Morally and socially, laughter has not been well regarded throughout history. Prior to the last hundred years or so, laughter in public was about as socially acceptable as vigorous breaking of wind would be today. In Medieval times, physicians located each emotion in some organ of the body. Love, for example, was seated in the heart—if they had chosen another particular organ which would seem to be a more logical contender, we would be sending each other quite different shapes on Valentine's Day. The seat of laughter was the spleen, apparently to indicate that laughter was viewed as a "low" form of behavior.
    It is no surprise that Victorian England was not big on laughter. Nevertheless, Queen Victoria did deliver one immortal quip in comment on a man charged with the attempted murder of the British Prime Minister, and who was pleading insanity—"We do not believe that anyone could be insane who would wish to murder a Conservative Prime Minister". Neither was laughter popular with the Church. The Puritans in particular looked upon it with disdain and permitted it only when it served to illustrate a moral lesson.
    Sigmund Freud distinguished between malign and benign laughter. Laughter was malignant, he argued, when it indicated an underlying pathology, i.e. served as an outlet for underlying sexual and aggressive impulses. Benign laughter did not indicate any underlying pathology. An example of benign humor is where a person masters unfortunate or unpleasant situations by turning them around and making a joke of them.
    In humor, as in everything else, there are different levels of quality. This can range from the sparkling wit of Oscar Wilde to the crudity of the drinking-club "blue" joke. In my opinion the ethnic joke is fairly low on the totem pole. The object of these jokes is to highlight supposed negative characteristics in the target group, e.g. in the Irish joke, Paddy is always stupid. Of course this does not mean that many such jokes cannot be funny; simply that, as a genre, they are cruel and biased. Here is one I read recently, of American origin—Question: "What is a real quick way to learn Irish?" Answer: "Repeat the following words in quick succession—WHALE, OIL, BEEF, HOOKED".
    Since the mid 1940s it has gradually come to be well accepted that tension and stress are bad for the health. We know that someone with a Type A personality, characterized by seriousness, cynicism, stress, concern with time, hostility and impatience, has a greater risk of having a heart attack than the Type B personality. Type B personalities are defined as those who do not exhibit the characteristics itemized above for Type A, i.e. they are less serious, more relaxed, not particularly competitive, slow to anger, more patient, etc. If psychological factors such as stress and tension can cause illness, and they can, then, surely, opposing psychological factors such as a sense of humor, which will lessen and deflate stress and tension, must have a positive effect on health.
    Although it remains to be unambiguously demonstrated that humor is good for your health, there is no doubt that it enhances the quality of fife. There are few more pleasant sensations than sharing a laugh with friends. Well, I will leave it at that, and I hope that your opinion of my musings on this subject is more favorable than Dr. Samuel Johnson's reply to an author who had sent him his manuscript for review—"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good".
    Questions:

问答题   What is the thesis of this article?

问答题   Divide the article into several parts with the paragraph number indicated.

问答题   What are the main writing skills applied in Paragraphs 2 and 3?

问答题   By using Dr. Samuel Johnson's reply to an author in Paragraph 6, what did the author intend to demonstrate?

问答题   Give a possible title to the article.