Do All Truly Intelligent People Have a Sense of Humour?

I just came across this aphoristic pronouncement in the Preface to Anthony Grayling's biography of René Descartes. Grayling is describing Descartes (p.xv):

'He had a sense of humour, which no truly intelligent mind can lack'

This sounds like a case of what Anthony Flew in his book Thinking About Thinking labelled 'The No True Scotsman Move'. If someone says 'No Scotsman could commit a gruesome murder' and then is confronted with evidence that someone who was born in Scotland had committed such a murder, they explalin 'Ah, but if they committed a murder like that, they're not a true Scotsman'. Similarly if I manage to dig up some examples of very intelligent people who completely lack a sense of humour, no doubt Anthony Grayling will tell me they are not 'truly intelligent'. Isn't it wishful thinking to believe that a sense of humour should be a necessary constituent of intelligence?

A review of Grayling's Descartes.

Comments

[Ophelia Benson]

Possibly, possibly, and yet - real, complete lack of sense of humour does seem quite *similar* to stupidity. It seems dim, point-missing, obtuse, shuttered, blinkered, unobservant. Casaubon-like. Is Casaubon intelligent? In a sense; but perhaps not *truly* intelligent, or he would have known The Key to all Mythologies was a dead end - or at least have had the sense to learn German.

[Nigel Warburton]

This comment started an interesting discussion on the website Butterflies and Wheels...but discussion moved swiftly away from the critical thinking point which is that the way Grayling phrased this seemed to involve an arbitrary redefinition of 'intelligent' so that humour became an essential ingredient in every intellligent person's character... I might stipulate that every good blogger has a sense of humour - then there can't be any serious counterexample because I will simply respond of a humourless but apparently good blogger that they aren't a 'truly good' blogger...

[Lisa]

Of course all intelligent people have a sense of humor!
Not to be flip, but bright people "get it". Humor is irony. It is an unexpected turn of events - if one is too stupid to anticipate a certain sequence of expected events, then they don't "get it".
This is not to say intelligent people find, say, a sit-com funny. Quite the opposite. Some current entertainment, meant to be "funny" won't be humorous to an intelligent person - and they can tell you why it's NOT funny. Get it?

maybe