Abstract

Let us dispel any terminological ambiguity from the outset, for it is an almost systematic tendency in all studies on humorous intent to deploy, for the sake of precision, a typology differentiating between “humour”, “irony”, “comedy”, “laughter”, “satire”, “sarcasm”, “witty”, “burlesque”, “farce”, etc. In so doing, we run the risk of losing sight of the underlying problem with all of these phenomena, which is their intentionality. It was in the seventeenth century that the English borrowed from the French their word humeur, that the French had inherited from a physiological and psychological tradition dating back to Hippocratic-Galenician medicine, which largely shaped the medical theories of the classical era (Arikha N. Passions and tempers: a history of the humours. Ecco, New York, 2007). From the word humeur, first designating a bodily fluid whose “temperament” regulates the character of an individual, the English forged the word “humour,” which the French in turn reimported. Humour was eventually understood as the transmutation of a physiological character, attested by the very origin of the term, into a style, therefore a strategy, which Montesquieu, in a fragment of his Pensées written in 1743, defines as “the joke in the joke”, or “the manner of comic force” (Montesquieu CL. Pensées. Robert Laffont, Paris, 1991). We will therefore speak here of humour rather than of laughter, in order to grasp the intention rather than its effect, since humour can play with laughter and even manifest it without necessarily provoking it, either because the humourist fails to do so or because he or she does not necessarily aim to achieve it: someone who laughs at their own jokes is not necessarily funny; or someone who laughs at someone may not want to make anyone else laugh but themselves.