By Mike Gray

The late Frank Muir, a BBC personality and humorist [or humourist], compiled a dazzling and hefty collection of excerpts from prose writings in English beginning with William Caxton and ending with P. G. Wodehouse entitled The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose (1990), rightly deemed his magnum opus. Muir’s interstitial comments are not only informative but also often as funny as the originals.

In his introduction, Muir modestly rejects the office of “expert”:

Theorizing about humour is kept to a minimum because for one thing the reader knows more about comedy than I do. That is to say, every reader knows precisely what he, or she, finds funny, which is more than any author can know about the reader.

Nevertheless, Muir does get theoretical, defining and carefully distinguishing among comedy, wit, humor, and buffoonery and subsuming the last three under the first. In so doing, he also pegs each style of comedy—wit, humor, and buffoonery—to social class distinctions, which seems to be the default (“knee jerk”) mode of thought among intellectuals in Merrie Olde Socialist England (what hath Marx wrought?):

Wit is the aristocratic aspect of comedy.

. . . . If wit belongs mainly to the well-educated classes and buffoonery to the lower classes, humour is middle-class.

. . . . Buffoonery, overt comicality, popular fun, is the opposite end of the scale to wit in just about every respect. Cheap and cheerful, it is that section of comedy whose sole purpose is to induce laughter. Laughter as loud and long and public as possible.

Is Muir saying that only intellectuals could titter at witty aphorisms, only Middle Americans could sputter at incongruities, and only Cockneys could spasm at bawdy jokes? Recent social development, with its concomitant enlargement of the middle classes and the explosion of mass media, makes such things progressively less likely.

As for wit:

Wit was essentially aristocratic because it was an intellectual sport played between gentlemen using ideas as shuttlecocks. The language of wit was rich in poetic references and paradoxes and puns which only expensively educated minds could bandy. It was also so much in use in upper social circles as an offensive weapon that Aristotle defined wit as ‘educated insult.’

During the seventeenth century the word began to be used to describe not only a brilliant and concise thought, as in Pope’s definition of true wit as ‘nature to advantage dressed,/ What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,’ but a brilliant thought which was also amusing. From then on a shaft of wit was expected to be entertaining as well as intellectually adroit. An example of this kind was the Revd Sidney Smith’s summing up of an Edinburgh Review piece full of declamation and invective by Henry Brougham:  ‘long yet vigorous like the penis of a jackass.’

But wit was not there to be laughed at. It was to be admired with a lift of an eyebrow or a half-smile or a nod of appreciation but not much more than that. Because of this it was the only aspect of comedy which a gentleman in the eighteenth century could practise in public; polite society would not tolerate the sight of gentlemen roaring with laughter.

To this modern age, which perhaps overpraises the tonic effect of collapsing into honks of uncontrollable mirth, it might seem incredible that an eighteenth-century gentleman was permitted by polite society to be seen kissing a male friend in the street, weeping piteously, spitting, relieving himself on the lawn of Lambeth Palace, but not laughing. Dean Swift admitted to having laughed only twice in his life. Pope claimed that he had never laughed at all. Lord Chesterfield wrote instructively to his thick son: ‘Since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.’ Even the clubbable Oliver Goldsmith wrote in The Deserted Village of ‘The loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.’

Samuel Johnson’s laughter-inducing frolics were much cherished by his friends …. but these qualities were hardly mentioned by Boswell in the Life. Boswell was not going to diminish his hero by showing him to possess what was to eighteenth-century society evidence of a flawed and second-rate character, so he played down this most amiable side of Johnson’s nature.

The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose is available on Amazon.com. The paperback edition features a photo of Muir’s trademark pink bowtie.