In his Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera proposes that humor is an invention of the modern, tracing its development alongside that of the novel from the Decameron to the present day. Kundera’s dizzyingly ambitious essay provides a framework locating humor in both its artistic and historical contexts. Kundera identifies the birth of the novel as well as that of humor with "the great precursor" Boccacio. (Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, "The European Novel.") In the Decameron first arises the embodiment of Octavio Paz’s humor, that entity which "renders ambiguous everything it touches." (Ibid., "The Invention of Humor.") A marvelous example is the tale of the monk Rustico teaching his pious, nubile pupil Alibech to "put the devil back in hell." Here Boccacio develops deliciously bawdy metaphors for putting Rustico’s male "devil" back in the eager Alibech’s female "Hell," and each line of his prose overflows with comic implications. He writes:

Is the purpose of this passage to mock the profligacy of monks like Rustico? Does it ridicule the high-minded piety of "those worthy men in Gafsa"? Is it a meditation on the church’s hypocrisy on the divided inclinations of spirit and body? There are shadings present of all these elements. Bocaccio’s tale refuses to be categorized as any of these, instead suggesting glimmerings of each in turn. This represents what Kundera describes as "the realm where moral judgment is suspended." This is captured pithily in Alibech’s habitual declaration to Rustico, "Father, I came here to serve God, not to idle away my time. Let’s go and put the devil back in Hell." (Ibid., 278.) Boccacio encapsulates in one line a delightful contrast between Alibech’s determination to "serve God" and her determination to have her monk bed her again. Boccacio refuses to lecture or admonish, but simply watches the rich absurdity of life with an amused eye.

The laughter comes from seeing these men and women in all their diverse contradictions. Rustico is "a very devout and kindly fellow" who does try, however briefly, to "prove to himself that he possessed a will of iron" and resist temptation. (Ibid., 275.) The humor lies in that Rustico is human and cannot. Alibech, likewise, is at once innocent and corrupt, and the hilarity stems from her conflation of these opposites. Boccacio’s figures appear humorous because they are, as it were, more true to life than life itself, revealing in their actions what goes on in all of us. Each is a bundle of human conflict. They lust madly and believe earnestly. They sin eagerly and repent honestly. This humor, Kundera argues, is "a particular species of the comic" (Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, "The Invention of the Comic") that strips away judgment and preconception and, in examining human nature by laughter alone, aspires to capture it on the page.

In originating the essay, Montaigne transmits to his new genre this same act of self-discovery through humor. In a memorable section of his "On the power of the imagination," he makes a stirring case in defense of the male member:

Montaigne has learned the lessons Boccacio has to teach. The same approach to humor recurs, that of revealing the human intermingling of the rarefied with the vulgar. Boccacio showed theology mixed with sex, whereas here Montaigne combines fine points of law with locker room subject matter. Kundera and his inspiration Paz would be proud; Montaigne makes no moral judgments, choosing only to laugh. His personification of the penis as a wronged client shows the penis to be a part of the man every bit as much as any other, neither nobler nor more base. Montaigne’s humor thus reveals his grasp of the totality of man. For Montaigne, this consists of indigestion, impotence, a little seduction, and a lot of "legal wrangling," and that Montaigne can show all these disparate elements synthesized into a human whole is what can make him so funny.

These human elements are also what give Montaigne’s essays their novelistic bent. He imbues them with the lush use of anecdote and imagery, and makes them not so much about any one thesis as some nebulous, inexhaustibly fascinating human pursuit of self-knowledge. He rambles, and rambles brilliantly. With each passing paragraph, Montaigne adds a new nuance to his ongoing portrait of humanity. In the course of "On the power of the imagination," he evokes man’s dreams, man’s empathy for his fellow men, man’s seductions, and lastly, with the same tone of even-handed respect, man’s penis. This member "is the author of the sole immortal work of mortal man," and as such deserves an equal place next to every other part of man. (Ibid., 44.) It is from this syncretism that humor arises.

