The Humor Corner:
Literary Humor Forms
Humor comes in a great variety of forms with a variety of affects on us. Humor may lift our spirits, harden our resolve, melt our pride, humiliate us, reassure us, make us feel smug, enliven us, exact revenge—the list goes on. The study of humor will go sadly awry if it does not recognize the great variety not only of humor affects but also of humor forms.
Humor is its various forms may contribute heavily to both the overall message and notably the affect of a dramatic work, on stage or in film. When humor plays a major part in a dramatic work, the predominant forms of humor will give the work a humor texture and even a humor personality. (See Comedic Tenor, Comic Vehicle: Humor Texture in American Film Comedy.)
The bulk of ITCHS exploration has been on two humor forms predominant in dramatic literature: Humor of the Mind and Humor of the Spirit, each of which has four sub-forms. Humor of the Mind was identified by George Meredith, a champion of Moličre, in “An Essay on Comedy” in 1867. Meredith saw humor of the Mind as appealing to our intellect, to our thinking person. It calls for a mental calculation or connection.
In Meredith we can see acknowledgment of three sub-forms of Humor of the Mind:
ITCHS has identified a fourth:
Humor of the Spirit, explored by Vitalist philosophers Henri Bergson and Susanne Langer, also comes in four different forms: Performance, Creativity, Tenacity, and Potential.