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The sense of humor may be denned as that quality the absence of which causes one to write a book on the sense of humor. Predicating this, let us concede at once that Max Eastman has written an excellent book. No one will agree with his theory of humor, of course, because no one who has a sense of humor himself agrees with any theory of humor. But at least he has collected in a convenient form all the more important theories formulated by philosophers and others.
The way to review a book of this or any other sort is to use it as a convenient peg whereon to hang an essay by the reviewer. With this maxim in mind, let us consider for a moment what humor is. Impossible, perhaps, as a definition may be, yet it would seem at the outset that the mistake made by everyone who has written on the subject is in the confusion of laughter with humor. Assuming that one is the inevitable concomitant of the other—as Eastman has done—we are led at once to several irreconcilable facts. Thus we find that men with the most highly developed sense of humor are not hearty laughers; indeed, they are likely to be the most melancholy of men in appearance and habits. In fact, while the sense of humor is associated with a high type of biological development, the faculty of easy laughter is an attribute of children, mental defectives, and simple racial types. It is a surprise, therefore, to read Max Eastman's glorification of the hearty laugh, where he says:
“But for my part I think the surest sign of a healthy spirit is to see friendly joyfulness power all over his features, and down into his throat and the muscles of his body without bound or hindrance.”
The only great writer with a sense of humor who praised the laugh was Dickens, and even with him it seems more of an artistic projection than a personal trait. We can conceive of Dickens, with his admirable histrionic hypomania, laughing with his Victorian puppets, but the man himself was decidedly not of the laughing type.
Rabelais has been often