ABSTRACT
If one did not know how the word “humour” came to acquire its modern meaning, it would be impossible to guess. This chapter looks first at how the word evolved over centuries from its early medical context to the meaning which is common today. Then there is a brief account of the various theoretical approaches that have been offered in understanding humour, from Aristotle and Plato through early modern (Hobbes) and eighteenth-century writers such as Hutcheson and Fielding, nineteenth century (Hazlitt and Meredith), to Freud’s psychological approach to laughter and humour in general. Some theories turn on superiority, normativeness, and incongruity, whilst others on sympathy or release of inhibitions. There follows a panoptic view of humour in the English language from Anglo-Saxon times to twentieth-century humourists in Britain and, more briefly, America. The overall theme is that humour is multi-dimensional, continually changing, and dependent on social context and the individual writer’s view of the world, whether conservative or subversive, bright or dark.
