Abstract

Good Jokes and Bad

Author Max Eastman has the indispensable thing called taste. He knows a good joke from a bad one, and the important thing is not that he also has a theory to explain this knowledge but that he leads one on to the enjoyment of good jokes as a good critic of poetry leads one on to the enjoyment of good poetry. To read him is to be made hungry for humor; and to that extent he is surely incomparably superior to other writers. Whatever the essential, primitive, or infantile basis of humor may be, and however fundamentally the technique of humor may depend upon the playful surprise, the fact remains that in an overwhelming proportion of modern instances that technique is employed for the purpose of achieving a sense of inward superiority to a person or an idea.