Why we laugh / by Samuel S. Cox.

  • Samuel S. Cox
Date:
[1880]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Why we laugh / by Samuel S. Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    Genuine humor is founded on a deep, tlioughtful, and manly character. It would make men laugh more hearti- ly, in order to make them live more happily. Wit is not careful of moral consequences. It looks only to its own brilliant flash. It admires the jewel in the hilt, and the glitter of the steel, only that they may give a glory to the stroke. Your humorless man, however witty, is not the best man. Indeed, the Italians have the same word {tristezza) for melancholy and malignity. Pope was witty, sad, and bad. Humor, if true, is kind and reformatory. Thackeray is wit all compact; but, unlike Pope's wit, it is relieved by lustrous fringes of humor. Dickens is hu- mor—radiant and benevolent. Blessed be that man or that nation, which, like Ire- land, has more humor than wit; blessed if the wit be tempered with humor; blessed if that humor, like the juice of the grape, mingles with the blood, to warm the heart and generously fructify the life! The Declaration of American Independence has been called a self-evident lie. So it is, if it is meant to de- clare that all men are created equal, and if by that phrase is meant equality in the endowments of mind. No ax- iom in Euclid is so self-evident as the diversity of men in the quality of humor alone. But whether men laugh, or whether they forbear, they are certainly equal in their right to do either. May not Mr. Glum, who wears his suit of sombre, and draws down the corners of his mouth, and opens his lachrymose sluices, and laments, like a maiden in sackcloth, for the husband of her youth, as he walks through this vale of tears, stand upon the same equality of right as his neighbor, Mr. Glee, whose words are a squad of rattling jokes, and whose mouth is ever on the stretch with smiles, as he reads in every thing about
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