Humour (1599, 1600) are in the
same idiom, explorations of mood and dominating disposition under the
80
Cazamian, Development of English Humour, 160.
81
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, line 1375, 30.
82
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 175–6, n.120 for the miscalculations, 241–2; the
humours are quite marginal to Maclean’s comprehensive study of Renaissance Latin medi-
cal theory.
83
Chapman, A Pleasant Comedy.
24 C. CONDREN
rubric of the humours, quite distinct from any ad hoc eccentricity that we
might find amusing.84 The word humour is also scattered throughout
Shakespeare’s work. As a verb, its meaning was as it remains—to
accommodate the foibles or character of another. As a noun, it rarely refers
directly to liquid, occasionally to merriment. Predominately, however, it
specifies mood, less often a fixed disposition; sometimes it may point to
either, as when Brutus asks rhetorically, ‘must I stand and crouch under
your testy humour?’ (Julius Caesar, act 4, sc. 3). In Cymbeline Belarius
says of Cloten that ‘his humour was nothing but mutation’, though from
bad to worse (act 4, sc.2). By extension, however, humour signifying dis-
positional stability aligns it with the unavoidable or incontrovertible nature
of something, as in Nym’s favoured phrase in both Henry V and The Merry
Wives of Windsor, ‘there’s the humour of it’. The partially comic character
of Nym is much given to the word humour. But although the word is
sometimes found in the ambit of what we see as humour, Shakespeare’s
usage is at one with that of his contemporaries in perpetuating and tum-
bling together the vernacular remains of humoral theory on the stage.
Sir Thomas Browne, as a professional physician, may have been less reli-
ant on it in his daily round, but he too captures the double sense of
humours still in play by referring to the proper humours of the multitude,
‘that is, their fits of folly and madness’.85 Shadwell, in his preface to The
Humorists, would also blend the different senses, echoing Jonson by call-
ing humours biases of the mind, one of which could be capriciousness.
The play also illustrates the predominant meaning of humour’s cognate,
humourist. Throughout early modernity, it was central to rhetorical laugh-
ter, as it designated an object of derision; hence John Donne’s dismissal of
the ‘motly humourist’ in his first Satyre.86 It had long been accepted that
there were limits to the licit scope of derision. It was held to be pointless
to ridicule those whose condition was inescapable, or who were irredeem-
ably evil, and so there could be an implicit casuistic justification for deri-
sion in censure and reform. Even in comedy amusement could be
subordinated to a claimed moral responsibility in provoking laughter but
84
The Quarto title pages indicate original performances in 1598. Both were revised for the
Folio edition of Jonson’s works in 1616; Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 19 for Jonson’s use
being both modern (no evidence is given) and tied to humoral theory as well.
85
86
Shadwell, The Humourists, ‘Preface’; Donne, ‘Satyre I’, in Poems, 129; Butler, ‘The
Humourist’.
only at fitting targets.87 It was the incubus of Aristotelian justification that

could make comedy akin to satire.
That people might be in or of a good humour places the potentially
ambiguous word on the cusp of its modern relationship with jollity. A mal-
leable term was open to further employment. Little more was needed than
a casual collapse of a cause (mood or disposition) into its putative effect to
give us something of the modern meaning. There is an early indication of
a usage in Italian with the Accademia degli Umoristi, established in Rome
in 1603. It was one of a number of clubs for literati (such as the Lunatici
and Estravaganti) self-consciously announcing their own eccentricity.88
John Evelyn (1620–1706) noted its formalized oddities but emphasized
its value in maintaining the purity of the language.89 It also had an empha-
sis on burlesque suggestive of humour’s later meanings. Italian (Tuscan)
had been fashionable in England from the sixteenth century, and it is pos-
sible that humour and its cognates had some similarities of conceptual
expansion in both languages. Robert Escarpit also notes a fugitive French
distinction (1645) between humeur and l’esprit (wit), from which appar-
ently nothing came.90 It is, then, on English vocabulary that I shall con-
centrate, in considering the empirical grounding for the putative
universality of humour.
From the late sixteenth century, English theatre, as noted, was a locus
for dramatizing humoral types and fickle conduct; and in advertising
uncertain shifts in humour’s meaning, it provided an institutional context
for terms that were gradually being found in sufficient proximity to give a
modern if limited concept of humour. William Cavendish (1593–1676)
penned a play sketch (ca. 1655–60) that conjoined humour and merri-
ment, though the humour was the consistent disposition of an otherwise
protean rogue.91 His theatrically innovative The Humorous Lovers (1667)
also illustrates the concentration of possibilities. It displays the risible
humour of those in love, or who are victims of a ‘loving humour’—a
humour with its own language, sometimes exhibiting ‘a touch of English’.92
All references to laughter are to deriding those in love. Yet, the almost
87
Cicero, De oratore, Bk 2, sect. 58, 237; Farquhar, Discourse Upon Comedy, 20–3.
88
Escarpit, L’Humor, 18.
89
Evelyn, Diaries, 1, 17 February 1645; his later reference to Sir Edward Baynton as a
‘humorous old knight’ (16 July 1654) probably only means odd.
90
Escarpit, L’Humour, 19.
91
Cavendish, A Pleasante and Merrye Humor off a Roge.
92
Cavendish, Humorous Lovers, 17, 12.
26 C. CONDREN
farcical comedy in which one character, a ‘walking pyramid’, moves only

under a growing mountain of clothes and blankets, makes the title redo-
lent of humour as it was probably already beginning to be understood.93
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), who blamed Cavendish’s wife Margaret for
this silliest of plays, mostly uses the word humour in the conventional
ways. It crops up more than 150 times in the Diary, predominantly refer-
ring to mood, but indicating disposition or character type some thirty
times. Context does not always allow a clear distinction: ‘I do love the
humour of the jade very well.’94 Rarely there is a loose medical reference,
as when his eye is full of humour.95 This pattern of usage is much like that
found in Shakespeare’s corpus.
Occasionally, however, in recording theatrical performances, there is a
further, prescient understanding of the word. The casual informality of
Pepys’s style is another indication that the newer usage was already more
widely spread.96 The English Monsieur is said to have ‘much mirth in it as
to that particular humour’, and on an earlier staging he had found it ‘very
witty’. Humour as cause has become an effect (mirth) and humour is at
least associated with wit. Another play, dismissed as tedious, nevertheless
has ‘many good humours in it’—where humours might just mean types of
character.97 Most significant is his appreciation of Heywood’s Love’s Mistress
(1640). He commended its ‘good humours’ by which he meant the range
of comedic tricks and tropes that delighted him. Not least was ‘a good jeer’
(jest) that treated the Trojan myth as ‘a common country tale’.98 So, a
humour is close to meaning a burlesque, and its associations are with stud-
ied performance not physiological imbalance. ‘Among other humours’, he
later wrote, were verses by Mr Evelyn that for their apt play on ‘may and
can … did make us all die almost with laughing’.99 ‘Among other humours’
might indicate that Pepys is using humour as a general term for whatever
93
Cavendish, Humorous Lovers, 28, 17 for the cynical Col. Boldman, a natural philosopher
who claims to have squared the circle, becoming the butt of his own wit in falling for a
widow; how far this is a joke at Hobbes’s expense is unclear. He had been rumoured to be
getting married in 1654; see Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 67, 187, 189.
94
Pepys, Diary, March 7, 1666/7.
95
Pepys, Diary, May 23, 1666.
96
The whole work was written in Thomas Sheldon’s shorthand (tachygraphy), and the
system printed in 1645 was designed for university students and became popular. Pepys’s use
of it would have been for speed and convenience more than secrecy and so it is a reasonable
indication of usage he could take for granted.
97
Pepys, Diary, 8 Dec. 1668, 7 April 1666; 2 May 1668.
98
Pepys, Diary, 2 March 1660/1.
99
Pepys, Diary, 10 Sept. 1665; Evelyn’s own Diary has no entry for the date.
might amuse, but the possibility is as fleeting as the manic laughter of

