i54 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



work of Th. Nast 10 during the brazen days of the Tweed Eing. 

 Martin 11 observes that the parody, was first introduced during the 

 performance of Greek tragedies to relieve the audience from the intense 

 mental strain. In the severe atmosphere of the king's court the court 

 fool was an important adjunct. In reality his was the freest per- 

 sonality of the group, the king not excepted. A most striking example 

 of this in literature is that of King Lear and his fool. 



These considerations indicate an intimate kinship between the 

 humor process and the sense of freedom. The real relation becomes 

 apparent when the nature of the stimulus is taken into account. It 

 has already been shown that the humor stimulus violates and breaks 

 up the order and mechanism about us. It appears as the only objective 

 fact in our experience that dares to defy the social order with impunity, 

 that can violate ruthlessly, without pain and without apology, the 

 human contrivances about us, and thereby not only remind us that 

 freedom is an abiding reality, but that we may escape, temporarily at 

 least, from the uniformities and mechanisms of life. We are rather 

 chary of an over-scientific game, one in which luck and spontaneity are 

 entirely supplanted by principles and rigid regulations. Speaking of 

 a game or a contest as a " dead sure thing " is an implication that 

 spontaneity and life are inoperative. Any instrument, therefore, that 

 reveals freedom to us through the veil of mechanism and the social 

 order will produce pleasure. Play, art and the humor stimulus are 

 such instruments ; play is largely for the young, art for the trained and 

 educated, but the humor stimulus is for every one. The second dif- 

 ferentium of the humor process, therefore, is the sense of freedom. 



The failure to see that the sense of freedom is a constituent part of 

 humor is doubtless responsible for the " superiority " (and its opposite 

 statement "degradation") theory. The sense of power is pleasur- 

 able, but not humorous, for the reasons that (1) the sense of power 

 contains an element of practical relationship and (2) the humor stim- 

 ulus does not make us aware of power. Incongruity, descending or 

 otherwise, all disorders of time and space relations in our actions, 

 customs and language, deceived expectation, all disorders of mechanized 

 living movements are only humorous when they excite the sense of 

 freedom. Incongruities are not inherently humorous. They may be- 

 come excitants of humor by revealing freedom behind human uniformi- 

 ties. It would appear then that the multiplicity of humor theories 

 may be resolved into the freedom theory. The theories hitherto ad- 

 vanced have been more a classification of humorous stimuli than an 

 explanation of humor as a mental process. 



A cross section of our adult mental life shows three interrelated 

 aspects: (1) an aspect composed of hereditary factors (unlearned 

 reactions), (2) a well-defined aspect of acquired factors or mechanisms 



10 " Nast, Th., His Period and His Pictures," The Macmillan Company, 1904. 

 "Martin, A. S., "Parody," p. 1. 



