# Humour as part of a complete human intelligence

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH02.P011](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH02.P011/#char=982,1066): "the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense"

The contrast continues a dispute already developed in *Heretics* (first published 1905; inspected here in Project Gutenberg #470). Chapter XVI, ‘On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity,’ reproduces McCabe’s objection that Chesterton substitutes dazzling verbal effects for sober inquiry. Chesterton answers that comedy and sincerity are independent qualities: a joke can convey truth, and solemnity can conceal emptiness. His concluding answer is that humour belongs to human nature, so excluding it makes an account of humanity incomplete. [Heretics, XVI](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/470).

That earlier argument helps explain why ‘common sense’ here includes more than successful inference. An explanation may be internally rigorous while excluding capacities by which people recognize a situation’s proportions. The chessboard’s reversal supplies a miniature exercise in such recognition: it asks the reader to change emphasis without changing the object. This is an interpretive connection, rather than a claim that a sense of humour establishes a theory’s truth or a person’s mental health. The passage turns Chesterton’s earlier defense of his controversial style into a criticism of explanatory narrowness.

## Sources

- [G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905; Gutenberg #470 transcription of the twelfth, 1919 edition)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/470), XVI, ‘On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity’: McCabe quotation beginning ‘Mr. Chesterton understands it’; reply beginning ‘Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious’; final paragraph beginning ‘When, therefore, Mr. McCabe says’
- [G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), Project Gutenberg #130](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130), II, ‘The Maniac’, paragraph beginning ‘Such is the madman of experience’

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