‘We are not amused’, said Queen Victoria, and the remark has become canonical (however apocryphal its origins) as an example of stuffiness, pomposity, failure to see a joke – all serious offences against the conventions of modern culture. As Derek Brewer has pointed out, GSOH (Good Sense Of Humor) is a sine qua non in the coded language of contemporary ‘Personal Columns’, and few will admit to lacking it. Yet at the same time, as has been pointed out recently from another quarter, no disapproving remark makes a modern American intellectual more neurotic than ‘I don't think that's very funny’ – the standard way to indicate that once innocent words have become offensive. On the one hand, by asserting one's own ‘GSOH’, one can lay claim to openness, wit, good nature; on the other hand, by denying that humor exists/ought to exist at all, one demonstrates superior sensitivity and moral authority, while denying these desirable qualities implicitly or openly to the other party. All this reminds us, first, that humor can be used tactically within a culture, and second, that humor is to some considerable extent culturally determined and subject to change.

The effects of cultural redefinitions of humor, as regards Anglo-Saxon studies, appear to work in two ways. One way is by finding humor (usually categorized as ‘ironic’ humor) in what appears on the face of it to be said straightforwardly.