HAIL HUMOUR

Until the eighteenth century humour came in four colors: red, yellow, black, and green. The word belonged to the world of medicine and represented four body fluids, the balance of which determined a person’s temperament, mood, and health. Theory held that humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile—released spirits or vapors that affected the brain. We still nod to that ancient idea when we say, “green with envy,” or speak of a “black mood.” Yellow is the color of jonquils, yes, but of cowards, too.

It took centuries for the meaning of humour to shift to “ho-ho-ho.” For that delay, either blame or congratulate the ancient Romans and Greeks who planted strong roots of opinion. They drove deep the conviction that “ho-ho-ho” rises from shabbiness (and some does). Back in the B.C.s, Plato considered humour a scoffing response to things weak. Aristotle, so wise on leisure, disdained laughter, arguing that it required a base of defect. Oh, those philosophers to whom we pay so little attention, always drawing conclusions with which we find ourselves living, unawares. 

Of course philosophers deliberated more admirably than my broad-stroke picture paints here, but generally speaking, their ancient ideas marched directly, and unassaulted, into the Middle Ages. While doctors of that period were using the word humour, no one expressed any. Society agreed that open laughter was inappropriate; it projected signs of superior feelings, signaled self-glorification. Nix it. Eighteenth century Lord Chesterfield did, in correspondence to his son: “There is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter,” he wrote. But consider. What was there to laugh about, given a history of barbarians, crusades, earthquakes, plagues, lice, and cholera. Yes?

Dave Barry, Garrison Keillor, beware. Till nearly yesterday, laughter represented a “vacant mind,” was regarded as sinister behavior, called the “hiccup of a fool,” or a sneeze in good sense. Humour experts of the past, like the tobacco industry of today, maintained a convincing but faulty opinion. Then, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, changes stirred. Playwrights saw new opportunity in prevailing thought. They created “humours” works. That is, comedy based on the four humours. Ben Jonson was the first, with his 1598 off-Broadway hit, Every Man in His Humour.

The popularity of this emerging genre, the spinning of tales of imbalanced humours, produced a gradual language shift. Humour slipped off medical charts and landed in the midst of society as a description of something causing us to laugh.  Audibly. Actually, before long the old usage was double cursed. Not only playwrights but scientists tampered with the status quo. Modern medicine was born and screeched directly into the ear of ancient medical theory, deafening its senses. Sound health, it proved, was not a product of balancing colorful body fluids. Now, what else could be done with the word humourbut make it hilarious? Its original usage certainly proved so.

Today, of course, the value of “ho-ho-ho” is medically, psychologically, and even intellectually appreciated as a sign of health, wit, and well-being. Unless assigned to diabolical or cruel use, laughter is a positive means of minimizing opposition, of driving home a point, of winning an audience, of relieving frustration, of breaking tension, of expressing humility, of cementing love, or of exercising power. Let us hail humour, or humor, as the Americans prefer. And, oh yes, when we discuss healthy humour, one indispensible element bubbles at its center. That is, the element of surprise. 

COMING UP – PRIZE SURPRISE

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