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New York: John Lane Co;
[London]: Allen Lane (1916) by Stephen Leacock IV.American Humour E SSAYS The following essay is therefore intended to present a serious analysis of American humour as an art, and to discuss its relation to the character and history of the people among whom it has originated. In such a discussion it may well become necessary to introduce an actual citation of typical American jokes: but, where this is the case, it is done only in the interests of art, and with a proper sense of responsibility. It is not to be implied from this that none of the world's great philosophers, such as Kant, and Schopenhauer, have dealt with the analysis of humour. Several of them have done so, and have done so in a spirit which does them credit. Schopenhauer has told us I cannot quote his phrase exactly but merely give the rough, everyday sense of his words that all those concepts are amusing in which there is the subsumption of a double paradox. This is a proposition which none of us will readily deny, and one which, if more, widely appreciated, might prove of the highest practical utility. Kant, likewise, has said that in him everything excites laughter in which there is a resolution or deliverance of the absolute captive by the finite. It was very honourable of Kant to admit this. It enables us to know exactly what did, and what did not, excite him. But the difficulty remains that the philosophical school of analysts, in their fear of being thought light, frivolous, or over-intelligible in dealing with this subject have been led to envelop themselves in a thick haze of psychological terminology which the common eye is unable to pierce. The explanation of the humorous proceeds thus | |
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