Introduction: The Senses of Humour/Les Sens de l’humour

Originally, “humour” was a medical term. According to Galen, “the humours from which animals and humans are composed are yellow bile, blood, phlegm, and black bile.”¹ The amalgamation of humours within single bodies determined the temperament of individual persons, but because the humours were contiguous with cosmic elements, and could be manipulated through changes in diet, climate, and physical treatments, the temperaments of humoral subjects were by definition vulnerable to influence and fluctuation.² By the eighteenth century, the term was used widely beyond the purview of Galenic humoralism. “Humour” came to refer not only to physiological fluids but also to the more ineffable human qualities believed to proceed from the movement and combination of those substances: moods, tendencies, preferences, and aversions, and what today we might call “personality.” One could be in “good humour” or in “odd humour.” One could even be “out of humour,” which might mean out of one’s own humour, that is to say, not like oneself, or might mean out of sync with the general humour of a group—very like oneself perhaps, but not like everybody else. The boundaries of these more insubstantial forms of humour determine how individual people feel, think, and behave in any given moment, as well as how their feelings, thoughts, and behaviours are received and interpreted by those around them, and yet these boundaries fluctuate as much as ever. The term also migrates in this period towards the modern association with laughter and amusement, though this consolidation of meaning seems to complicate rather than clarify the term’s cultural work. As Simon Dickie and James A. Steintrager argue, and as many of the articles in this special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction illustrate, eighteenth-century senses of humour are practically inconceivable apart from conditions of pain, cruelty, and suffering.³ “How many strange humours are in men!” exclaims Democritus in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.⁴ Indeed, as the senses of humour become increasingly estranged from their physiological roots, they engender modern forms—bodily and textual, subjective and social—founded on the uncertain ground of shifting and contested cultural terrain.

In “‘Fitted to the Humour of the Age’: Print and Alteration in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub,” Katie Lanning argues that Jonathan Swift’s text reveals an anxiety about humoral instability while introducing a form of satire premised on that instability. Swift’s reference to “the humour of the age” emphasizes the inconstant quality of humour—the dynamic fluids of Galenic physiology have been abstracted into an unsteady set of cultural preferences and presumptions that provide no foundation for the solidification of meaning. The unreliability of modern humours manifests itself in a “mad” text subject to constant alteration: A Tale of a Tub’s capacity for alteration is, paradoxically, its one enduring quality. While the “humour of the age” is an ephemeral quality, the incessant “fitting” of a text to an ever-changing historical context generates physical artifacts of cultural instability. Lanning points to illustrated editions of the Tale, and especially extra-illustrated editions into which someone has inserted plates from earlier editions, as examples of books that are themselves materially disordered bodies. By collapsing the historical distance between various editions, the extra-illustrated versions reassemble the different humours of different ages as part of a single confused body. Historical inconsistency is thus formalized as material incoherence: the modern book, subjected to alteration to meet changing tastes, appears to suffer a humoral pathology. Its humour continues to work because its humours, mimicking our own, are perpetually out of order. Swift insists—and enables us to demonstrate through the market in print editions—that our books are as mad as we are.

Vivian Davis’s essay, “A Comedian on Tragedy: Colley Cibber’s Apology and The Rival Queans,” examines the cultural work of another kind of funny or “mad” body, that of the comedian, in the inhospitable milieu of the tragic stage. Focusing on the temporally contingent and embodied acts that generate meaning in performance—what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire,”⁵ and...