ABSTRACT
Humor is modern, purportedly. Many writers and critics from the last 200 years have said something to this effect. The implication of this idea is not as minor as it seems. For if humor, even if only a certain subspecies of it, really is modern, then a certain way of presenting human experience was simply not possible, or at least not predominant, until something about our relationship with the world had changed. There has always been laughter for sure, but has it always resembled what we recognize today?
