Wit, humor, and the comic:
Wit, humor, and the comic:
At present both “wit” and “humor” designate species of the comic; that is, any element in a work of literature, whether a character, event, or utterance, which is designed to amuse or to excite mirth in the reader or audience. The words “wit” and “humor,” however, had a variety of meanings in earlier literary criticism, and a brief comment on their history will help to clarify the differences between them in present usage.
The term “wit” once signified the human faculty of intelligence, inven-tiveness, and mental acuity, a sense it still retains in the term “half-wit.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it came to be used also for ingenuity in literary invention, and especially for the ability to develop brilliant, surprising, and paradoxical figures of speech; hence “wit” was often applied to the figu-rative language in what we now call metaphysical poetry.
And in the eighteenth century there were attempts to distinguish the false wit of Abraham Cowley and other metaphysical stylists, who were said to aim at a merely superficial dazzlement, and “true wit,” regarded as the apt rephrasing of truths whose enduring validity is attested by the fact that they are universal commonplaces. Thus Alexander Pope defined “true wit” in his Essay on Criticism (1711) as “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” See neoclassic.
The most common present use of the term derives from its seventeenth-century application to a brilliant and paradoxical style. Wit, that is, now de-notes a kind of verbal expression which is brief, deft, and intentionally con-trived to produce a shock of comic surprise; a typical form is that of the epigram. The surprise is usually the result of a connection or distinction be-tween words or concepts which frustrates the listener’s expectation, only to satisfy it in an unexpected way.
Philip Guedalla wittily said: “History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.” Thus the trite comment about history turns out to be unexpectedly appropriate, with an unlooked-for turn of meaning, to the writers of history as well. The film actress Mae West once remarked: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” The resulting laughter, in a famous phrase of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, arises “from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into noth-ing”; it might be more precise to say, however, “from the sudden satisfaction of an expectation, but in a way we did not expect.”
Mae West’s remark is what the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called “harmless wit,” which evokes a laugh or smile that is without malice. What Freud distinguished as “tendency wit,” on the other hand, is aggres-sive: it is a derisive and derogatory turn of phrase, directing the laugh at a particular person or butt. “Mr. James Payn,” in Oscar Wilde’s barbed com-ment on a novelist of the 1890s, “hunts down the obvious with the enthu-siasm of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable.”
Repartee is a term taken from fencing to signify a contest of wit, in which each person tries to cap the remark of the other, or to turn it to his or her own advantage. Attacking his opponent Disraeli in Parliament, Gladstone remarked that “the honorable gentleman will either end on the gallows or die of some loathsome disease.” To which Disraeli rejoined: “That depends on whether I embrace the honorable gentleman’s principles or his mistresses.” Restoration comedies often included episodes of sustained repartee; a classic example is the give-and-take in the discussion of their coming marriage by the witty lovers Mirabel and Millamant in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), Act IV.
“Humor” is a term that goes back to the ancient theory that the particular mixture of the four humours determines each type of personality, and from the derivative application of the term “humorous” to one of the comically eccentric characters in the Elizabethan comedy of humours. As we now use the word, humor may be ascribed either to a comic utterance or to a comic appearance or mode of behavior. In a useful distinction between the two terms, a humorous utterance may be said to differ from a witty utterance in one or both of two ways:
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(1) wit, as we saw, is always intended by the speaker to be comic, but many utterances that we find comically humorous are intended by the speakers themselves to be serious; and (2) a humorous saying is not cast in the neatly epigrammatic form of a witty saying. For example, the chatter of the old Nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is verbose, and humorous to the audience, but not to the speaker; similarly, the discussion of the mode of life of the goldfish in Central Park by the inarticulate and irascible taxi driver in J.
D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is unintentionally but richly humorous, and is not cast in the form of a witty turn of phrase.
Unlike wit, which is limited to spoken or written language, humor encompasses a broader range, including appearance, actions, and visual media like cartoons [1]. Complex humor, such as in Twelfth Night, can involve unintended comedy from a character’s actions alongside audience awareness of hidden plots [1]. The character of Falstaff in 1 Henry IV represents a peak of comic creation, blending intentional wit with unintentional humor through his appearance, behavior, and embellished storytelling [1].
we extend Freud’s distinction between harmless and tendency wit, we can say that humor is a “harmless” form of the comic. There is, however, another mode of the comic that might be called “tendency comedy,” in which we are made to laugh at a person not merely because he is ridiculous but because he is being ridiculed—the laughter is derisive, with some element of contempt or malice, and serves as a weapon against its subject. Tendency comedy and tendency wit, rather than humor, are among the devices that a writer most exploits in satire, the literary art of derogating by deriding a subject.
On the alternative use of the term “comic” to define the formal features of a type of dramatic or narrative plot, see comedy; on the form of humor-in-horror in some present-day literature, see black humor. For diverse theories of wit, humor, and the comic, together with copious examples, refer to Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916); Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (1936); D. H. Monro, The Argument of Laughter (1951); Louis Kronenberger, The Thread of Laughter (1952); Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (1960); Jerry Palmer, Taking Humor Seriously (1994).
women’s studies: 126.
wrenched accent: 218.
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zeugma (zoog’ mä): 347
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