Humor

A funny thing happened the other day

During the Middle Ages, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, the word humor was defined in this way:

“One of the four fluids of the body, blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile, the dominance of which was thought to determine the character and general health of a man. Accordingly one’s disposition might be sanguine [i.e., passionate], phlegmatic [i.e., unemotional], choleric [i.e., bad-tempered], or melancholy [i.e., violently angry].”

Although, as the American grammarians Bergen and Cornelia Evans say in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, the medieval definition is evident in constructions like “ill humor” and “bad humor,” the modern definition, which The American Heritage Dictionary also provides, emphasizes our ability to perceive something amusing — something like a word, an action, or an image whose purpose is to show us that life is not so grim as it sometimes seems.

If you have ever perceived something that has amused you and that has not amused someone else, you know that perceptions — or senses — of humor differ. And because my sense of humor may differ from yours, I can’t say what kinds of jokes will always amuse you; but I will suggest that two kinds of jokes will seldom amuse anyone: the kind of joke that depreciates the person who tells it, and the kind of joke that depreciates someone else.

Those kinds of jokes will seldom amuse anyone because they demand reassurances (the kind that depreciates the person who tells it demands a statement like “No, you’re not the half-wit you say you are!”; and the kind that depreciates someone else demands a statement like “Yes, he is the half-wit you say he is”); and humor doesn’t demand reassurance — humor gives it.

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Copyright © 2022 by John Porter. All Rights Reserved.

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