Henry Fielding II: Amiable Humor, Ironic Distance, and the Charitable Embrace of Conflicting Truths and Values

This chapter continues the project of the previous chapter to take advantage of the concrete context provided by Henry Fielding’s humor to elaborate and deepen some of the foundations of the general account presented in the previous chapters. Fielding’s humor is what has become known as “amiable humor.” This is humor with a compassionate and appreciative attitude towards human eccentricity and human limitation, weakness, and flaws. This form of humor embodies and illustrates in an exceptionally full and illuminating way the interconnection between the three things which the book proposes that humor does.