ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham’s humour has long been treated as an eccentricity, amusing but unrelated to his larger critiques of society, not least his critique of the English legal system as represented by William Blackstone’s magisterial Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769). This essay argues that understanding Bentham’s comedic critique of Blackstone in a history of emotion context is fundamental to understanding two important dynamics: first, the potential humour has to critique not only content but also form, and second, a shift in the form humour took during this period, and thus the marking of an important moment in the history of emotion. Analysing Bentham in light of eighteenth-century theories of humour such as superiority theory and incongruity theory draws attention to how his humour undermined not only long-held conventional ideas about jurisprudence but also the formal structures that reinforced those ideas.
