SOURCE: Clive, John. “Gibbon's Humor.” Daedalus 105, no. 3 (1976): 27-35.

In the following essay, Clive argues that Gibbon's frequent use of humor in the Decline and Fall was meant, above all else, to show his readers that the advance of civilization is fashioned more by practical concerns than by imagination or speculation.

Oliphant Smeaton, editor of the “Everyman” Decline and Fall, speaks of “those silly witticisms as pointless as they are puerile in which Gibbon at times indulges.”¹ How would the great historian have dealt with that comment and its author? The latter's name, though the mere act of pronouncing it may even now raise a smile, would not have lent itself to punning—unlike that of the Abbé le Bœuf, “an antiquarian, whose name was happily expressive of his talents.”² But his censorious remark might have moved Gibbon to credit him with “that naïveté, that unconscious simplicity...