Ben Jonson says that
When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
In their constructions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humor.
But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good
subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.
Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
faces, or before they have spoken a word.
The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
humorist, defines it thus:
Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
presence of the infinite all are alike nothing.
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