THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF HUMORA COMMON-SENSE view of American cultural life shows at once the astonishingly important role which is played in it by humor. There is scarcely a newspaper that does not have its daily comic strips and the most popular papers have an entire section of comics in their Sunday issues. There are more comic periodicals in this country than in all of Europe together. In the American child's reading, the funnies play an equally important role. The comics can truly be considered a social institution in American civilization.In consulting the most frequently used textbooks of social psychology for a satisfactory discussion of humor, one finds that neither Dewey, Dunlap, Gault, Judd, Kimball Young, McDougall, nor Poffenberger has a sentence on the subject. Bogardus has a few lines and Crane a few paragraphs. Gordon Allport, in his book, Personality (i), has devoted a few pages to humor. The foreign literature in our field treats humor no more extensively than does the American. A recent book of essays on humor (24) refers to twenty-four titles, all more recent than Herbert Spencer's famous Physiology of Laughter (28). Among these are essays such as Bergson's (2) and Sully's (29) speculative treatments, while not more than four works are of specific psychological character. Among these, however, is the most sincere psychological study ever devoted to humor, that of Harald Hoeffding (19). We have, on the other hand, an entire literature of short papers on humor in the field of education, arising from the effort of the educators to direct and to educate the juvenile urge to laughter. To this we shall turn in the latter part of our study.Any serious psychological study of humor today must take its start from Harald Hoeffding's investigations. To Hoeffding, humor appeared as a more profound force in human nature than many will be willing to admit. He spoke of humor as a Totdfoelelse 351 352 ERNEST HARMS
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