Apropos of humor, here's an interesting book. Yoshie
***** Journal of Social History 33.3 (2000) 683-685
Book Review The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America
The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. By Daniel Wickberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. x plus 267pp.).
Unknown before the second half of the nineteenth century, the "sense of humor" fully emerged by the early twentieth century as a personality trait that was universally recognized as an essential component of a complete person. The rise of the sense of humor, Professor Wickberg argues, answered the strangest and most pressing demand of modern "bureaucratic individualism": it made possible a self that was capable of not taking itself too seriously. The sense of humor thus arrived as both a tool in fashioning, and a central feature in the makeup of, individuals primed for the requirements of corporate society.
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Ah, yes humor of self was invented by our society and serves some central socio-economic and practical purpose. Hmm.
Consider reading The Tale of the Fat Woodworker. It has a level of intellectualized humor about the concept of self that is rare and was written about the time Columbus was sailing forth.
The tale concerns a practical joke that Brunelleschi, Donatello and their fast tract crowd decide to play on a slow witted woodworker who was carving some of the wood decorations for S. Maria del Fiore.
It begins with an arrogant and drunken boost that Brunelleschi is so good at the arts of illusions and perspective, that he can make a fat man believe he has disappeared. The wager is taken up and the game begins at the expense of our lowly, debt ridden, and poor wood carver who lives with his dear-hearted old mother. (violins, please, allegro-capriccio)
The game relies on the tired idea of inviting the woodcarver to a fancy dinner party and drugging his wine to make him pass out, then re-inventing his identity and placing him in the completely different social position of his own creditor's bed (the character having been induced to leave town on a wild goose chase for promising business deals at some remote vineyard). Meanwhile the wood carver's shop is rearranged and blood is splattered about covering several tools. A report of a horrible fight in the shop that night is given anonymously to the police.
The wood carver wakes up covered in blood in his creditor's bed, where he is arrested that morning for the supposed murder and subsequent disappearance of the poor debt ridden tradesman--himself! Despite his pleading that he is one and the same man, the police have no patience for this absurd alibi and throw him in jail. His kind friend, Donatello comes to visit him and assures him that he and his friends will get a lawyer and find the drunken lout of a wood carver who has obviously run off to avoid his debts and is responsible for this tragic miscarriage of justice. (mixed strings, largo-capriccio)
Since the wood carver's only hope of escaping either a life in jail or a not too distant execution is the discovery of himself, he has to assure Donatello that he has finally regained his wits, will stop claiming he is the man they seek, and yes, that finding that other sob is his only way out. (adagio)
The story goes through many elaborate turns that result in completely reversing the whole confusion of identities, the wood carver is returned to his former life to find his kindly old mother showering him with kisses and tears of joy at his triumphant return. (vivace-capriccio)
The point to this reading is that it puts a sceptical eye to various claims I've read about the invention of self as an artifact of some technological or social relations aspect of our society--as if self, the games we play with it, and the ultimate absurdity of them were somehow our invention and these were never heard of before us.
Among the numerous twists and turns in this story is the idea, that if Antonio didn't take himself and his position so seriously, and didn't feel so down trodden and dominated by the glitterati (of Brunelleschi and Donatello), he never would have found himself so abused in the first place. His own tragic sense of an isolated self was the pivot on which all these games of gullibility and illusion depend. In other words the illusion of perspective depends on considering your own point of view to be unique--that's how it works its magic. The magic disappears the minute you step out of your own fixed position and consider other numerous possibilities.
Chuck Grimes
See:
Manetti, Antonio, 1423-1497 Novella del Grassolegnaiuolo.
English Title: The fat woodworker / by Antonio Manetti; translated with an introduction and notes by Robert L. Martone & Valerie Martone.
Publisher: New York : Italica Press, 1991.
Description: xxv, 61 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. Notes: Translation of: Novella del Grasso legnaiuolo. Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-61).
Language: English Subjects: Brunelleschi, Filippo,--1377-1446--Fiction. Donatello,--1386?-1466--Fiction. Architects--Fiction Sculptors--Fiction Italy--Fiction.
Biographical fiction Other entries: Martone, Robert L., 1960- Martone, Valerie, 1957-