recounts some absurd incident he has witnessed without adding sufficient
to it to show that he has a humorous imagination. His mirth, except
when merely that of pleasure, is of the old hostile character. In Iliad,
xi, 378, Paris, having hit Diomed, from behind a pillar with an arrow in
the foot, springs forth from his concealment and laughs at him, saying
he wished he had killed him. In Iliad, xxi, 407, where the gods descend
into the battle, Minerva laughs at Mars when she has struck him with a
huge stone so that he fell, his hair was draggled in the dust, and his
armour clanged around him. In the Odyssey, Ulysses speaks of his heart
laughing within him after he had put out Polyphemus' eye with a burning
stick without being discovered. And in Book xviii, Ulysses strikes Irus
under the ear and breaks his head, so that blood pours from his mouth,
and he falls gnashing and struggling on the ground, at which, we are
told, the suitors "die with laughter."

From this hostile phase the transition was easy to ridiculing personal
defects, and so Homer tells us that when the gods at their banquet saw
Vulcan, who was acting as butler, "stumping about on his lame leg," they
fell into "unextinguishable laughter."

Thersites is described as "squint-eyed, lame-legged, with bent shoulders
pinched over his chest, a pointed head, and very little hair on it."
Homer may merely have intended to represent the reviler of kings as
odious and despicable, but there seems to be some humour intended.
Ridicule of personal defects must always be of an inferior kind, being a
matter of sight, and of small complexity. As the first advance of the
ludicrous was from the hostile to the personal, so the beginning of
humour seems to have been the representation of personal defects.[7]

In accordance with this, we find that the only mention of laughter made