friends on a joyous night in the plague year. What is more certain is that
here he is using humour as virtually synonymous with jest or wit.
Shortly after, John Dryden (1631–1700), who had revised Cavendish’s
Humorous Lovers for publication in 1677, proved determined to appropri-
ate wit at the expense of humour in his disputes with Shadwell, Dryden’s
successor as poet laureate. Dryden denied Shadwell even acquaintance
with wit, tarring him with the brush of dull senselessness, and humour as
a bias of the mind, which is tinted with vulgarity.100 Margaret Cavendish,
however, in her eulogistic account of her ‘thrice noble’ husband twice
commended his plays specifically for their wit, humour and satire. She
draws no clear difference between these qualities but implicitly contradicts
any exclusive association of humour with the lower orders.101 She also
occasionally seems to distinguish humour from disposition.
In sum, by the mid-seventeenth century, if not earlier, a subordinate
meaning for humour was being established by its variable proximity to
words like wit, merriment, mirth, jest and jeer. Nevertheless, it is not con-
ceptually prominent and crucially it probably stops short of becoming a
general classifier for such terms, so enabling them to function as the rough
semantic field with which we are familiar. Laugh and be fat may be typical.
Its subtitle at the end of the seventeenth century makes reference to comic
intrigues and ‘Pleasant humours, Frolics, Fancies, Epigrams, Satyrs and
Divertisements’, but it is unclear quite what the ‘humours’ are. The sub-
titles change and it is only in later editions, for example that of Salem
1799, that there is reference to ‘humourous jests &c’. The collocation,
although indicating that not all jests were humorous, may have been
because the newer meaning of humour and its cognates was not well
established, at least in New England. The occasional use of ‘humour’
within the text remains true to the older meanings of disposition and
mood.102 Indeed, in the seventeenth century, where we might now expect
humour to be used, it can be striking by its absence.103 William Congreve
100
Dryden, Mac Fleckno, 238–43.
101
Margaret Cavendish, Life, 202, 155, 318.
102
Anon., Laugh and be fat, 1700, cf. 1799.
103
In portraying a number of characters, ‘Clown’, ‘City wit’, ‘Court wit’, ‘Buffoon’, and
‘Droll’, Samuel Butler uses the sorts of terms that would now be seen as exemplifying
humour (repartee, jesting, laughing, merry-making) but does not use the word, except when
discussing the ‘Humorist’ as laughable and almost lunatic; Characters 1612–1680; George
Farquhar even discusses the nature of comedy by mentioning ‘wit and humour’ only once in
passing, Discourse Upon Comedy, 27.
28 C. CONDREN
(1670–1729) recognized that wit and humour were undifferentiated and

that one problem with establishing any reliable new meaning for humour
was that it was easily confused both with wit and wit’s opposite, folly.
Nevertheless, he insisted, humour should be regarded as synonymous
with what can be said pleasantly; it is thus accorded a greater generality
than wit. The point, however, is lost as he reverted to writing of the older
humours and of being in a given humour.104
Thus, to return to Shaftsbury: when only a few years later, he referred
to raillery as a type of humour it was in the idiom passingly recognized by
Congreve, possibly employed by Pepys, but with a greater discrimination
and deliberation than for either. Humour, as Addison’s essay also illus-
trates, was finally becoming, in Lockean parlance, a sortal, an abstract term
erratically subsuming a loosely related sector of the vocabulary: raillery,
wit, comedy, jesting, jeering, facetiousness, pleasantness, mirth, drollery
and irony. It might be a stretch to include the ribald and bawdy, so embrac-
ing Geoffrey Chaucer. Humour had become wider in its scope than
Pepys’s term for the dramatic ploys of merriment or just another word for
wit, and was assuming the general status that Congreve had briefly given
to the much older notion of the pleasant. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746)
too would passingly use ‘pleasantry’ where we might use humour.105
Gradually, terms within the emerging field of humour, such as pleasant
and facetious, would have their usages changed. Wit’s relationship to
humour was long disputed (Chap. 4) and ridicule arguably tied more to
wit, facilitating humour’s increasingly benign connotations during the
later eighteenth century.106 Other words would become all but obsoles-
cent or, like jeer, excluded from the range. It is only to be expected that
even at the beginnings of such an accommodating generality, humour
would need to be specified in negative and positive terms. Either way, in
this elevation of status we have a precondition for humour to designate a
broad area of study, although a good way short of being taken as a human
faculty.
Shaftsbury’s positive usage in the Characteristicks arose, however, not
directly from the theatre, but from the importance he attached to the
philosophic persona, a philosopher being of a good humour, of a
104
For a fine discussion, see Wickberg, ‘The Sense of Humor in American Culture,
1850–1960’, 103–10, 106; Congreve, An Essay Concerning Humour in Comedy (1695).
105
Hutcheson, Reflections, ‘Letter 2’.
106
Bricker, ‘Laughter and the Limits of Reform’, 164–5.
questioning, undogmatic temperament. Ridicule, wit, raillery and satire as

modes of humour were promoted as integral to establishing truth and
maintaining virtue and sociability; humour was essential to rational or, as
we might say, serious discussion—a view that is easily extended to political
discourse in general.107 The enhanced standing that Shaftsbury accorded
humour was even buttressed by reading it back into Aristotle, translating
his commendation of derisive laughter in debate as humour—a precedent
for Sir David Ross.108 Humour’s significance for Shaftsbury was aug-
mented also by treating it as a sign of liberty. It is a refinement of Congreve’s
conclusion that had illustrated the slippage between the old and the
emerging meaning of the word humour. As Congreve had put it, follow-
ing Sir William Temple, humour was almost of native growth because the
English had greater liberty than other peoples and this allowed the expres-
sion of a wider range of humours, that is, types of character.109 Such people
might well be designated humourists, those to be laughed at for their
oddities and moral failings. George Farquhar elaborated in writing about
comedy: just as England had a great mixture of peoples so it had a unique
richness of humours, what he called ‘distempers’ to be counselled and cor-
rected on the stage. Comedy was thus not an expression of but a remedy
for humour, critique not celebration.110 The close relationship Shaftsbury
made between humour and liberty arose from an older meaning of
humour, but he attached it to the newer. Yet even at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, for Mme De Staël the nexus of English eccentricity and
humour remained intact; an originally censorious characterization became
a compliment.111
The discussion of satire will largely be held over (Chaps. 6 and 7),
although it is worth noting here that its being moved decisively into the
ambit of humour is at one with the understanding of satire that has only
107
Rossing, ‘A Sense of Humor for Civic Life’.
108
Shaftsbury, Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, sect. 5, 48; Aristotle was endorsing an
adage of Gorgias, Rhetoric, 1419b 7: jest at your opponent’s seriousness, treat seriously his
jests; Amir, Humor and the Good Life in Modern Philosophy takes Shaftsbury’s implantation of
humour into Greek as a rediscovery of Greek humour.
109
Ashley Cooper, Sensus communis, Characteristicks, 1, sects. 3–6, 42–52; for discussion
see especially, Amir, Humor and the Good Life in Modern Philosophy, 11–30; also Grean,
Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, 120–32; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 75–82;
Congreve, Concerning Humour; Tierney-Hynes, ‘The Humour of Humours’, 98–101.
110
Farquhar, Discourse Upon Comedy, 22.
111
Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’, quoting Mme de De Staël, De la literature
(1800), 537; Escarpit, L’Humour, 65–6.
30 C. CONDREN
recently become dominant. Traditionally satire had been a matter of

