After the laugh had passed, I said: “Virginia, I can think of only one expression that will fit you just now, and that is slang. I think you are talking——”
“Yes, exactly. This to me seems the difference between wit and humor: The witty man is he who says or writes clever, funny things, just to show how clever and keen he is. Conceits are witty, because wit is essentially conceited. It may be very interesting and entertaining, but it always makes you think of the author rather than of his characters. It is always superficial, the trick of words, and it doesn’t keep well through the ages. A pun, for instance, is always witty.”
“Bernard Shaw,” I said, “is a good example of wit. Humor is the understanding of the petty foibles, humors and lovable weaknesses of men. Remember that the word humor really means mood or state of the blood, that it is a word very like the word ‘human.’ Humor is always human. It is the large, genial way of looking at life of him who sees how little men are, and how great they are at the same time. It is a sense of absurd contradictions, of the unity of utterly unlike things, almost a parody of completeness. All humor, all wit, everything funny is an incongruous bringing together of things that do not seem to belong together.”
“I suppose,” Marian said, “that is why we laugh when we see some one fall in the street?”
“Yes,” said Virginia, “for their heads and the sidewalk don’t belong together.”
“Now, seriously,” asked Marian, “what makes me want to laugh when I see any one fall, especially a grown person? And I must laugh, especially if it is a fat person, no matter how hard I may try to be polite.”
“That’s because you expect a grown person and a fat person to be dignified, and to fall is very undignified. Imagine his high hat flying one way, his gold-headed cane another, and his heels in the air. But if a little boy falls you don’t laugh, because little boys are meant to fall.”
“When my mother falls,” Ruth said, “I can’t keep from laughing, though I hate to see her fall.”
“But everything funny grows stale very soon,” said Marian.
“That is,” I answered, “because when we get used to a combination it no longer seems incongruous.”
“Well,” asked Marian, “when you laugh at people because they are boors and funny, why is that?”