vinity School once began a
lecture on Comedy by saying that the study of the comic had made him
realize for the first time that a joke was one of the most solemn
things in the world. The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is
hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay on humor illustrated by
a series of jokes, or an exposition of humor in the technical terms of
philosophy. No subject has been more constantly discussed. But it
remains difficult to decide what humor is. It is easier to declare what
seemed humorous to our ancestors, or what seems humorous to us to-day.
For humor is a shifting thing. The well-known collections of the
writings of American humorists surprise us by their revelation of the
changes in public taste. Humor--or the sense of humor--alters while we
are watching. What seemed a good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor
joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the
individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This
vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it
produced a humor of its own?

Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous territory of definitions.
Let us, rather, take one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight and
his squire, who for three hundred years have ridden together down the
broad highway of the world's imagination. Everybody sees that Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you
will--idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and
proverb-maker--these figures represent to all the world two poles of
human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes
on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this
contrast. It is the electric flash between the two poles of experience.

Most philosophers who have meditated upon the nature of the comic point
out that it is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once compared
our human idealism to the flight of a swallow; at one moment it is
soaring toward the sunset, at the next moment some one shoots it and it
tumbles into the mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden
poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded
bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But
something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same
element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the
humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and
the litt