rebuke, and its associations with laughter as an expression of forensic pug-
nacity actually reinforced its severely censorious nature and exclusionary
force.112 It was contiguity, of the sort indicated by Margaret Cavendish’s
commendation for her husband’s plays, with their wit, humour and satire
that indicates an increasing synchrony between satire and humour. Thus
Swift would come to see the two as sometimes mutually compatible, some
way from satire as a type of humour.113
Drawing on earlier discussions, Corbyn Morris (1710–79) provided
precision for what by mid-century had come to be recognized as a closely
and mutually dependent sector of the vocabulary. He is dismissive of
Dryden, Addison and of Congreve, and of understanding by negative
specification, a ‘Crochet’, a dress of darkness. His conception of wit echoes
Locke and Hutcheson. It is elucidation by juxtaposition and a vital politi-
cal virtue requiring surprise, not to amuse but to enlighten.114 Humour,
however, refers only to the specific foibles of real people.115 In one way,
then, humour remains close to the humours, and the humourist is a par-
ticular, despicable type, but in another we approach modern usage in what
Morris calls the ‘man of humour’, one who can assume a ridiculous char-
acter, so having the self-consciousness necessary for what would be called
a sense of humour. The point of raillery, he states, is to amuse, that of
satire to scourge. It is both witty and severe, and thus is nothing to do
with what we see as humour.116
In his attempts to fix meanings from confusion, Morris shows how we
are still in a partially alien linguistic world, not just with regard to satire
and humour. He hardly mentions laughter, although writing of amuse-
ment, merriment and delight. Within a few years, however, Lord Kames
(1696–1782) would finesse the distinction between the humourist and
man of humour. There is a difference, Kames argued, both between
humour in character and in writing, and between ludicrous and humorous
writing. In the former, ludicrous topics are chosen to provoke laughter; in
the latter, the writer amuses by appearing serious, and is not, in his
112
For illustration, Morton ‘Laughter as Polemical Act’, 107–32.
113
Swift, Intelligencer 3 (1728), Works, 8, 234–5.
114
Morris, Essay, xxii, xx, xxvi, xx; cf. John Locke, On Human Understanding (1690), Bk
2, chap. 11, sect. 2, where wit is referred to as ‘an assemblage of Ideas’; Hutcheson,
Reflections, ‘Letter 2’, discussing Addison.
115
Morris, Essay, 1–2, 12–13; 20–2.
116
Morris, Essay, 37.
character, a humourist. This is Addison’s true humour, exemplified for

Kames by John Arbuthnot, a serious man who exceeded all ‘in drollery
and humorous painting’.117 Humour, in short, is a general term indicating
a self-conscious craft, generating mirth and laughter—it explicates the
skills of the actor in portraying the humourist, coinciding with what was
necessary in Ben Jonson’s comedy of the humours.
Dictionaries need treating with caution, but Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary (1755), gives a taste of how uneven the process of change had
been. ‘Laugh’ and ‘laughter’ are associated with merriment (not vulgar-
ity), and ‘to laugh’ contemptuously is relegated to a third meaning.118 Yet
‘humour’ as merriment, and ‘humorously’ as ‘merrily’, ‘jocosely’ appear
still to be subordinate to the older humour as a temper of the mind, or as
a morbid disposition, and capriciousness, peevishness, violent passion and
illogicality akin to Morris’s depiction of the humourist.119
The new general function for humour as insisted upon by Shaftsbury, is
not, on that evidence, either as common or as freed from older usages as
we might expect, even in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As
I shall suggest (Chap. 5), established terms such as parody and even imita-
tion may have inhibited its uptake. Although Kames gave humour a mod-
ern generality, his treatment of laughter remained highly conventional.
Certainly, he was at pains to distinguish mirthful laughter from that of
ridicule, but it is ridicule that provided the immediate context for the dis-
cussion of humour, making it still partially an expression of contempt and
scorn.120 More broadly, the close alignment of the physiological notion of
the humours with the new humour was sustained in the tradition of the
Jonsonian comedy of the humours, what Richard Bevis treats as laughing
comedy, that of wit and ridicule more than sympathy and sentiment. The
staged humours remained predictable subjects of derision. They were usu-
ally suitably named, and their survival may evidence the contained accept-
ability of still vibrant habits of aggression and victimization.121 Even at the
end of the eighteenth century, William Preston, partly concerned with
117
Lord Kames, Elements, chap. 12, 253–6.
118
Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1174; cf. earlier works, on which see
Shrank, ‘Mocking or Mirthful?’, 48–66.
119
Johnson, Dictionary, 1027. In some 85 entries where ‘humour’ and its cognates are
present, Johnson overwhelmingly stays true to older meanings and only rarely uses the word
in conjunction with wit or levity.
120
Lord Kames, Elements, 193, 274.
121
Bevis, The Laughing Tradition, 4, 7, 110; Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 2–8, 16–44.
32 C. CONDREN
humour in its emerging sense, and addressing a fairly erudite audience,

could still refer to an ‘extraordinary afflux of humours’ and their ‘evacua-
tion’ in violent laughter—hardly a case of laughter expressing humour.122
In fact, the new and suitably refined meaning of humour became instru-
mental in the increasing attention given to the benign, socializing poten-
tial of laughter during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so helping
bring satire within humour’s range. This modulation to laughter now
needs noting in its own right for it indicates a potential explanation for the
concept of humour’s importance in English.
Laughter had been celebrated in Henry Vaughan’s ‘A Rhapsody’
(1646), a joyous poem of good company in an inn, the painted ceiling of
which directed merriment to the gods above. ‘Let’s laugh now, and the
pressed grape drink / Till the drowsy Day-Star wink; / And in our merry
mad mirth run / Faster, and further than the Sun.’ This is close to the
harmless solipsistic laughter of Thomas Browne waking from his comic
dreams, or the laughter urged by Rabelais. It was what John Straight
(notably not using, or even avoiding, the word laughter) would shortly
discuss as the duty of ‘holy joy’, and Isaac Barrow (mentioning laughter
only in passing) treat as the Christian’s joyful duty: nothing gave legiti-
macy more than assimilation to office and duty. It was a duty restricted to
innocent jest.123 This was the benign laughter that Pepys relished in close
company, that Thomas Sheridan (1687–1738) would see as promoting
‘good fellowship’, and that Francis Hutcheson would take as an expres-
sion of an inherent benevolence in human nature. Such disparate attempts
to see laughter in a positive light marked old theological fault-lines and
would be gradually accepted by the end of the eighteenth century.124
The slow and erratic emergence of humour in England distinct from
medical theory and comedic convention may have been initially encour-
aged precisely by the persisting negative connotations of laughter, the
importance attached to its damaging effects and its frequent associations
with vulgarity. This altered meaning should be seen, I think, not in the
122
Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 79, a departure from the four humours. As late as 1885
Samuel Maunder’s popular Scientific and Literary Treasury gave more attention to medical
humours (again not the original ones)—vitreous, aqueous and crystalline—than to humour
as the quality of the mind that creates ludicrous images and mirth, though lacking the bril-
liancy of wit.
123
Barrow, Against Foolish Talking; see Tave, Amiable Humorist, 3–6.
124
Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing; Sheridan (Tom Pun-Sibi), Ars punica, 24, 125; Tave,
Amiable Humorist; for example, 43–4, 71.
context of a rather abstract genealogical narrative of developing individu

