Humour as umbrella term

The word humour is often taken as an ‘umbrella term’. This article first briefly situates umbrella terms within a context of logically stable and unstable forms of classification. It outlines the reasons why the scope of what is studied as humour justifies the general designation that also encompasses a necessary degree of interdisciplinarity. The implications of this, however, can be at odds with how humour is treated in analysis: there can be few general conclusions about humour per se; global theories of humour, or uniform conceptual vocabularies for its analysis are likely to remain unsatisfactory. The article concludes by pointing to a category mistake analogous to Russell’s set theory paradox when humour, accepted as an umbrella term is then conflated with what the classifier subsumes.