Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the difficulties involved in attempting to study humour historically. First, this chapter questions the common belief that humour and a sense of humour are universal attributes of humanity. Next is an exploration of some of the limitations of methodological guidance, dealing with the variable uses of terms in the immediate ambit of what we call humour, satire, laughter and wit. The chapter then outlines some of the issues involved in broader forms of contextualisation. After this it discusses the problem of intentionality (with reference to punning controversies) and analogously the problems of dealing with humour in translation. Penultimately, it argues that looking at the reception of humour is not necessarily a reliable means of understanding a putatively humorous work. Finally, Thomas Hobbes’s famous and usually misunderstood account of laughter is used to concentrate the principal issues canvassed, showing that to hypothesise a humorous dimension to writing complicates the difficulties of reading.
My thanks to Dr Hannah Burrows and Dr Daniel Derrin, for the invitation to give this paper in Durham, July 2017, to the other discussants and to Dr Marguerite Wells, Dr Mark Rolfe and Averil Condren.
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Notes
- 1.
Milner, ‘Towards a Semiotic Theory of Humor’, 1–30. Homo ridens overlaps with Johan Huizinga’s much earlier Homo ludens, a seminal study of play in the Middle Ages.
- 2.
Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History of Humour, 1.
- 3.
Wiggins, Identity and Spacio-Temporal Continuity, at length.
- 4.
See for example, Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History, 1.
- 5.
Reddy, ‘Conduit Metaphors’, 164–201.
- 6.
Billig, Laughter, 5; Morreall, ed. Philosophy of Humor; Critchley, Humour, 2–4 attributing the tripartite classification to Morreall.
- 7.
Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History, 1.
- 8.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftsbury, ‘Sensus Communis’ 1.1.
- 9.
See for example, Barrow, Against Foolish Talking, 305–28, 306, 312.
- 10.
See, for example, Billig, Laughter, at length; Ruch, Sense of Humor; Critchley, Humour, 2–3.
- 11.
Wickberg, ‘Sense of Humour in American Culture’, 30–139; for brief but not entirely reliable comments on the pre-history of a sense of humour, see also Ruch, Sense of Humor, 1–10.
- 12.
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 241–3.
- 13.
The OED gives 1847 as the earliest use, but negative neologisms can precede their positive forms. Words with the un prefix provide good examples, see Dixon, Making New Words, 77.
- 14.
I have consulted a number of lexicons through the extremely valuable Australian Society for Indigenous Languages (ausil) website. Although all had distinct and variably organised vocabularies of laughter, Walpiri, for example, having different terms for laughing in fun and derisively, none had accommodated humour or has a listed semantic equivalent, including New Tiwi, a simplified version of Tiwi with many English loan words.
- 15.
Wells, ‘Satire and Constraint’,193–217; see also Wells and Jessica Milner Davis, ‘Farce and Satire’, 127–52, although the suggestion seems to be that farce does map pretty precisely on the faasu of kyōgen.
- 16.
Eco, Mouse or Rat; Jacobson, ‘Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, 222–239, 238.
- 17.
Ghose, ‘Licence to Laugh’, 42–3.
- 18.
For further discussion see Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 5–7.
- 19.
McKee, Japanese Poetry Prints: 9–33, 10–11. I am grateful to Dr. Aoise Stratford for drawing this to my attention.
- 20.
Newton, Origins of Beowulf, 55–63.
- 21.
Lewis, Studies in Words, 8–13.
- 22.
Donne, ‘Satyre I’, 129.
- 23.
Bailey, Universal Etymological Dictionary.
- 24.
Matthias, The Pursuits of Literature, 6–7.
- 25.
Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 6.
- 26.
Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 291.
- 27.
Samuel Butler, quoted in Farley-Hills, Benevolence of Laughter, 8.
- 28.
Resnik, ‘Risus monasticus’, 90–100, 90–1 on John Chrysostom’s claim about Jesus; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 150, 174,
- 29.
For a valuable survey, Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 14—176; see also ‘Why Laughing Mattered’, 418–47.
- 30.
Montaigne, ‘On Democritus and Heraclitus’, 219–21; for a valuable discussion, Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, 90–112.
- 31.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world.
- 32.
Gurevich, ‘Bakhtin and his theory of carnival’, 54–60.
- 33.
Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense, 117–24.
- 34.
Goh Abe, ‘A Ritual Performance of Laughter’, 37–50.
- 35.
Castelveltro, Poetica d’Aristotele, pt.2, pp.34b-62; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 42.
- 36.
Straight, Rule of Rejoycing, 2, 24–5.
- 37.
Barrow, Against Foolish Talking, 304–20 writing of innocentjesting and facetiousness; it is an understanding, specifically of laughter that threads through The Spectator; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’,162–4; Ghose, ‘Licence to Laugh’, 43 who both suggest that it gains increased attention from the eighteenth century.
- 38.
Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing, 7; Farley-Hills, Benevolence of Laughter, 11–12, seems not to notice the absence of reference to laughter.
- 39.
Burrow, Against Foolish Talking, 312.
- 40.
Rackin, Stages of History, 38–42.
- 41.
Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 17–35.
- 42.
Wickberg, ‘Sense of Humor’, 103–110, 106.
- 43.
Cavendish, Life, 202.
- 44.
Nietzsche, La Gaia scienza, para 26.
- 45.
Dilthey, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology; The Understanding of Other Persons; Makkreel, Dilthey, 247–73, esp. 269–71, 333–4.
- 46.
Some of the issues are raised in Brewer, ‘Prose Jest-Books’, 90–111.
- 47.
Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History, 3.
- 48.
Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense.
- 49.
Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 1–3, 113–6, for a brilliant analysis: see also Bonds, ‘Haydn’, 57–91, for the interplay of wit and humor between words and music.
- 50.
Ghose, ‘Festive Laughter’, at length.
- 51.
Gallie, Philosophy, 105–115.
- 52.
Gallie, Philosophy, 115 for the historian’s causal vocabulary as a matter of glossing a text.
- 53.
On the late emergence of a historical rationale for translation, see Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation’, 7–38.
- 54.
Vives, De ratione dicendi, III, 225–6.
- 55.
Dacier, Iliade d’Homère; similarly, it has been argued that the intellectual content of William of Ockham’s logic can only be properly revealed through modern notation.
- 56.
Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’, 231–55; and especially, Nelson, ‘General Introduction’.
- 57.
Fitts, ‘The Poetic Nuance’, 42–7.
- 58.
Rubinstein, Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns, x-xiii; Ghose, Much Ado 114–17.
- 59.
McKee, Japanese Poetry Prints, 12–13,188–90.
- 60.
Rose, Parody, 117.
- 61.
Addison, The Spectator, 228.
- 62.
Nokes, John Gay, 231–3, discussing God’s Revenge Against Punning, and A Modest Defence of Punning, (Swift), a Defence of the Ancient Art of Punning, (possibly Arbuthnot); see also, Arbuthnot and Pope, Memoirs, 125–8, 262–3.
- 63.
John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia (1649) 104–26, cited Kerby-Miller, ed. Memoirs, 277; the parodic account in the Memoirs, chapter 10, 133, may in some form have been known by Sheridan, via Swift.
- 64.
Shaftesbury, ‘Sensus communis’, 1.2.
- 65.
An exception may be an arithmetical error about the number of chapters—Arbuthnot was probably the foremost mathematician of his generation. But the pamphlet is anonymous and Arbuthnot was notoriously careless about his own writings.
- 66.
Adams, Bad Mouth, 43–5.
- 67.
Arbuthnot and Pope, Memoirs, 169.
- 68.
Lund, ‘Res and verba’, 63–78.
- 69.
Lund, ‘Res et verba’,63–78; Anderson, Sons of Clovis.
- 70.
Hobbes, Elements of Law, (1640) pt. 1. Ch. 9. sect. 13, 41–3; ‘our previous selves’ is a cumbersome, if precise formulation for laughing at ourselves, consequent upon Hobbes’s belief that we exist in the present, the past, however recent, being decaying sense.
- 71.
Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2 ch. 6, 88–9; see also Skinner ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 147–9.
- 72.
Addison, Spectator, April, 1711, 174.
- 73.
Roeckelein, ‘Hobbesian Theory’, vol. 1, 340–2, is entirely representative; Billig, Laughter, 37–56; for a timely critical discussion, Lintott, ‘Superiority in Humor Theory’, 357–58.
- 74.
Preston, Essay, 69–76.
- 75.
In De cive, Hobbes very briefly posits a wider range for gloria (vain glory) in mentioning laughter, but even this is qualified.
- 76.
Hobbes, Elements, pt. 1, chs 9–10, 36–48; Lintott, ‘Superiority’, 352–6.
- 77.
Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 151.
- 78.
Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 155, 151.
- 79.
Parkin, The Taming of Leviathan.
- 80.
Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 101–31.
- 81.
Serjeantson, ‘Hobbes, the universities and the history of philosophy’, 114–5.
- 82.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 4
- 83.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Review and Conclusion’.
- 84.
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 46.
- 85.
It is true that he is sometimes seen as part of a lineage, preceded by Plato and Aristotle, for which similar distortions are required, on which see Lintott, ‘Superiority’ at length; he is nevertheless given an untoward preeminence in keeping with his own assessments.
- 86.
Hutton, ‘Science and Satire’ 161–78; Cottegnies, ‘Utopia, Millenarianism and the Baconian Programme’, 71–92, 71–2.
- 87.
Mayne, Part of Lucian Made English.
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Condren, C. (2020). The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the Limits of Method. In: Derrin, D., Burrows, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3_2
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