alism,125 but rather against the more tangible background of which peo-
ple were actually aware: namely, intense political instability, religious
intransigence, and social brutishness that together marked seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century England. Religious confessions fragmented
with their differences sharpened, civil wars fought or narrowly escaped,
one monarch executed, another deposed, and another nearly assassi-
nated, a sprawling, endemically violent capital city, sporadic risings and
eruptions across the country, plots and conspiracies frequently rumoured,
invasions by foreign powers feared, and one decisively accomplished. It
was later to be massaged into the shape of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, but
more immediately it was followed by thwarted counter-invasions from
France. All these features of seventeenth-century England, plus danger-
ous weather and the failed harvests suggestive of divine punishment, cre-
ated a public memory engendering insecurity and making the exploration
of the considerata of sociability urgent.126 Some aspects of this are famil-
iar, such as the admonitory emphasis on politeness in periodical literature
of the early eighteenth century that has even been seen as marking a
change of emotional regime.127 Others have been less obvious, such as
the translation of Homer’s violent epics into more civilized and accept-
able forms.
The assumed aggression of so much laughter was part of the problem.
In a world in which people greatly depended on credit, both financial and
social, reputation was capital, and to be laughed at diminished it more
decisively than might be the case now.128 Thus slander was a serious crime,
seen as a threat to social order, and it could be satire and ridicule by
another name. What, more generally, have been called shame cultures, such
as ancient Greece, already noted, and Edo Japan, to be discussed in Chap. 3,
were unusually sensitive to the potency of what I am calling rhetorical
laughter and the damage ridicule might do. It was augmented by aristo-
cratic preoccupations with family name and honour, which lost through
insult or ridicule might only be restored through the violence of the duel.
125
This is an important theme in Wickberg, The Senses of Humor.
126
For an overview of this far-reaching fear of instability, the long seventeenth century, see
Scott, England’s Troubles, 1–39; see also Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 9, 13–14.
127
Kerr, Lemmings and Phiddian, eds, Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture, 3–19.
128
Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, at length.
34 C. CONDREN
Certainly, the gauntlet thrown down by Hobbes in De cive (1642)

remained uncomfortably present for years after his death. He dismissed
nostrums about humanity’s natural sociability, because they were explana-
torily empty (there is society because we are sociable). Rather, he urged,
we must presume that humans are inherently antisocial and belligerent.
This paradox explains society and its fragility. It must curb our violent
instincts or be destroyed by us. The aggression of laughter illustrated the
point: it was contrary to the laws of nature mandating peace. Bernard de
Mandeville (1670–1733), largely endorsing Hobbes’s view of laughter,
exacerbated matters by arguing that civilized society actually depended on
antisocial impulse.129 It is no accident that Shaftsbury’s advocacy of
humour, its value for liberty and rationality, occurs in the context of dis-
cussing the dangers of religious dogmatism—and this only a few years
before another confessionally driven, attempted revolution in 1715. ‘’Tis
the persecuting Spirit has rais’d the bantering one: And want of Liberty
may account for the want of Politeness, and for the Corruption or wrong
Use of Pleasantry and Humour.’130 Similarly, almost thirty years later,
there is Morris’s stridently Whig dedication to Robert Walpole: it arraigns
on one side politeness, Walpole’s own political wit, his openness, generos-
ity and care for liberty against, on the other, a threatened return to tyranny
and slavery under Tory ministers, effectively an undoing of the Revolution
of 1688/89 and by implication the Reformation.131 He paints the little
word wit on a threatening canvass. By this time too, humour was suffi-
ciently important to be retrojected into antiquity, as Shaftsbury had done,
so giving the notion enhanced cultural kudos, a boost to its naturalization
and the universality it would widely be accorded.132
Belonging and exclusion are bi-conditionals and it may be that whereas
rhetorical laughter had implicitly affirmed social and political belonging by
isolating and damaging the deviant, initially the potential value of some
expressions of humour lay directly in the prospect they held for enhancing
social cohesion, either bypassing or barely acknowledging laughter (John
Straight, Isaac Burrow, Corbyn Morris), or, as Addison urged, by capital-
izing on its innocent potential and thus rehabilitating it with drawn teeth.
129
Mandeville, Fable, 2, 134.
130
Shaftsbury, Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, sect 4, 46.
131
Morris, Essay, ‘Dedication’, iv–v, ix–xii, xvii (on Richard Steele’s politeness and patrio-
tism), xiv–xv.
132
Hurd, ‘Dissertation’, 244–5.
According to Hobbes, he remarked, to hear laughter is to witness not

