Shoyo Tsubouchi’s Theory of Humour

Abstract

　Shoyo Tsubouchi, known as a builder of a milestone in the history of modern Japanese literature, was as greatly concerned with innovation of comic writings as with propounding of realistic theory. In his Essence of the Novel, the first full-length theory of the novel in Japan published in 1885, Tsubouchi expounded what a true comedy should be like, comparing with Dickens’s Pickwick Papers the popular comic novels of the Edo period such as Jippensha Ikku’s Hizakurige(Shanks’s Mare) and Kinga’s Shichihenjin (The Seven Eccentrics). What he found wrong with these novels was their frequent resort to obscenity and scatology as means of provoking laughter. Laughter in literature should not betake itself to such vain vulgarity, but must be such a decent one as endowed with sympathy, kindness, and pity. Here we see that he was resorting as an antidote against what he called “obscene comedy” to the sentimental humor which was represented by Carlyle and flourishing through Dickens and Thackery. But Tsubouchi’s own theory of wit and humour had not been proposed until he wrote an article on the subject three years later than The Essence of the Novel. From every point of view this unfinished article on “The Distinction of Wit and Humour” in The Senmongakkai Zasshi, No. 2 is obviously based upon Sydney Smiths lectures “On Wit and Humour” which were widely read and quoted for a quarter of a century since its posthumous publication in 1850. And this was the first introduction to Japan of the theory of humour based upon incongruity developed ever since Aristotle and represented in England by Coleridge.