Proper of the man?!

Defining humour is hard for a plastic hippo.

That's not to say that humans have done much better, even though they keep claiming to enjoy a good laugh.

Take my late friend Alcofribas Nasier, who had a strange habit of writing in sixteenth-century French about a bunch of drunken giants:

"It's better to write about laughter than tears
Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'homme."

Alcofribas had better have been joking, or perhaps I'm losing something in the translation.

What on earth could he have meant by saying "rire est propre de l'homme"?

• laughter is proper of the man -- impossible, meaningless. Nothing is proper about laughter.
  
• laughter is clean(er) than man -- quite possibly. Not to say that laughter can't be filthy, but it's certainly less so than most humans.
• laughter is the owner of the man -- sounds like an Ionesco play based on language method tapes. Or a parody of a Greek tragedy. Or that the man is stoned.
  
• laughter is the property of man -- the traditional interpretation. I don't like it. Everyone knows humans have no sense of humour; I contend that plastic hippos do. Wrong on two counts. All this goes to prove is that property really is theft.
  

This, I fear, isn't getting us very far. Such weighty matters may well be beyond my feeble hippo brain. And I've completely forgotten why I wanted to define laughter in the first place.

It seems really that that's the sort of thing that only a humourless human would want to do.