The humor in Boccacio and Montaigne alike support Kundera’s approach to humor as something programmatic; it is an implement towards human self-understanding. As such, the development of humor is an integral part of the development of literary aesthetics. In evincing a thoroughly ambiguous, fully problematized view of its characters, humor brings the author and the reader closer to comprehending what it is to be human. These are lofty words, and it is a testament to Kundera’s staggering skill as an essayist that he can make a convincing case for such an overarching thesis. To explore the truth of Kundera’s approach, consider Virgil. It is because it offers few insights into human nature or the society of its time that Virgil’s beautifully crafted Aeneid is filled with profoundly unfunny verse such as this, when Aeneas flees the flames of Troy with Anchises:

What makes this passage so impressively unfunny is its artificiality. It is written in stilted, elegant language in carefully measured meter. In the original Latin, it would rhyme, making it still more contrived and solemn. If one wanted to make this passage humorous, one would endow the text with a greater sense of reality. This applies equally to the situation and the characters’ identities. To address first the reality of the situation, one need only attempt to visualize what takes place in this passage. One imagines sword-wielding warrior Aeneas, holding his son’s hand, wizened old Dad on his back, Dad himself carrying idols of gods under an arm here or over the head there, all of them running around northern Turkey. Even if what is humorous, as Kundera acknowledges, is subjective and difficult to explain, there is an inherent humor to this absurd image of son reaching up to father supporting grandfather reaching for god. It is Roman patriarchy executed as perverse cheerleader pyramid.

Where the reality of the characters’ identities is concerned, one might look at Aeneas not as some duty-bound caricature but as a disheveled New York nebbish with badly matched clothes and thick glasses. In that context, the dialogue livens up at once: "You want to ride piggyback carrying the hearth gods again, Dad?" or "Every time the Greeks burn Troy, I just get so verklemmt" are only two examples. These new lines are, to whatever extent they better capture human nature, both more plausible and more entertaining than Virgil’s originals. A devoted classicist recreating Virgil with contemporary idioms and characters and a puerile college student out to mock the great epics face precisely the same challenge. They are both on an ontological quest to discover Virgil’s characters in modern equivalents and to remake Virgil’s milieu in the mold of their own.

Kundera documents his awe at Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra, which fused disparate times and places in the Mexican past to create what Kundera calls a "poetic and oneiric metahistory." (Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, "Coexistence of Various Historical Periods Within a Novel.") What we have done with Virgil represents a likeminded "metahumor" that dreams of the comic possibilities of modern sensibilities and realities grafted onto an unfunny work. This is consistent with, if rather less ambitious than, the "aesthetic obsession to bring different historical periods to coexist in a novel" (ibid.) of Fuentes and Kundera; "metahumor" seeks to bring different historical perspectives on humor to coexist in a reading of the classics. In doing so, one envisions them as novels and gains new insights into them. It is in finding the humor in the Aeneid that one most fully comprehends the inherent falseness of the work. Perceiving that, in the context of a modern reality, Aeneas possesses all the grace of Harpo Marx, one confronts the fact that the Aeneid is only superbly executed mythology, poor in revelations as to the nature of man.

Moreover, like the metahistory of Fuentes and Kundera, a metahumor is a reaction against history. Kundera ponders Thomas Mann’s view of the brutally deterministic power of history on human development, dooming each person to "revive certain given forms, certain mythical schema established by forebears, and to allow them reincarnation." (Ibid., "The Well of the Past.") Against the onslaught of this "inhuman force that . . . invades our lives from the outside and destroys them," Kundera champions the novel, and specifically the elaboration of its aesthetics, as a means to rebel against history and establish a personal identity independent of it. The novel’s history, he writes, "is opposed to the meaning of history itself. Because of its personal nature, the history of an art is a revenge by man against the impersonality of the history of humanity." (Ibid., "The History of the Novel as Revenge on History Itself.") Metahumor, in like fashion, is itself revenge against impersonal, historically dominated literature such as Virgil’s propagandistic Aeneid, rooting out its ridiculousness. Just as Gargantua and Pantagruel became a novel "gradually as later novelists . . . took their inspiration from it, openly drew on it, thus integrating it into the history of the novel," (ibid.) the Aeneid can become farce if later writers draw on the human absurdity underlying its stories.

Kundera, in his writings on humor, captures the monumental scale of the novelist’s enterprise. Humor and the novel are the author’s means to follow Socrates’ edict to know thyself. Even readers may gain insight and amusement by approaching everything they read, no matter how stolid the text, with a humorist’s keen eye for human idiosyncrasy. Through the aggressive pursuit of humor, both as author and reader, we may escape "the ordinary pursued to its utmost" and the "tedium of gray" (ibid., "The European Novel") that Kundera finds plagues the literary world today.