The%20History%20of%20Humor

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The History of Humor

• By Don L. F. Nilsen and
• Alleen Pace Nilsen

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Some Historical Advertisements
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Humor in Gothic Cathedrals

• Notre Dame Cathedral is on the Isle de la Cité in
  Paris France. At the entrance is the sculpture
  of a beheaded Christian martyer holding his own
  head.
• Winchester Cathedral is a Gothic Cathedral in
  England. In the rafters is the Winchester Imp,
  placed there by the masons, and smiling down on
  the congregation below.

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Winchester Cathedral Notre Dame Cathedral
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Classical Graffiti Ironic Oratory

• In ancient Greece and Rome, there are examples
  of graffiti, many of which are very funny.
• Classical Oratory also contained many examples of
  Irony, Paradox, Parody, and Ridicule.

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The History of Comedy

• Greek comedies were often bawdy or ribald and
  ended happily for everyone.
• To Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other writers of the
  Middle Ages and Renaissance, a comedy was a story
  (but especially a play) with a happy ending,
  whether humorous or not.

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Homer (9th-8th Century BC)

• Aristotles Poetics, includes Homer in his
  discussion of the comic
• A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be
  put down to any author earlier than Homer though
  many such writers probably there were.
• But from Homer onward, many instances of the
  comic can be cited.

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Homer
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Old Comedy, Middle Comedy and New Comedy

• Old Comedy of the 6th 5th Centuries BC often
  made fun of a specific person and of current
  political issues.
• Middle Comedy of the 5th 4th Centuries BC made
  fun of more general themes such as literature,
  professions, and society.
• New Comedy of the 4th 3rd Centuries BC usually
  revolved around the bawdy adventures of a
  blustering soldier, a young man in love with an
  unsuitable woman, or a father figure who cannot
  follow his own advice.

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Aristophanes (c450-c388 BC)

• Of the Old and Middle comedies, the only ones
  that have survived complete are eleven plays of
  Aristophanes.
• The Clouds lampoons Socrates in heaven, in the
  Old tradition, while Lysistrata makes fun of
  human nature in general.
• In Plutus both the wealth and the poverty in
  Athens are personified. The citizenry are so
  distracted that they neglect the gods.
• Plutus is considered to be Middle comedy.

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Aristophanes
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Titus Maccius Plautus (c254-184 BC)Plubius
Terentius Terence (185-c159 BC)

• Comedy in the Roman Empire is generally reduced
  to the works of Plautus and Terence, the former
  of whom lived at about the same time as Menander,
  the latter about a century later.
• Both Plautus and Terence wrote plays of the old
  Greek sortfarces involving the same stock
  characters (father, soldier, slave) and which,
  unlike the plays of Aristophanes, offended no one
  in particular.

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Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

• Most of Dantes The Divine Comedy is not at all
  funny.
• It is about Paradiso as contrasted with
  Purgatorio and the Inferno.
• It was called a comedy because it is a story
  about the powerless vs. the powerful, or the
  little man vs. the big man, or even about the
  perils and pitfalls of social pretence.
• And thus, The Divine Comedy was indeed a
  comedy only in the classical sense of the word.

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Dante Alighieri
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• The Inferno, the first installment of Dantes The
  Divine Comedy, describes damned souls engaging in
  bawdy behavior and word play.
• The second and third installments of The Divine
  Comedy are however distinctly not funny, and
  demonstrate that in the fourteenth century a
  comedy need do nothing more than end happily.

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Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)

• Boccaccios Decameron is a collection of stories
  told by a group of ten nobles who have fled the
  Black Death by shutting themselves up in a lonely
  castle.
• Chaucers Canterbury Tales were influenced by
  Boccaccios Decameron, and they have basically
  the same structure.

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Giovanni Bocaccio
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Geoffrey Chaucer (c1342-1400)

• In the Middle Ages, the farces, bawdies, and
  satires of Greek and Roman literature continued
  to be popular.
• Chaucer is best known for his Canterbury Tales,
  some of which (e.g. The Millers Tale) are both
  bawdy and still funny by todays standards.

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Geoffrey Chaucer
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• Chaucer also penned The Romaunt of the Rose, a
  satire on love and courtship, and The House of
  Fame which seems to spoof Dantes idea of the
  narrator and the guide.
• In Chaucers version, the narrator would rather
  not listen to the guide.

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Erasmus (1466-1536)

• Erasmus has very clear political and religious
  objectives in The Praise of Folly, where Folly is
  nursed and instructed by Self- Love, Flattery,
  Intemperance, and a number of other personified
  sins, and goes on to criticize the Catholic
  Church.
• These personified characteristics are what made
  this piece allegorical.
• Oddly enough, the joke was on Erasmus, who was a
  staunch Catholic, but whose work became a major
  catalyst of the Protestant Reformation.

