Meliorating Virtues
Humorousness
Invite a shared laugh that leaves everyone their dignity.
In this imagined scene, a game-night hat slips over the host’s eyes. The host bows to the coat stand as though it were a guest, then lifts the hat; a friend laughs with the host.
Understanding Humorousness
Humorousness is a readiness to find and share fitting amusement while keeping regard for the people involved. Skill at producing jokes is only one possible expression. The host can offer a small shared laugh by making room for their own harmless mistake; nobody else has to become smaller for the scene to be funny.
Read this collection’s historical contextHumorousness: finding the balance
The host’s party hat covers their eyes.
Too little of the fitting response
Awkwardness made solemn
The host treats the slipping hat as a ruined evening.
A fitting response
Shared amusement
They bow to the coat stand, then lift the hat and welcome the friend.
A distortion of the purpose
A joke that will not stop
They keep performing after the friend asks a serious question.
A fitting laugh opens company; it also knows when to leave room for something else.
Humorousness gives…
Ordinary company gains a little flexibility when every error need not become a solemn verdict. Shared amusement can mark affection and make a conversation more lively. It works best when someone can decline the joke without becoming its next target.
What Humorousness makes possible
Humor can give an awkward moment another shape. The host’s mistaken bow invites company in the mishap and makes the room easier to enter. A playful observation can reveal an inflated expectation or a familiar self-deception more lightly than a lecture. Its measure is the shared invitation, not the loudest response.
Humorousness in ordinary life
- Make a harmless mistake of your own the subject of an invitation to laugh.
- Offer a playful comparison that clarifies an ordinary absurdity.
- When a joke fails, let it end rather than explaining why someone should enjoy it.
Nearby virtues, different work
Cheerfulness offers brightness; Humorousness notices or invents a fitting comic angle. Amiability eases contact without requiring a joke. Tactfulness helps decide when amusement belongs. Humor is a possible expression of humane playfulness, not proof of superior social skill.
Humorousness and its counterfeits
Ridicule is a counterfeit of Humorousness: a host makes the shy visitor’s discomfort the entertainment. Genuine humor leaves participants their dignity. Relentless joking over someone’s serious concern is another counterfeit; wit can become a way of refusing to listen.
How to cultivate Humorousness
Start with an absurdity you can share rather than a person you can expose. Include yourself in the scale of human imperfection. Notice the response and change course when the moment turns serious. Let silence remain an acceptable answer to an offered joke.
Try it today
Recall a harmless everyday mishap of your own. Try a short playful description with a willing friend, without exaggerating anyone else’s embarrassment.
Keep the practice proportionate
Do not joke about another person’s injury, identity, distress or private disclosure. Nobody owes a laugh; a serious concern may need an unadorned response.
A question worth returning to
Does the comic angle open the conversation or prevent its next honest moment?
Quotations and further reading
These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this virtue.
We are even put out of humor if our companion laughs louder or longer at a joke than we think it deserves; that is, than we feel that we ourselves could laugh at it.
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments
CHAP. II. Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy. · , exact-print and territory review held.
Smith notices the friction when a companion’s laughter exceeds our own. Amusement is not automatically shared; a considerate joker attends to the actual response.
He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him—when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer.
Charles Lamb · Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia
MY RELATIONS · Elia (1823) / Last Essays of Elia (1833) in E. V. Lucas’s edited Works, volume II; editorial notes excluded, exact edition/contributor rights held.
Speaker: Elia, Charles Lamb’s essay persona
Lamb’s comic portrait punctures a claim to be above laughter. The imagined character’s sudden crowing exposes a harmless contradiction, rather than making distress the joke.
The world seems to me well supplied with what is genuinely ridiculous: wit and humour may play as harmlessly or beneficently round the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy meadows.
George Eliot · Impressions of Theophrastus Such
DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. · William Blackwood and Sons, second edition, 1879; satirical narrator Theophrastus Such, not an empirical report.
Speaker: Theophrastus Such, George Eliot’s satirical narrator
Eliot’s narrator locates fitting humor around egoism and absurdity. The host’s own hat mishap offers just such a modest subject without requiring a victim.
Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper the more through this turning of all things indiscriminately into food for a gluttonous laughter, an idle craving without sense of flavours?
George Eliot · Impressions of Theophrastus Such
DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. · William Blackwood and Sons, second edition, 1879; satirical narrator Theophrastus Such, not an empirical report.
Speaker: Theophrastus Such, George Eliot’s satirical narrator
Eliot’s question challenges indiscriminate consumption of everything as a joke. Discrimination belongs to humor as much as inventiveness.
The reproach of poverty agonizes some men, and whoever conceals it makes it a reproach to himself; and therefore if you of your own accord are the first to acknowledge it, you cut the ground from under the feet of those who would sneer and politely insult you; no one is laughed at who begins by laughing at himself.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · Minor Dialogues Together with the Dialogue on Clemency
THE SECOND BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES22 OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED TO SERENUS. “THAT THE WISE MAN CAN NEITHER RECEIVE INJURY NOR INSULT,” OR, AN ESSAY ON THE FIRMNESS OF THE WISE MAN. · Aubrey Stewart, 1889
Seneca proposes acknowledging a possible subject of ridicule first. His sweeping assurance is historical rhetoric, not a promise against bullying; here the comparison is voluntarily making one’s own harmless mishap comic.
Miso, one of the seven sages, of a Timonian and Democritic humour, being asked, “what he laughed at, being alone?”—“That I do laugh alone,” answered he.
CHAPTER VIII——OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE · Charles Cotton translation, William Carew Hazlitt edition, 1877
Speaker: Montaigne reporting a reply attributed to Miso
Montaigne reports Miso’s joke about laughing alone. The reported reply turns an ordinary situation back on itself, illustrating play with a premise rather than an attack on a companion.
But in wit and humour Caesar, the elder Catulus's half-brother, surpassed them all: even at the bar he would with his conversational style defeat other advocates with their elaborate orations.
Marcus Tullius Cicero · On Duties
BOOK I MORAL GOODNESS · Walter Miller, 1913
Cicero recalls an advocate’s conversational wit defeating elaborate oratory. This illustrates the power of comic skill; the article separately asks whether a use of that skill treats people well.
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