merriment but pride. This, he continues, is indeed largely true, but not
where laughter stems from elevated wit, and presumably the true humour
that helps create and sustain good company.133 It is a few years after this
that Swift too suggests that humour’s laughter could be less than vicious,
and so an aid to gentle forms of satire. We are close to Hutcheson’s case
that laughter is an expression of benevolence.134
In commending the conjunction of wit, humour and laughter, Addison
was not rehearsing a platitude, or acknowledging a universal truth. In his
persistent quest to improve manners and public deportment, he might be
construed as extending the reach of amicable laughter to the wider politi-
cal world, easing the limits on legitimating loci such as Henry Vaughan’s
inn with its ‘merry mad mirth’—turning the pub public. So, if festive
occasions did something to mew up the bite of laughter, attaching a
notion of humour to it provided a means of conceptual palliation, roughly
analogous to the Greeks marking some laughter as a matter of play.
Regardless of this possibility, Addison was certainly making a case in the
context of troubled times.
It was accepted only gradually: Morris’s loathsome humourist would
become, as Stuart Tave has argued, increasingly congenial because of fig-
ures like a laundered Falstaff, Sterne’s Uncle Toby and Cervantes’s Don
Quixote. Humour in its variable, unstable guises became an expression of
that cardinal socializing virtue, sympathy; and laughter, if sufficiently
benign, could be the music of affirmation.135 In short, from its uncertain
and casual beginnings the firm establishment of a modern meaning for
humour and its affinity with laughter had a political cause and a partially
political function as cement for a fissiparous society. It is, then, less the case
that humour became more kindly, as Terry Eagleton puts it, than that its
invention helped moderate the worst of laughter.136
133
Addison, Spectator, 47, 24 April 1711, 174–7; Mandeville’s qualification, fittingly for a
physician, relies more on the physiology of laughter, and the need for a theory to take into
consideration chuckling babies and tickling (Mandeville, Fable, 2156–7, 2159).
134
Swift, Intelligencer, Works, 8, 232–3; Hutcheson, Reflections.
135
Tave, Amiable Humorist, at length.
136
Eagleton, Humour, 99–101.
36 C. CONDREN
IV
Therein lies one precondition for speaking of a sense of humour. Yet until
the meaning of sense was also enlarged, the word humour remained a
general abridgement often secondary to specifics, such as raillery or wit,
and a second precondition for conceptualizing a sense of humour was
absent. It would explicate what Addison had intimated, that true humour
could express sensibility, self-awareness or sympathy. According to Anna
Wierzbicka, the augmentation of sense’s range was, like humour, initially
an English language phenomenon.137 There is also no clear watershed, but
there is the much-disputed proposition at the heart of Locke’s Human
Understanding (1690) that all human knowledge derives from the senses.
Those who wished to defend a robust notion of innate human faculties
metaphorically extended the notion of sense to reconceptualize them.
Sense came to enjoy a range of meanings, and sensibility, as C.S. Lewis put
it, was overburdened with them.138 Throughout the eighteenth century
we find sense of, as awareness being augmented by sense as common sen-
tient even moral capacity—an innate universal potential for understand-
ing, appreciation and fitting conduct. Shaftsbury, no follower of Locke,
wrote of a moral sense, and it was common enough to acknowledge a
sense of honour or shame.139 Sense, sensibility and sympathy received con-
siderable attention from philosophers such as Hume, Hutcheson and
Smith as fundamental to social cohesion, and from the illustrative dis-
course of novels like Sterne’s The Sentimental Journey (1768) and Jane
Austen’s Love and Freindship (1790) and Sense and Sensibility (1811). All
stopped short, however, of articulating an innate sense of humour. We
come close with Richard Hurd’s commentary on Horace referring briefly
to a ‘sense of humour’ being analogous to pathos, but this is sense as aware-
ness of rather than innate capacity for.140 Alexander Gerard (1728–95)
begins his Essay on Taste by using sense similarly to signify awareness but
then silently shifts meaning by referring to how the senses of novelty, sub-
limity, harmony, ridicule and virtue cooperate to form taste; a foretaste, as
it were, of what is to come. But although he refers to wit and/or humour,
there is no sense of either.141 Corbyn Morris and Lord Kames have been
137
Wierzbicka, Experience, ‘Moral Sense’, 2–8; ‘Sense of Humour’, 4–6.
138
Lewis, Studies in Words, 163.
139
Steele, The Spectator, 137, 30 August 1711, 2, 271–2.
140
Hurd, Dissertation, 273; Tierney-Hynes, ‘The Humour of Humours’, 102.
141
Gerard, Essay on Taste, 1–2.
noted as drawing attention to the reflexivity that distinguishes the man of

humour from the humourist; and Shaftsbury had regarded nurtured
humour as necessary to the armature of philosophical discourse. William
Preston was also tantalizingly close in remarking that ‘a person who laughs
at his own foibles and defects is thought to show an extraordinary effort
of good sense and good humour … [making] a painful sacrifice of selfish
feelings’. There is, however, always ‘some political motive’.142
Such intimations might lead us to expect references to a sense of humour
to be evident before the nineteenth century, but apparently not. Coleridge
is sometimes misquoted in using the expression, ‘No mind is thoroughly
well organized that is deficient in the sense of humour’ (italics added). The
evidence is hearsay (ca. 1825), and the definite article may indicate that we
are still dealing with an awareness of humour. Be this as it may, Daniel
Wickberg, who has provided the most important recent study of such
matters, finds substantial evidence for a sense of humour as a human attri-
bute only from the mid-nineteenth century.143
His surprisingly late dating for a common reference to the phrase is
supported by a largely contemporaneous chain shift in humour’s cognate
forms. As I have noted, humourist had meant someone risible or unduly
subject to changes in the humours. By the eighteenth century it included
those given to whimsy, and for Morris, those of distasteful singularity.
Gradually it indicated an acceptable eccentricity, occasionally someone
writing to amuse.144 By the mid-nineteenth century, this latter usage is
common, the earlier ones nearing obsolescence. Thackeray’s New York
lecture ‘Charity and Humour’ (1852) highlights the change: humour is an
expression of charity, wit, love and human fellow feeling.145 In tandem, the
adverbial form humorously is shifted from humoral imbalance to humor-
ous performance. The increasingly marginal humoursom/humoursome had
a similar process of change. The now rare neologism humoristic (ca. 1818)
qualifies the new meaning of humourist and is used by Thackeray.146 The
neologism humourless is in use from the 1840s (OED, 1847). Crucially it
142
Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 72.
143
Julian Young’s recollection; see Coleridge, Table Talk (i), 426n and Table Talk (ii)
appendix P, 422; Wickberg, ‘The Sense of Humor’, 30–139.
144
Bailey, Dictionary; Addison, Spectator, 1, 129. Bailey does not acknowledge this
newer usage.
145
Thackeray, ‘Charity and Humour’, a view at one with Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics, as
noted by Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 14.
146
Thackeray, ‘Charity and Humour’, 196.
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Title: Breathes there a man
Author: Charles E. Fritch
Illustrator: H. R. Smith
Release date: July 28, 2022 [eBook #68615]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Space Publications, Inc, 1953
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BREATHES

THERE A MAN ***
BREATHES THERE A MAN
BY CHARLES E. FRITCH
ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH
Someone in the place where Dunlop worked was an