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François Rabelais (c1483-1553)

• Rabelais published a series of five books
  collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel.
• Gargantua and his son Pantagruel are two giants
  of unfixed size, who can sometimes fit into a
  normal building and sometimes hold whole
  civilizations inside of their mouths.

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François Rabelais
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• These books contain satires on the Roman Catholic
  church, bawdy stories, and scatological humor as
  well as plain silliness that reminds the modern
  reader of Monty Pythons Flying Circus.
• Rabelais brand of silliness and freedom from the
  laws of physics and of logic was discussed by the
  critic Bakhtin, who calls this atmosphere the
  carnival world.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

• Shakespeares plays are sometimes divided into
  Comedy, Tragedy, and History.
• The history plays are, obviously, those based on
  historical personages such as Richard III and
  Henry IV.
• The difference between comedy and tragedy is
  still very much the same as in Greek
  playscomedies have happy endings and tragedies
  have sad ones tragic heroes are larger than
  life, while comic heroes are flawed.

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William Shakespeare
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• Shakespeares comedies are also usually funny,
  but unlike the Greek bawdy plays and satires,
  their humor lies in word playpuns, allusions,
  and double-entendres that are very often lost on
  todays audience.
• Careful perusal of an annotated version of Loves
  Labours Lost or Alls Well That Ends Well will
  reveal the surprising density of jokes in these
  plays, which are supposed to have had Elizabethan
  audiences roaring with laughter.

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• Falstaff, a great comic and humorous character
  demonstrates Bakhtins carnival.
• Falstaff appears not in comedy plays, but in
  history plays--Henry IV parts I and II.
• Shakespeares tragedies, too, often include a
  figure of a clown or fool. His job is not so
  much to provide mirth or laughter as it is to
  provide commentary that is sometimes satiric and
  very often funny.

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Court Jesters from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance

• During the Middle Ages, Kings Court Jesters were
  not to be in competition with the Kings.
• So most often they were deformed midgets with
  humped backs and bug eyes.
• They acted stupid to match their clothingcap and
  bells, motley clothes, and pointed shoes.
• Their scepters were made from pig bladders as
  parodies of the Kings scepter of power.
• In many plays, the fool is smarter than the King,
  but because of his appearance he could be
  critical of the King and the Kingdom.

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Fools During the Renaissance and Beyond

• There are both foolish and wise fools in
  Shakespeares plays.
• Contrast the wise fool with the dead fool
  (Yorrick) in Hamlet and the wise/foolish women in
  The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about
  Nothing.
• Street jugglers and street musicians came out of
  these Renaissance traditions.
• So did Englands Punch and Judy shows, Italys
  Commedia del Arte, and Frances Comedie
  Française.
• As well as Englands Comedy of Humours, and
  Comedy of Manners, and Americas ventriloquists
  and political cartoonists.

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The Eighteenth Century

• The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new kind
  of humorous author the wit.
• A wit is usually a person who can make quick, wry
  comments in the course of conversation.

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Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

• Swift is best known for his novel Gullivers
  Travels in which sailor Lemuel Gulliver recounts
  his visits to strange lands inhabited by
  fantastic peoples.
• Gullivers last voyage finds him in a land where
  horses are the dominant species, and keep dumb,
  barbaric humans (called Yahoos) as beasts of
  burden.
• This novel is a humorous reflection on the
  failings of civilization.

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Jonathan Swift
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• Swifts A Modest Proposal is an essay which
  suggests that the problems of overpopulation and
  starvation in the lower classes (especially in
  Ireland) would be readily solved if they would
  eat their own children.

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William Congreve (1670-1729)

• William Congreve was a contemporary of Jonathan
  Swift and Alexander Pope.
• His The Old Batchelor (1693), The Double Dealer
  (1693), Love for Love (1695), and The Way of the
  World (1700) are all satires filled with ironies
  and paradoxes.

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Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

• While Jonathan Swift was writing satirical
  novels, Alexander Pope was writing satirical
  poetry.
• Popes Imitations of Horace satirizes the
  policies of George II and Horace Walpole while
  imitating the form of a classical poet.
• Popes Moral Essays are works more of ridicule
  than of satire, and are not considered humorous
  by everybody.
• Popes most celebrated satire was named Dunciad.

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Voltaire (François-Marie Arout) (1694-1778)

• Voltaire dabbled in many different literary
  formsfrom novels to plays, history, poetry,
  letters, and essays.
• His signature wit is present in all, and some are
  expressly meant to be satires, especially on the
  Catholic church, censorship, and French civil
  liberties (or lack of).

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Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

• Tom Jones is a light-hearted tale of adventure,
  containing many hilarious episodes and ends
  happily for everyone who is deserving.

