Hardy’s Humour

Abstract

Humour is elusive of definition: few will agree on what is amusing or comic, and even fewer will agree on why it is. Humour is a subjective thing, requiring some emotional response from those who experience or regard it. At the same time as calling forth our happiest feelings, it suggests a threat to those feelings. The general inadequacy of literary criticism to come to terms with humour in any work of the imagination, let alone Hardy’s, is perhaps a demonstration of the unease, even the threat, which such humour poses.

Withdrawing the stem of his pipe from the dental notch in which it habitually rested, he leaned back in the recess behind him and smiled into the fire. The smile was neither mirthful nor sad, not precisely humorous nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him recognised it in a moment; it was his narrative smile.

(From the description of Solomon Selby in Hardy’s ‘A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four’ in Wessex Tales.)