agent of the World Bureau Investigation. But how
could they suspect him at a time like this? His tracks
were covered and tangled until even Julie had
no knowledge of them. Then the robot came....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Rocket Stories, July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Arthur Dunlop busied himself over the blueprints as though he had a
deep and sincere interest in them, unmindful of the scurry of sounds
in the office. The incessant clicking of electronic typewriters, muffled
though they were, combined to form a hum of angry bees. Papers
shuffled that were important somehow to the welfare of the State,
and men and women sat and looked at them, checking and
rechecking, checking and rechecking, for it was important that
nothing should go wrong, any place, in even the slightest aspect.
The small square of paper had been dropped on his desk
unobtrusively, and for a brief moment he had stared at it in surprise.
Then he covered it with a casual hand and glanced up in apparent
thoughtfulness. A blonde girl was making her way down the space
between rows of metalloid desks, a bundle of vital-appearing
documents in her hands. Arthur studied the swaying body, as though
that were the only thought on his mind, but the paper burned
curiously at his palm.
He returned quickly to his work of checking blueprints, for idleness
even in a trusted employee was looked upon with suspicion. He bent
over the three-dimensional diagram, feigning interest, and slowly
opened the folded square of paper. On it were written the words:
"WBI. Careful." The words leaped up at him in a green ink that would
fade in seconds, leaving no trace.
He crushed the paper in his hand, trying hard not to look around him.
WBI. World Bureau of Investigation. Did they suspect? he wondered.
He thrust the thought from his mind and made a conscious effort to
study the drawing on his desk.
Drawing 2b, one-tenth of the plan for a respirator, newly-designed
and improved, streamlined for the year 2108, Arthur could just
imagine the advertising they'd do on this model. But the other
thought crowded it aside: the underground knew there was a WBI
man in the office.
And just why would there be a WBI man here? Routine? Possibly.
Yet more likely, somebody smelled a rat. This was no time for plans
to go awry.
He looked up, glancing with apparent disinterest at the faces near
him hovering over their respective desks. They, too, were busy with
blueprints. Part 3d of a new atomic engine. Part 14c of a three-
dimensional television set designed to bring in bigger and better
commercials. Et cetera. Et cetera. For security reasons, no two
worked at the same project.
He scanned their faces, searching for something indefinable,
something that might outwardly betray hidden thoughts. There was
Hawkins, a middle-aged, eagle-faced person, been with the local
office of State Enterprises for more than twenty years—
unquestionably loyal to the government. Merker, a chubby person
with shifting eyes behind thin-lensed glasses; he was okay, for
shifting eyes or not, they had all been checked, even as he had been
checked. And Austen, the newcomer, only twenty-five and fresh from
college, a nervous; restless type of person; he was the most likely
suspect for a WBI man, although some might think it would be too
obvious—which might in turn tend to prove the point.
Arthur shrugged mentally and returned to his work. He stared at the
design of coils and condensers and wires and felt a little sick, which
was strange for he should have become used to it by now. This
design, together with nine others, would form the complete pattern
for printing a mechanism on a thin disc which would be inserted in
the watch-like affair known as a respirator. It was somehow ironic, he
thought that he should be working on it.
His intercom buzzed and he reached to flick on the switch. A
business-like voice said: "Dunlop, this is Samson, can you come in
for a minute?"
"Of course," Arthur said calmly, but he wondered what his superior
wanted. First, the note about a WBI man; now this.
The big door marked "Charles L. Samson, Mgr., Dept. 40"
confronted him. As he neared it, electric eyes probed him, timed his
approach, opened the door automatically.
Charles L. Samson, Mgr., Dept. 40, graying and cleanly mustached,
was intently studying a sheet of paper on which were typewritten
several paragraphs. Arthur drew to a halt before the man's desk,
unconsciously fidgeting mentally and wondering if the item of interest
on that paper concerned him.
The manager carefully put the paper down and raised his eyes.
"Everything okay, Dunlop?"
"Simply great," he answered automatically.
The older man leaned back in his chair. "Dunlop," he said, "you've
been here for some time now, I believe."
"Five years this month," Arthur supplied, trying to put pride in his
voice.
"Precisely," Samson agreed. "And because you have been a loyal
and dependable worker," he smiled blandly, "you'll find a little
something extra in your pay envelope from now on."
Arthur breathed a sudden sigh of relief. So that was it, the automatic
pay increase. It meant no financial gain, of course, since he would
also automatically be put in a higher tax bracket which would just
offset the increase. Pay raises were for "morale" purposes only.
"Thank you, sir," Arthur said, hoping he sounded as though he meant
it.
"Quite all right," Samson said, turning once more to his papers.
"Yes, sir." Arthur strode, relieved, from the office.
The rest of the workday passed uneventfully and it was time to

leave. The soft hum of preparations testified to that. Plans were
folded, locked securely into desks, and workers filed past probing
mechanical eyes that scanned them for anything hidden. Doors
whirred open electrically, and humanity poured through them into
tubecars which hissed with sickening speed to the helibus terminal.
Arthur flowed into a helibus with the others, and his heart gave a
sudden jump as he saw a familiar blonde form ahead of him. Julie!
He wormed his way forward and sank onto the air-cushion beside
her. She did not look at him. The helibus lurched skyward.
She was staring out the window, at the blue sky and the cloudfaces
and the sun beginning to dip low at the horizon. The building they
had left glowed with the million setting suns reflected from its great
bank of windows. After awhile, her fingers moved restlessly. Arthur
Dunlop watched them idly. The movements were swift, seemingly
random but actually precise and predetermined.
They said: "I couldn't hesitate at your desk; I had to take a chance
with the note."
Arthur glanced complacently about him, stifling a yawn. His fingers
rippled: "Who is the WBI agent?"
"Underground doesn't know—yet," she told him silently. "Meet me
tonight."
"Will I see the leader?" he asked.
"Meet me tonight," was all she would reply.
He nodded, as though to himself, and stared at the signs adorning
the inside of the bus. Names made familiar by television leaped at
him. There was Ronson, Franklin, Stallman, Eliot, names of all kinds
to give the impression of existence to a long-dead free enterprise; all
were government owned, competing to enhance the illusion.
Who was the leader, he wondered, and why the secrecy? Some
government bigwig probably, who kept his secret from all but a few.
Well, time would tell.
He glanced out the window at the countryside rushing below. Trees.
Green fields. The beginnings of the city of small square dwellings. A
man got up, went to the rear of the helibus. After awhile, Arthur rose,
went down the aisle to the exit platform. He paused for a minute, and
then he stepped into space.
The air whirled about him; twin rotors, appearing from his clothing,
churned and scraped the air, lowering him gently through the five
hundred feet to the ground. Overhead, the helibus continued its
prescribed journey, discharging passengers who resembled fluttering
insects. He came to rest gently atop his roof, and the rotors ceased
and folded invisibly beneath his coat.
The moon had risen well into the twilight sky, that moon which only a
few hundred years before had furnished lovers with inspiration. Now,
looking at it, one thought inevitably of the Lunar Prison Colony that
occupied its entire surface, of the persons who had been sentenced
to spend years on its ugly barren wasteland. Inspiration came
possibly, but it was of a different nature.
He descended into the house, into the single room that was
bedroom, living room, parlor. Helen, brunette and beautiful, attired in
the semi-transparent slacks that were the decreed style, rose from
the couch and gave him a wifely peck on the cheek.
"Everything okay?" she asked, not appearing particularly interested.
The standard question.
"Simply great," he said.
He settled into a hard plastic chair, uncomfortable but designed to
improve posture.
The television set was blaring: "Nothing could be greater than to

