Why philosophy ignored humor until the twentieth century

Despite how central a sense of humor is to everyday human life, philosophers spent millennia largely ignoring it. From antiquity through the nineteenth century, the most that prominent thinkers wrote about laughter or humor amounted to passing remarks. Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Immanuel Kant each gave the subject only a few paragraphs tucked inside works addressing other concerns. It was not until Henri Bergson published Laughter in 1900 that a major philosopher produced a dedicated book on the topic.