Humour as a Virtue: Lesley Stephen & Others

The English people have always been proud of their sense of humor which constitutes a major part of English culture and characterizes the English identity as one renown for its sometimes sophistry and oftentimes sophistication.

In the first edition of OED (The Oxford English Dictionary, 1884-1928), “humour” starts to stand apart from “wit,” being defined as “distinguished from wit as being less purely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic quality in virtue of which it often becomes allied to pathos.” Either henceforth or around this time, humor (in its modern sense) claims its significant presence in the English society (Figueroa-Dorrego & Larkin-Galiñanes 313). What follows are a couple of examples of the burgeoning “sense” of humour at that time:

Sir Lesley Stephen:

A fashion has sprung up of late years regarding the sense of humour as one of the cardinal virtues. […] It is indeed rarer to meet man, woman, or child who will confess to any deficiency in humour than to a want of logic. Many people will confess that they are indolent, superstitious, unjust, fond of money, of good living, or of flattery: women will make a boast of cowardice and men of coarseness; but nobody ever admits that he or she can’t see a joke or take an argument. If people were to be taken at their own valuation, logical acumen and a keen perception of the humourous would be the two most universal qualities in the world.

—Humour (1876)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The English humour is the most thoughtful, the Spanish the most ethereal—the most ideal—of modern literature. Amongst the classic ancients there was little or no humour. […] the wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to the French, and that of images to the English. […] [It] constitutes the larger and more peculiar part of the wit of Shakespeare.

—“Wit and Humour” (1818)*

*Coleridge’s attitude is obviously different from the typical English attitude towards “their national pride.” William Congreve’s, however, speaks for it: “[T]here is more of Humour in our English writers than in any of the other comic poets, ancient or modern” (“Concerning Humour in Comedy,” 1695). Following this logic, typical English taunts related to humor often target other nations for the (alleged) lack of it. The absence of humor goes to the German; the lack of wit is said to characterize the French; the Italian are too busy dulling their brains with debauchery. The list may go a lot longer than this, and from this point, nationality and regionality are closely related to English humor. (For a posh, snobbish English person, even neighbors may fall easy targets: Scousers always confuse talking with coughing; Geordies can’t tell their A’s from E’s; the Irish, when not drunk, still tink instead of think; the Welsh and the Scotts, after shxgging so many sheep, don’t even speak English anymore.)