Sense of Humor

Somehow I suspect that Stephen Potter wrote Sense of Humor because he thought he must. As the most popular humorous writer in contemporary English prose, his readers look to him for some kind of definitive comment on humor, which he surely does not give them in Sense of Humor. Mainly an anthology of various scraps of humor since Chaucer, it reels pompously though eight hundred years of English literature in search of some kind of principle. The most amusing thing about the book is that Potter could just as well have written his opening sentence, "The day of English humor is declining," and left it at that.

Not that the author doesn't realize the short-comings of his book, for he describes it as "a collection of pages of English writing which I have enjoyed." These selections are indicative of Potter's good taste and wide reading, but of little else. It is a tribute to Potter's prestige that such a book has been published and sold. I think now that he has broken the ice that we may expect a "From Bunyan to Benchley" from S. J. Perelman, and soon after that, "Two-Line Jokes Which I Have Liked Best," by Bob Hope.

Potter's plan is simply to divide all English humor into nine categories, with samples, and prefix one long introduction and nine shorter ones. Perhaps there is some virtue in classifying humor in this manner, as much, anyway, as there is in making nine arbitrary divisions of, say, literature since Homer. But it seems to me that the field is much too broad and amorphous to be handled in a book of under three hundred pages, or in any book at all, for that matter. Potter himself must realize this, when he says of humor: "Perhaps its history is its meaning."

Sense of Humor contains humorous writing, but very title of it is Potter's; it also contains some interesting ideas on the evolution of the British sense of humor. The format, however, is ridiculously ambitious. One finds oneself hoping that the conceptural scheme of the work is a literary practical joke, or "lifemanship" in practice by the master. Whether it is or not, Sense of Humor proves that humor, like children, is best seen and not heard about.