humorist

Noun

humorist (plural humorists)

1. (archaic, historical) Someone who believes that health and temperament are determined by bodily humours; a humoralist.
2. (obsolete) Someone subject to whims or fancies; an eccentric.
   • She and the duke used to rally me upon my fondness for lord W—m, who was a sort of an humourist, and apt to be in a pet, in which case he would leave the company, and go to bed by seven o'clock in the evening.1751, [Tobias] Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC
   • I called on him and found him a contemporary of Beauclerk and Langton at Trinity College, Oxford, and a man of reading and animation, but a kind of humourist.1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 175
3. A humorous or witty person, especially someone skilled in humorous writing or performance.
   • Peter, after the manner of man at the breakfast table, had allowed half his kedgeree to get cold and was sniggering over a letter. Sophia looked at him sharply. The only letter she had received was from her mother. Sophia's mother was not a humourist.1921, Ben Travers, chapter 1, in A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC
   • Art Buchwald, who satirized the follies of the rich, the famous and the powerful for half a century as the most widely read newspaper humorist of his time, died Wednesday night in Washington.2007 January 18, Richard Severo, “Art Buchwald, 81, Columnist and Humorist Who Delighted in the Absurd”, in The New York Times
4. One who studies or portrays the humours of people.