A History of the Comic and Humor

This chapter takes up key historical questions about the concept of the comic and the word humor as both a perceptual ability and an embodied characteristic. This history contrasts some of the ways the comic was approached in the premodern era by Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas, with the emergence of philosophical interest in the concept of the comic in the early eighteenth century, beginning with Lord Shaftesbury. By the nineteenth century, humor had become the dominant term for the comic and this chapter argues that this dominance was influenced by its association with eighteenth-century moral philosophy and sentiment, the Romantic imagination, and the intersection of benevolence and the concept of personality in the nineteenth century. It is not a historical coincidence that humor , as a word that expresses a special appreciation for the wide variety of possible personalities, becomes the dominant term to refer to the comic in the same timeframe that the novel form, as an expression of interest in the individual, becomes culturally dominant. This chapter argues that humor and the novel are historically united by the nineteenth century’s interest in the individual.