have a respirator made by Fra-a-a-a-nklin!" On the 40-inch screen a
happy couple, Franklin respirators on their happy wrists, were
bouncing happily across a miniature solar system, using planets for
stepping stones.
I must be an atavist, he thought. How can people actually put up with
this stuff. He could not subdue the grimace that rose automatically,
but he managed to turn it into a grin as he saw Helen looking at him
curiously.
"Something funny?"
"Nothing in particular." He couldn't very well tell her he thought a
government-sponsored commercial was amusing. That was the
equivalent of treason, for which the Lunar Prison Colony had been
constructed.
Not that Helen wasn't understanding. Their marriage had been
lacking in many things, true, but she was inclined to be fair and
broadminded on most issues which were not controlled. But when it
came to things like the State and its directives, most people got
emotionally patriotic. It was something like trying to discuss religion a
century earlier, except that in the present case arguments could be
easily won by sending the "treasonous" person to the prison satellite.
The law made plain what was right and what was not.
"I was just thinking," he said, hoping to explain the grimace, "about a
fellow at the office. He suggested that we should get a rebate on the
airtax, because we don't utilize all the air we breathe in."
"You reported him, of course."
"Worse than that. We told him if he didn't like it he could stop
breathing. Crime doesn't pay anymore."
"I should hope not," she said, and she seemed perfectly serious.
There was no point in arguing with Helen, so he didn't. She
apparently had little interest in politics other than a layman's desire
to see justice prevail, and if the government wanted to tax the air
they breathed, why—let them; they were taxing everything else.
That's why he found himself drawn irresistibly to Julie; she wasn't a
slave to convention. That's why he liked to meet her in the darkness
of the outside, when the curfew forbade anyone venturing into the
night—at least, that was one reason. She was part of the forbidden
fruit he secretly desired and vowed would have.
A government official's benign face appeared on the television
screen to announce the Super State program. The World Flag
materialized, waving in a studio-inspired breeze, and a chorus
chanted: "Super State, Super State, Simply great is Super Sta-a-
ate!"
"Sixty minutes of uninterrupted commercial," Arthur Dunlop thought
with distaste. Plays and songs subtly presented to show that
contemporary living was equivalent to a golden age. He was careful,
however, not to let his face reveal his mind's opinion.
"The airtax man will be around to read the meter tonight," Helen
reminded him.
"Fine," he murmured, but already he was only half-aware of the
world around him as he dozed while appearing outwardly alert.
There was a time, he remembered vaguely, when there were no
such things as respirators, when the air you breathed was free. For
twenty of his thirty-four years he had known that golden era. There
were taxes, of course, but only on the food you ate, the money you
earned, the entertainment you saw, et cetera, almost ad infinitum.
Air, it seemed—much to the government's evident dissatisfaction—
was an untaxable commodity, a luxury which even the poor could
enjoy without restriction.
Then came the war. The war that caused all peoples to finally unite
under one government to insure peace. Arthur Dunlop knew of the
war, for he was a part of it. He fought back to preserve his life, and
they gave him a medal for it, a piece of cloth and metal which
indicated that he was lucky enough to survive. It was another war to
make the world safe for something or other, and he still recalled with
a shudder the Battle of Boston, the Siege of New York, the great
topplings of great cities into greater dust.
To counteract the poisonous by-products of civilized weapons, the
respirators had been developed—small watch-like mechanisms that
enabled the wearers to breathe in practically any atmosphere. After
the war, they had been adapted to a new use.
"What?" Arthur Dunlop said.
Helen was extending a carton marked "6-C." "Mealtime," she
declared.
He took the box, another development of the Last War, and opened
it. Standardization was the keynote, he remembered, for in that there
is unity. Standardization of clothing, of living, of eating, of thinking.
He plopped a pill marked "steak" into his mouth, nibbled absently at
the ones labeled "bread" and "potatoes and gravy," and then
followed with a pill called "coffee." It might have been funny had he
been able to view the scene objectively, but the time when he had
been able to do that had long passed. They were the best
government-made pills and tasted not a bit like their labels.
From the television set, an enthusiastic voice declared: "Ronson
Rotors are the best, Try the thousand foot drop test, Be convinced
it'll break your fall, Ronson Rotors are the best of all!"
Furiously, Arthur Dunlop chewed on his pill marked "apple pie."
There was a knock at the door. "Air tax," an authoritative voice
called, and the door slid open to reveal an impassionate face
surrounded by uniform. "Your respirators, please," the face directed
in a monotone. "Monthly check."
Arthur Dunlop extended his wrist, and the man, frowning importantly,
noted several numbers from the respirator dial and wrote them in a
small black book; he carefully examined the part that would tell if the
device had been removed.
Arthur resisted an impulse to ask the man for a refund for the Carbon
Dioxide he had exhaled during the past month to see what reaction
he might get. But the man, eager to get ahead, would welcome the
opportunity to report someone less patriotic than he, and there would
follow an investigation. Investigations were taken as a matter of
course, naturally, and even investigators were being investigated
with confusing regularity. But under the present circumstances,
Arthur could hardly afford the risk. Entirely too much was at stake.
"You could use a new respirator," the air tax man said in the tone of a
man who had said this same thing many times before.
"Yes," Arthur agreed mechanically. "What kind would you suggest?"
"What kinds do you like?" the man said testily.
Arthur named the various kinds and the merits professed by each, to
show that he had been attentive to the telecasts. The man, secure in
the knowledge that Arthur was loyal to the cause, left.
Arthur sighed a vague sigh that could mean almost anything and
watched Helen stretch her long limbs, smooth and sensuous
beneath their thin coverings. He wondered what thoughts, if any,
were in her mind, but her lovely face was vacuous and non-
committal as she reclined to dutifully watch the screen as a good
citizen should.
The evening grew old, and with its aging came the insistence of
various televised personalities that each product cavorting about the
screen was undoubtedly the best possible, and anyone who didn't
agree was most certainly an idiot of the most idiotic sort. Actually,
since the government directed the manufacture of all commodities, it
mattered little which product was bought, so long as they were
bought. Finally—
"Time to go to bed," a grandfatherly individual intoned gently from
the set. "Remember: to bed and to rise at a time not late, makes one
healthy and wise for the Super State."
Arthur grimaced at the benign gentleman's countenance, but Helen
set about pushing the buttons that would transform the room into a
bedroom. Tables slid from sight, twin beds appeared, the lights
dimmed.
They undressed in the dimness, without conversation, as they had
these many years. It was as though they were separated by miles
instead of only a few feet, each unaware of the other's presence.
"I'm going to grab a fast shower," he told her and headed for the
shower stall. He heard her answering murmur, as he closed the door
of the airtight cubicle. Fingers ran over the dials, and invisible rays
caressed his naked body, cleansing it of impurities with swift silent
radiation.
When he stepped once more into the main room, Helen was lying
unmoving on her bed. The television set was blank, and an almost
inaudible hypnotic hum came from it, soothing, compelling, lulling.
He sat on the edge of the bed, listening in fascination to the sound.
Slowly, it faded, slowly, slowly....
He caught himself starting to doze, and he sat upright on the bed
straining to hear the evasive hum. He shook his head violently to
clear it. He wondered how many persons were aware that the noise
was actually a high-frequency voice-recording which in effect
hypnotized persons into sleep, and then instilled into each one's
subconsciousness a faith in the glories of the government. Yet even
when you knew, it was difficult to resist.
Stealthily, he rose and dressed again in dark silence. He then made
his way across the room to the shower stall, entered, closed the door
securely. A manipulation of the dials, a soft pressure on a portion of
one wall, and a section slid back to reveal a radio apparatus.
Arthur put the microphone to his lips, spoke swiftly into it, making
contact. A furtive voice, crackled and staticky answered in code.
Arthur gave his part of the ritual.
"Right," the voice said, relaxing a bit. "Everything okay?"
"Simply great," Arthur said, putting a smile into the phrase. It was
good to hear George Keating's voice again. "How's everything up
there?"
"Not bad. Nobody suspects anything as far as we know. Shipments
are getting a bit slow, but I expect they'll be heavier before long.
Ready to spring it?"
"Yes," Arthur said. "Oh, one thing though," frowning, "the
underground suspects there's a WBI man in my unit."
"Anything further? Have they narrowed him down at all."
"I don't think so. I'm going to a meeting tonight; I managed to talk
Julie into it. If I can, I'll contact you later."
"Right-o."
Arthur closed the circuit and sealed the wall again, turning the dials
to a random location. He opened the door of the cubicle and peered
cautiously into the gloom. He thought he detected a furtive
movement, but it was only Helen turning on the bed.
He crossed the room, noiselessly ascended to the roof and leaped
outward. Blades unfolded to churn the darkness. It was a Stallman
Rotor—their commercials seemed the least offensive—and it
deposited him gently beside his house; just as gently as any Ronson
would have done.
Ahead of him, the stars glittered frostily in the night. He breathed the
crystal air in great intakes of breath, trying not to remember it was
taxed. Lines from Walter Scott leaped unaccountably to his mind:
"Breathes there a man," he thought, "with soul so dead, who never to
himself hath said, 'This is my own, my native land.'" He felt the last
word could be justly changed to "air" to fit this overtaxed era in which
he lived.
The moon was out, and he stopped to stare at it. Across its surface,
in letters of fire, were the words: "Buy Air Bonds, A Solid
Investment." There was little practical need for the ad; pay
deductions were arbitrary. Shaking his head sadly, Arthur Dunlop
walked into the night.
Night beckoned, and Arthur Dunlop followed its call. He went willfully,
but he could not have resisted had he wanted to. The streets were
dark, lit only by the moon and the stars, and houses were dark
phantoms rising in the night, their owners lulled to sleep by the
omnipresent television receivers. But he tried not to think of that. He
thought of the cool velvet evening which lay before him, and of the
girl who waited quietly in the shadows of a deserted park.
He thought of that as he walked into the night, and he thought also of
things more serious, and suddenly—
—a voice cried: "Stop!" It was a mechanical voice, tinny, without
emotion. "It is the time of curfew. You are not allowed out. Your
name?"
Arthur stood, petrified, and stared at a black robot face before him.
He heard a click, loud in the darkness, and knew that his picture had
been taken.
The sound jarred him from his immobility, and he turned and
scampered into the darkness.
"Stop," the robot commanded, "Stop!" and a shaft of light darted from
its forehead, piercing the darkness, shriveling grass beneath Arthur's
feet. But the ray missed him, and he darted down the street, amid
the pounding echoes of his flight.
After several blocks, he threw himself panting into a doorway and
looked back down the street. Nothing. Silence and moonlight and
darkness, and only his own labored breathing while his chest rose
and fell in unaccustomed gasps.
But they had his picture! In seconds, a giant machine could find a
similar picture in its files, complete with every detail of information
concerning him. They might get him before the work was complete. If
he could only evade them until he could turn this to advantage. He
felt in his pocket for the radioactive silver disc he knew was there.
Down the street, a shadow moved, and he held his breath. In a shaft
of moonlight, black metal glinted darkly. With a muffled cry he slipped
from the doorway and flew down the street, trying to still the noise he
made. Behind him, no sounds came to indicate pursuit.
He darted across the street, went into an alley, crossed another
street. Finally, he came to the park. He stopped. Fearfully, he looked
behind him. No one. He walked forward.
The park was a mass of tree and shadow, indistinguishable. Softly,
he called, "Julie." No answer. "Julie."
A gentle movement, and someone disengaged from the shadows,
glided to him. Someone soft and warm—and feminine. He could
smell the elusive taint of her perfume even before she entered his
arms.
"You're late," she said.
"I was detained."
She looked sharply at him. "Trouble?"
"I—I don't know. A robot surprised me. He took my picture."
"A robot!" she said in alarm, drawing away from him. "They probably
already know who you are. Were you followed?"
"Part of the way, but I think I dropped him."
"You think?" Her tone was worried. "Do you realize you might have
led him here. We can't go to the meeting place now. They'll be
searching for you."
"And they'll find me if I stay here," he said mournfully. "Now, you've
got to take me, Julie. I've got to go someplace."
"Where?" she said. "Where can anyone go—except up there?" With