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Henry Fielding
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History of America

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vaLdQ4DUnnw4feature
  fvw

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Charlotte Lenox (1720-1804)

• Charlotte Lenoxs The Female Quixote tells the
  story of Arabella, a young woman whose only
  education and contact with the outside world has
  consisted of reading romance novels, and the
  adventures she has when she becomes independently
  wealthy and comes face-to-face with the outside
  world.

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Jane Austen (1775-1859)

• Jane Austens characters are simultaneously
  true-to-life and ridiculous.
• All of her novels can simultaneously be read as
  scorching satires of human nature, comedies of
  humours and comedies of manners.

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Jane Austen
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Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852)

• Some of Gogols short stories like The Nose are
  bizarre, almost to the point where humor is lost
  to wonder and confusion.
• In The Nose a mans nose goes AWOL and walks
  about the city causing trouble.

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• But some of Gogols short stories are so dark and
  horrible that, while the story is most certainly
  a joke with a punch line, the reader is loathe to
  laugh.
• For example, in The Overcoat a poor clerk starves
  himself to buy a new coat, which is stolen from
  him on the first night he wears it.

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William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

• Both Charles Dickens and William Makepeace
  Thackeray became enormously popular for
  sympathetic portrayals of eccentric characters.
• There are many straightforward jokes and much
  satire in their novels, which can be considered
  comedies because they end well for almost
  everyone.

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Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

• Charles Dickens is famous for the eccentrics that
  he portrays in his novels.
• For example, the characterizations of Silas Wegg
  and Mr. Venus in Our Mutual Friend make us laugh
  in delight at the recognition and exaggeration of
  a type of person that we ourselves have met in
  real life.

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Charles Dickens
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Mid 19th Century

• James Russell Lowells Birdofreedum Sawin said,
  at any rate, Im so used up I cant do no more
  fightin / The only chance thets left to me is
  politics or writin.
• On the western frontier, wise fools, con-men, and
  tricksters like Johnson J. Hoopers Simon Suggs
  and George Washington Harriss Sut Lovingood were
  employed to portray the rough and unsophisticated
  American as an ironic hero. Suggs was lazy and
  dishonest, and he knew it was good to be shifty
  in a new country.

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Sut Lovingood (1814-1869

• Sut Lovingood expressed a rude racism and sexism.
• He argued in favor of drinking, sex,
  roughhousing, and a deep mistrust of preachers,
  widows, and other guardians of civilization.
• His freedom, joy of life, and cynicism supported
  the counter culture.

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Mark Twain (1835-1910)

• Like Charles Dickens in England, Mark Twain in
  America wrote vernacular novels with eccentric
  characters.
• Twain wrote stories about characters that are
  more real than real life, more true to type than
  any true person could be.

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Mark Twain
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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

• Oscar Wilde is a great comic playwright whose
  only joke, it seems, was to contrast the honest,
  industrious morés of the public world with the
  lazy selfish motivations of his elegant heroes.
• Wildes plays exhibit a gift for word play and
  repartée, as well as cultivation of ridiculous
  situations.

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Oscar Wilde
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P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

• Wodehouse wrote many novels about the nitwit
  Bertie Wooster and his gentlemans gentleman,
  Jeeves.
• Wodehouses works usually hinge around a
  ridiculous social situations created by the
  characters themselves.

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P. G. Wodehouse
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E. B. White (1899-1985)

• In 1941, E. B. White wrote, Humor can be
  dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in
  the process and the innards are discouraging to
  any but the pure scientific mind.

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E. B. White
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George Orwell (1903-1950)

• Orwells Animal Farm is an allegory.
• On the surface it is a story about personified
  farm animals.
• But it is probably also about the Russian
  revolution.

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We should learn from history!
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Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

• Isaac Asimov is famous as a science fiction
  writer, but he also published two books of jokes,
  one in 1971, and one in 1993.
• These joke books contain commentary on why the
  jokes are funny, and suggestions on how to become
  a good joke teller.

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Joseph Heller (1923-)

• Joseph Heller wrote gallows humor in which he
  tried to make people laugh and then feel like
  fools for having laughed.
• He wrote Catch 22 in which Yosarian had to prove
  that he was insane in order to get out of the
  army, but by trying to get out of the army he was
  proving that he was sane.
• Another catch 22 in the novel was that they had
  to fly a certain number of missions before
  returning home, but the number kept increasing.

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Joseph Heller
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Television Humor

• Television opened huge new vistas for performing
  arts in general, and humor in particular.
• Early TV featured humorous variety shows like
  Laugh In, and Saturday Night Live.
• There was also much sketch humor in such shows as
  Monty Pythons Flying Circus.

