SOURCE: Hope, Quentin M. “Humor in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld.” Dalhousie French Studies 58 (spring 2002): 3-9.

In this essay, Hope discusses La Rochefoucauld's love of teasing, making fun, and laughter, and claims that many of his maxims should be understood as jokes.

I have undertaken to write about humor in La Rochefoucauld fully convinced that any reader will know what I mean by humor, but also aware that the word, like other words close to it, eludes definition. In L'écriture comique Jean Sareil speaks of the “impossibilité d'arriver à une définition objective du sujet” and adds: “Qu'est-ce que l'esprit, l'humour, la satire, l'ironie? Bien malin qui pourrait répondre à cette question” (14). Robert Escarpit agrees. He entitles the introduction to his L'humour, “L'impossible définition.”

In his excellent introduction to what has become the standard twentieth-century edition of the Maximes, Jacques Truchet mentions the humorous element in La...