William Gerhardie's definition of humour

Aunt Teresa looked at me uncertainly, not knowing whether I was serious or laughing, and if laughing whether I was laughing at herself. I wonder,' she said, 'whom you could write about?'

'Well, ma tante, you seem to me a fruitful subject.'

'H'm. C'est curieux. But you don't know me. You don't know human nature. What could you write about me?'

'A comedy.'

Under what title?'

'Well, perhaps - A tout venant je crache!" ["I spit on everyone who comes"]

'You want to laugh at me then?'

'No, that is not humour. Humour is when I laugh at you and laugh at myself in the doing (for laughing at you), and laugh at myself for laughing at myself, and thus to the tenth degree. It's unbiased, free like a bird. The inestimable advantage of comedy over any other literary method of depicting life is that here you rise superior, unobtrusively, to every notion, attitude, and situation so depicted. We laugh - we laugh because we cannot be destroyed, because we do not recognise our destiny in any one achievement, because we are immortal, because there is not this or that world; but endless worlds: eternally we pass from one into another. In this lies the hilarity, futility, the insurmountable greatness of all life.' 

I felt jolly, having gained my balance with one coup. And suddenly I thought of Uncle Lucy's death; and I realised it was in line with the general hilarity of things!

- William Gerhardie, The Polyglots, 1925, p.319-320.