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The First Comic Strips

• The early strips such as The Yellow Kid were
  curious combinations of down-to-earth slapstick,
  topical joking, and rather abstract referencing.
• In the hands of a Windsor McCay (Little Nemo in
  Slumberland, The Adventures of the Rare-bit
  Fiend,) they were creative indeed, and could
  border on the surreal and handle social satire at
  the same time.
• George Herrimans Krazy Kat mostly settled for
  a domestic humor involving marital conflict and
  bratty kids.

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The Golden Age of Humor

• The golden age of humor was often considered to
  be the 1920s but would be more accurately placed
  from the end of WWI to the early 30s.
• During this golden age, we see the development of
  the little man in Casper Milquetoast, Andy
  Gump, Jiggs, Mutt (of Mutt and Jeff), and
  Dagwood (of Blondie and Dagwood).

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Blondie and Dagwood

• Dagwood loses battles with his wife, Blondie, his
  kids, the dog, his boss, and the neighborhood
  bridge club (intruding on his bath).
• His defense is napping as often as he can, eating
  everything in sight Dagwood Sandwiches, and
  knocking down the mailman as he rushes off to
  work in the morning.
• It was a comic counter-balance to American
  arrogance, and self-confidence.

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Blondie and Dagwood, Pogo, and Lil Abner
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The 1940s

• The humorous comic strips that were revived after
  the Second World War included Walt Kellys
  Pogo, and Al Capps Lil Abner.
• Kellys swamp fables were allegorical swamps
  themselves, loaded with social and political
  commentary lurking behind the antics and
  interactions of the familiar cast of animal
  characters.
• Al Capps hillbillies gave access to Capps
  views on topical events, government, and American
  values.

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Charles Schulzs Eccentrics

• The Peanuts comic strip uses kids to reflect
  adult neuroses
• Lucy uses her meanness to compensate for the
  unrequited love she has for Schroeder (who keeps
  trying to play Beethoven on a toy piano with
  painted on black keys).
• Linus has his blanket to comfort him when his
  childhood fears and fantasy get in the way of his
  intellect,
• and the dog, Snoopy, deals with the limitations
  of his dogness by pretending to be the Red
  Baron, or a lawyer, writer, hockey player,
  detective and resident of a deluxe doghouse
  complete with a pool table and rare paintings.
• Charlie Brown, the consummate loser, little man
  character, reflects all the fears, weaknesses,
  and failures of modern man. He knows that Lucy
  will pull the football away from him when he
  tries to kick it, yet every year he tries again.

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Charles Schulz
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• Nostalgia The Land that Made Me Me
• https//www.youtube.com/embed/J55S38xwxnQ?rel0

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History of International Humor Conferences
1976 Cardiff Wales 1982 Los Angeles, CA 1984 Tel Aviv, Israel 1985 Cork, Ireland 1982-1987 Tempe, AZ 1988 West Lafayette, IN 1989 Laie, HI 1990 Sheffield, England 1991 St. Catharines, Canada 1992 Paris France 1993 Luxembourg 1994 Ithaca, NY 1995 Birmingham, England 1996 Sydney, Australia 1997 Edmond, OK 1998 Bergen, Norway 1999 Oakland, CA 2000 Osaka, Japan 2001 College Park, MD 2002 Forli, Italy 2003 Chicago, IL 2004 Dijon, France 2005 Youngstown, OH 2006 Copenhagen, Denmark 2007 Newport, RI 2008 Alcala, Spain 2009 Long Beach, CA 2010 Hong Kong 2011 Boston, MA 2012 Krakow, Poland 2013 Williamstown, VA 2014 Utrecht, Netherlands 2015 Oakland, CA 2016 Dublin, Ireland
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International Society for Humor Studies(Martin
Lampert, Web Master)

• www.humorstudies.org

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Recent History of theInternational Society for
Humor Studies

•                  The 2014 Conference of the
  International Society for Humor Studies was held
  from July 7-11, 2014 in Utrecht, Netherlands. 
  Here is the 2014 ISHS Conference Web Site
  http//ishs2014utrecht.nl
•  
• The 2015 ISHS Conference was at Holy Names
  University in Oakland, California.   Here is the
  2015 ISHS Conference Web site https//www.hnu.edu
  /ishs/ in which you can find the 2015 ISHS
  Conference Web Site.
•  
• The 2016 ISHS Conference will be held at Trinity
  College in Dublin, Ireland. Eric Weitz will be
  the Conference Convener. His e-mail is
  weitzer_at_tcd.ie .
•  
• If youre interested in Humor, Irony, Paradox,
  Parody, Sarcasm, Satire, Symbols, or Archetypes,
  please click on this web site http//www.public.a
  su.edu/dnilsen .

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Two Visual Anachronisms
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Conclusion Ironic Tatoo
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In Conclusion