I've been keeping this blog as a formal undertaking for cataloging the bursts of creative, intelligent thought I've had while listening to top 40 radio on the drive to work or while serving bananas to kindergartners at said work but now I'm gonna try to make this a little more informal so I'll be less afraid of posting some of the weird stuff I've been thinking about.
What sparked this was a conversation I just had 30 minutes ago with a good friend about how much I enjoy looking at histories and iterations of certain types of humor. I know there are hundreds of scientific and sociological studies of the human brain and interaction with "jokes" and the behaviors and stimuli that influence laughter and silliness and good humor but I want to look at is as I always have: from the perspective of someone who doesn't really know what the fuck she's doing.
Last semester I wrote my senior thesis on Mark Twain's use of deadpan and dialect humor to convey the idea that college is stupid in a weird, reflexive fuck-you to the literature department and to the academic system that brought me so far intellectually and creatively. I learned a bunch about the southern humorists and the gold rush but I also learned that there is so much material out there ABOUT humor that is humorous in itself. I learned that humor is traceable, trendy and fun to talk about. I also learned that good humor that we find funny in twenty-twelve was around hundreds of years ago. I read texts that could have been written by my great-great-great-great-great grandfather that had me in stitches.
Well, I gave a damn good presentation that got the whole room laughing about mining culture in the mid-1800s and I kind of set the study of humor down for a few months while I regained regular eating habits and temporarily broke a caffeine addiction (which was a nice try but I'm up to 4 cups of coffee a day again). I'm working a 9-5 this summer at a summer camp which leaves me with just enough free time to write and just enough preposterous stories to tell. I did a post about the cool shit that falls from the tongues of small beings and now I can do many more posts about why some of it is funny.
I attempt humor in all forms pretty much all day long. I love pointing out oddities and making quips about everyday life. I love speculating about humorous situations and I love making disarming jokes and thoughtful puns in every situation. I make fart and poop jokes with my summer camp kids (and my boyfriend and my best friends...) with no shame. I'm definitely not the funniest of my friends but I am part of a group who casually looks at humor's influence and attempt a half-assed dissection of the body of humor. I got to looking at where the idea of humor came from and found some really sweet connections that I'll try to make clear so just bear with me.
I took a class about John Fucking Milton for a whole semester last year and learned way more than anyone needs to know about 17th century religious and governmental philosophy (WHAAAATS THE DIFFERENCE!!!! *BOWTIE SPIN*) and we talked a lot about "humorism" which has NOTHING to do with the humor we know today as "making a funny" but was about the 4 humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. The humors made up everything living in the universe and were combinations of the forces of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Here it is explained in squares:
Or for an even more what-the-fuck sensation, take a peep at this chart from wikipedia that gives a little more detail about how these forces of nature combined (if you're legitimately interested in it, though, I'd be glad to explain it to you over the phone or in an email or with a powerpoint presentation):
| Humour | Season | Element | Organ | Qualities | Ancient name | Modern | MBTI | Ancient characteristics |
| Blood | spring | air | liver | warm & moist | sanguine | artisan | SP | courageous, hopeful, amorous |
| Yellow bile | summer | fire | spleen | warm & dry | choleric | idealist | NF | easily angered, bad tempered |
| Black bile | autumn | earth | gall bladder | cold & dry | melancholic | guardian | SJ | despondent, sleepless, irritable |
| Phlegm | winter | water | brain/lungs | cold & moist | phlegmatic | rational | NT | calm, unemotional |
So here's the deal: Humans had a shitload of things happening around them that needed to be explained. 16th/17th century scientists did SCIENCE!!! and found out that when all of these elements and temperatures and chaotic forces solidified into living being, they took the four grossest forms imaginable which, when squished together, formed a cat or something. Maybe a depressed cat.
So where is the connection between the four humors and our modern humor? I'm pretty sure doctors back in the day weren't busting their guts open when they extracted black bile from a cadaver's liver and nosebleeds weren't responsible for uncontrollable laughing. The word "humor" meaning "ha ha" comes from the same word as snot, blood, and liver juices.
Here's an excerpt from etymonline (a freely accessible website with the Oxford English Dictionary's historical etymologies for almost all words AKA MY HOMEPAGE) about "humor"
In ancient and medieval physiology, "any of the four body fluids" (blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy or black bile) whose relative proportions were thought to determine state of mind. This led to a sense of "mood, temporary state of mind" (first recorded 1520s); the sense of "amusing quality, funniness" is first recorded 1680s, probably via sense of "whim, caprice" (1560s), which also produced the verb sense of "indulge," first attested 1580s. "The pronunciation of the initial h is only of recent date, and is sometimes omitted ...." [OED] For types of humor, see the useful table below, from H.W. Fowler ["Modern English Usage," 1926].
| device | HUMOR | WIT | SATIRE | SARCASM | INVECTIVE | IRONY | CYNICISM | SARDONIC |
| motive/aim | discovery | throwing light | amendment | inflicting pain | discredit | exclusiveness | self-justification | self-relief |
| province | human nature | words & ideas | morals & manners | faults & foibles | misconduct | statement of facts | morals | adversity |
| method/means | observation | surprise | accentuation | inversion | direct statement | mystification | exposure of nakedness | pessimism |
| audience | the sympathetic | the intelligent | the self-satisfied | victim & bystander | the public | an inner circle | the respectable | the self |
I included the chart because it's interesting not because it helps me make my poorly thought out point.
OKAY SO LET'S TAKE A LOOK-SEE. This doesn't directly draw the connection I want y'all to make but essentially, "humor" meaning "whim, caprice" came from the four body fluids. Indulging in your humors led to that feeling of whim and lightheartedness. So at face value the idea of humor came from someone really letting loose and becoming one with their snot. Basking and indulging in their blood. Now there is some innocence to this idea that people legitimately thought their liver goo made them sad and blood made them happy and I'm not just going to flat out say that humorism is concretely linked to poop jokes BUT....
These feelings were permanently linked with the oozes in the body and it's not like any normal person wouldn't REALIZE THAT. People back in the day knew that gross stuff is funny. You can easily look up jokes about really, seriously icky stuff from the middle ages. The bodily juices were humorous and a lot of people didn't overlook the fact that expelling goop from your body and then talking about it provided a good, dirty laugh. I'm currently struggling to find the articles I should link to here but there are plenty examples of people making witty puns at the expense of humorism. Milton linked the "hot/wet" humor of blood to boners like A HUNDRED TIMES.
The word "humor," then meaning SCIENCE, has multiple connections to our joke humor. Humor came from indulging in your juices/fancies and also probably got some good help from the fact that those juices were also inherently funny.
So know that when you make poop and fart jokes they are an essential element to the spiritual philosophy of humorism and are part of the reason why "humor" got its name. So there
If you don't want to believe me or accept the god given fact that poop is related to medieval psychology then at least you learned something about why we still use the term melancholy for being sad.
Also phlegm, being cold and wet and also representing rationality and reason was the antithesis to blood (springtime's) sexy, sexy lust. Cold shower anyone?
