Tradition of the "Genial" Theories of Laughter

James R. Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California

Note 25 to Chapter 1 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.

This view enjoyed a vogue in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century; the most famous statement of it is in George Meredith's An Essay on Comedy. Stuart M. Tave's The Amiable Humorist is an intelligent analysis of the development and manifestations of the anti-Hobbesian theory. Of its few twentieth-century exponents, the most strenuous is Max Eastman.

Last modified: 1 May 2001