In the study of humor, it is indispensible to be aware and to remind your readership that the word “humor” has not yet gained its modern sense of “perception or expression of amusement” in lexicography before 1682* (namely early Modernity).
This explains why, when we deals with humor studies in Antiquity and early Modernity, we all too often rely on separate features or elements subsumed under the modern-sense humor: jape, jest, joke, laughter, comedy, and so on.
In early Modernity, the concept of humor, mostly through its expression of comedy, is constantly attacked and marginalized by Puritans. Therefore, the Puritan attack on comedy needs must claim our interest and study related to humor and the attention it receives at that time.
The survey of the Puritan attack on comedy (or “the devilish laughter”) will take us through various biases and diatribes asserted by Stephen Gosson, Philip Stubbes, William Prynne, Issac Barrow, etc. and also the distinction drawn by St. Francis of Sales between mockery (derision) and eutrapelia (gaiety).
*(Works Cited entry: “Humor.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.) The definitions and example sentence are taken intact from the 7th subentry under “humor” in O.E.D.:
7. a. That quality of action, speech, or writing, which excites amusement; oddity, jocularity, facetiousness, comicality, fun.
b. The faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, or of expressing it in speech, writing, or other composition; jocose imagination or treatment of a subject.
Distinguished from wit as being less purely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic quality in virtue of which it often becomes allied to pathos.
1682 tr. Glanius’ Voy. Bengala 142 The Cup was so closed, that ’twas a difficult matter for us to open it, and therefore the General gave it us on purpose, to divert himself with the humour of it.
7. a. That quality of action, speech, or writing, which excites amusement; oddity, jocularity, facetiousness, comicality, fun.
b. The faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, or of expressing it in speech, writing, or other composition; jocose imagination or treatment of a subject.
Distinguished from wit as being less purely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic quality in virtue of which it often becomes allied to pathos.
1682 tr. Glanius’ Voy. Bengala 142 The Cup was so closed, that ’twas a difficult matter for us to open it, and therefore the General gave it us on purpose, to divert himself with the humour of it.
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