THE SENSE OF HUMOUR.

Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 69, 24 March 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE SENSE OF HUMOUR.

Carlyle has said that a man who has no humor has only half a mind. That is, a mind incapable of detecting incongruity. But there are minds that are capable of discerning incongruity — indeed, most acute observers and critics — in whom it produces none of that muscular convulsion, that rapid and violent respiration we call laughter, and which we find So delightful, nor even that invisiblo subtile mental agitation, so exquisitoly enjoyable to those who can experience it. Tho sense of humor it seems is not the power to detect incongruity, but the susceptibility to more or less violent mental and muscular throes and turmoil. which we find agreeable. Yet this is surely not intellectual. Of course, a man who is not capable of discerning incongruities, not only is deficient in half a mind, but can have no mind at all. A man who does not detect any incongruity in another's act of trying to stir his tea with tho fire shovel must be a born idiot. Another man, possibly a Scotchman,

may see in such an act only a grave mistake. He sees fully the unfitness of the moans to the end, and yet it produces no agreeable agitation of mind or body, whilst another is thrown into ecstatic convulsions, which wo call laughter, and we say ho has a sense of humour ; and yet he sees no more clearly than the Scotchman the magnitude of the error committed. What is this sense of humour ? Wo pause for a reply.