A state of good humour is the healthiest condition for human beings to achieve. A sense of humour, by enabling us to expose, deflate or deride the ridiculous creations of the Mind, makes this state attainable by reducing the fear and anxieties created by the dominance of the Mind on our lives and culture. Under the influence of good humour, we are more likely to achieve wisdom, rationality and serenity.
However, there is some confusion about what "humour" really means. Fielding wrote in his 'Covent Garden Journal', "In truth, there is nothing so unsettled and uncertain as our notion of humour in general".
Our understanding of this subject does not seem to have improved since Fielding's time. Thefact that many people consider humour synonymous with comedy or wit merely adds to the confusion.
The comic comes into play whenever physical or cosmic laws exposes the absurdity of our Mind's abstractions or beliefs; whenever Nature deflates ego; whenever reality debases pretentiousness, capricious expectations or wishful assumptions; whenever material objectivity brings ethereal subjectivity and its posturing, affectation or self-deception, down to earth. In short, whenever the world of our Mind is shaken, it is comic.
The word humour is derived from the Latin word'umor'and the medieval word 'humour', both of which were medical terms meaning a biological disposition or temperament.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, the word humour also began to mean an adopted "umor", an affectation, a pose, a pretension. In the Introduction to his Every Man out of his Humour, Ben Jonson found the affected 'umor' "more than most ridiculous".
By liberating our sense of perception from its distorting and inhibiting over-seriousness,a sense of humour enables us to perceive humanity in its nakedness, with magnanimity,pity and sympathy. Carlyle emphasised this when he wrote in his essay 'On Richter', that "the essence of humour is sensibility: warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence".
Good humour inspires magnanimity, because through it we cannot fail to perceive familiar aspects of the human condition, in particular the suffering, pathos and despair brought about by pretentiousness,chasing after 'ought-to-be' illusions, and capricious over-ambition.
In 1921 an old peasant woman, wrapped in many coats, bent almost into a ball, shuffled up to the Kremlin doors and said she had a question for Lenin. She was allowed an audience because of her age and because she came from Simbirsk, Lenin's childhood home. "What do you want to know?" Lenin asked. "Is it true that Communism is an experiment?" asked the old woman, "Yes indeed it is - a glorious social experiment!", said Lenin. "Then why didn't you try it out on animals first?!"
A sense of humour exercises our capacity for realistic reasoning, thus banishing the risk of intimidation by irrational wishful thinking, and keeps the intelligent activity of our brain alive and alert.
Good humour establishes a more harmonious relationship between the old brain and the new, a relationship threatened by the precarious and imaginary world of the Mind.
Since it is infectious, a sense of humour can create a healthy atmosphere of togetherness and intimacy, a natural condition for our species that was born to live as a socially interdependent community.
Humour immunises us against ideologies or beliefs, dogmas or prejudices, leaving us mentally fit to enjoy a life free from stress and frustration. An example of the way Russians, during the Stalinist years, used humour to deride their fear of their system is in the follow:
Stalin died and met Tsar Nicholas II in the afterlife...
"Tell me", said the last Tsar, "how are my people?"
"What do you mean?" asked Stalin.
"Well", said Tsar Nicholas, "are the peasants still lazy?"
"Yes" said Stalin
Nicholas: "Is bureaucracy still corrupt?"
Stalin: "If it is possible, more than ever"
Nicholas: "Is the Kremlin still despotic?"
Stalin: "Absolutely!"
Nicholas: "No change there, then".
Stalin: "What else do you want to know?"
Nicholas: "What about my Vodka, is the best still 35% proof?"
Stalin: "Ah! No I increased it to 40% and more!"
"So tell me," said Nicholas: "was a bloody revolution worth a few degrees of alcohol?"
A sense of humour, therefore, is the only means by which we can emerge from a life dominated by the fear and suffering of the Mind.
Wit and humour are often considered mistakenly, to be one and the same thing, however they are not, and it is essential to understand the difference.
Wit is a product of our brain's activity in periods of Mind-created emotional arousal, kept alive by resentment on the part of the wit himself, usually resulting from some form of humiliation or frustration. Wit is his vindictive or malicious catharsis, his exorcism of emotional arousal."There is no possibility of being witty without a little of ill-nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick", wrote Sheridan in 'School for Scandal'. The wit never loses an opportunity to launch his poisoned arrows, as Quintilian wrote,"Potius amicum quam dictum perdere" ("better lose a friend than a chance for a wisecrack").
When the wit's emotional arousal is linked to the idea that created it, wit becomes a compulsive game, an obsession. He is"plagued with an itching leprosy of wit",as Ben Jonson put it.
A wit becomes intoxicated by his own venom, revelling in the agony of his victims.Swift, a well-known exponent, confessed to Alexander Pope that it was a pleasure to harass people:"The chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than to divert it". In his, 'Antologie de I'humour noir', André Breton, made the following observation about Alphonse Allais, possibly the greatest malicious wit in France since Voltaire: "Il excelle à mettre en dificulté l'individu satisfait, ébloui de truismeet sûr de lui" ("He excels in embarrassing those who feel self-satisfied and self-righteous").
While humour encourages relaxation, wit creates tension; while humour fosters togetherness, wit creates distance and division; while humour generates charm, benevolence and magnanimity, wit generates defiance malevolence and contempt; while humour disarms the Mind, wit alerts it; humour seeks intimacy, wit longs for indiscretion; humour brings about humility, wit brings about insolence; the humorist is kind and tolerant, whereas wit is offensive and impertinent; humour remains humble, wit leans towards the pompous and baroque.
As Pope put it in his 'Essay on Criticism', "great wits sometimes may gloriously offend".
Charles Brooks, in his article 'On the Difference between Wit and Humour' wrote that; "humorous persons have pleasant mouths turned up at the corners... but the mouth of a merely witty man is hard and sour until the moment of its discharge".
People who are content with themselves, healthy, pleasant looking and professionally competent, have less over-developed Minds, less inflated egos and are less pretentious. These are people with a sense of humour. Those who are discontented, and display the opposites of the above characteristics are inclined to develop a malicious wit. I have also noticed that successful artisans, whatever country they come from, tend to develop a better sense of humour than the middle classes, who regard humour with circumspection or even fear, since it threatens their precarious sense of self-esteem.
I will try to illustrate the difference between the comic, the wit and a sense of humour with an example.
A General informed Napoleon that there was in the army a soldier who looked exactly like him. Napoleon decided to see the soldier.
"Where are you from?" asked Napoleon.
"From a village near Ajaccio" replied the soldier (Napoleon comes from Ajaccio)
"Did your mother ever come to Ajaccio?" Napoleon asked maliciously.
If the soldier is candid and tells the truth, he might say without any particular emotion:
"No, my mother never went to Ajaccio, but my father often went there", and we have a comic situation.
However if the soldier was offended by Napoleon's insinuation, and answered with a malicious tone: "No my mother never went to Ajaccio, but my father often used to go there", we have wit.
Finally, if the soldier understood Napoleon's insinuation, and decides to rise above his malice by answering: "Yes, my mother used to go to Ajaccio, and she loved it", we have a sense of humour.
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