a motion of her head she indicated the moon, hanging like a grim
reminder of the Prison Colony it contained. She shook her head. "I
should've suspected it when that WBI man showed up. Somehow
they've gotten wise to you. Do you realize you've jeopardized our
entire position?"
"I didn't mean to—"
"It matters very little whether or not you meant to," Julie said sharply;
"the fact is, you've done it." Her tone softened, "I'm sorry, Arthur, it's
just that—"
"I understand how you feel," Arthur said gently, taking her in his
arms. "Believe me, Julie, everything will turn out all right."
"I hope so," Julie said. "Well, we have to do something; we can't stay
here."
"Take me to the hiding place, Julie," he begged; "we can work out
something from there."
She looked at him briefly, considering the alternatives, her mind torn
between affection for him and fear for the underground's safety. He
knew she was recalling the many plans they had made for when all

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Between Laughter and Satire: Aspects

of the Historical Study of Humour Conal

Paroimia and Parr■sia in the Gospel of John: A

Funny Business: The Legendary Life and Political Satire

Funny Business: The Legendary Life and Political Satire

State Laughter. Stalinism, Populism, and Origins of

978-1111578718 Legal Aspects of Architecture,

Business Aspects of Optometry 3rd Edition

State Laughter. Stalinism, Populism, and Origins of

Handbook of Algal Biofuels Mostafa El-Sheekh

ISBN 978-3-031-21738-8 ISBN 978-3-031-21739-5 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

Cover Credit: IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo

Part I Laughter and the Study of Humour 5

2 Laughter and the Formation of a Concept of Humour 7

3 The Universality and the Genealogy of Humour 41

Part II Method and Its Limits in the Historical Study of

4 Context and Intention 69

5 Translation and Reception 85

Part III Defining Satire and Satiric Humour 109

6 Definition by Dictionary, Origin and Implications111

Part IV Satiric Humour in Popular Culture: The

8 Theory and the Absent Political System151

9 The Satiric Presence of Political Discourse181

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

In Part I, I focus on the uncertain intersection between laughter and

common. The sociological study of networks behind the Weimar night-

Laughter and the Study of Humour

Laughter and the Formation of a Concept

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 7

animals might amuse, but we do not because of our reactions attribute to

very largely a matter of its conjunction with something quite recent, a

to the text (1128a34).22 In what is actually purported to be a historical

In the following chapter I shall outline the significance of such genea-

who wept in sympathy for humanity, provided the crucial counterpoint.

modified or rationalized them.40 As Jazdzewska has illustrated from

scaturient response, London wits were mobilized to retaliate in kind.58

regard laughter as a natural antidote to sorrow. The text, as Alice Williams

to be celebrated—for some humour theorists it is almost by definition

only at fitting targets.87 It was the incubus of Aristotelian justification that

farcical comedy in which one character, a ‘walking pyramid’, moves only

might amuse, but the possibility is as fleeting as the manic laughter of

(1670–1729) recognized that wit and humour were undifferentiated and

questioning, undogmatic temperament. Ridicule, wit, raillery and satire as

recently become dominant. Traditionally satire had been a matter of

character, a humourist. This is Addison’s true humour, exemplified for

humour in its emerging sense, and addressing a fairly erudite audience,

context of a rather abstract genealogical narrative of developing individu­

Certainly, the gauntlet thrown down by Hobbes in De cive (1642)

According to Hobbes, he remarked, to hear laughter is to witness not

noted as drawing attention to the reflexivity that distinguishes the man of

Title: Breathes there a man

Author: Charles E. Fritch

Release date: July 28, 2022 [eBook #68615]

Original publication: United States: Space Publications, Inc, 1953

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BREATHES

Someone in the place where Dunlop worked was an

Part I Laughter and the Study of Humour 5

2 Laughter and the Formation of a Concept of Humour 7

3 The Universality and the Genealogy of Humour 41

Part II Method and Its Limits in the Historical Study of

4 Context and Intention 69

5 Translation and Reception 85

Part III Defining Satire and Satiric Humour 109

6 Definition by Dictionary, Origin and Implications111

Part IV Satiric Humour in Popular Culture: The

8 Theory and the Absent Political System151

9 The Satiric Presence of Political Discourse181

context of a rather abstract genealogical narrative of developing individu