People laugh at the juxtaposition of incompatible concepts and at defiance of their expectations—that is, at the incongruity between expectations and reality.
According to a variant of the theory known as resolution of incongruity, laughter results when a person discovers an unexpected solution to an apparent incongruity, such as when an individual grasps a double meaning in a statement and thus sees the statement in a completely new light.
These and other explanations all capture something, and yet they are insufficient. They do not provide a complete theoretical framework with a hypothesis that can be measured using well-defined parameters. They also do not explain all types of humor. None, for example, seems to fully clarify the appeal of slapstick. In in the journal Psychological Science, A. Humor results, they propose, when a person simultaneously recognizes both that an ethical, social or physical norm has been violated and that this violation is not very offensive, reprehensible or upsetting.
Hence, someone who judges a violation as no big deal will be amused, whereas someone who finds it scandalous, disgusting or simply uninteresting will not. Experimental findings from studies conducted by McGraw and Warren corroborate the hypothesis. Consider, for example, the story of a church that recruits the faithful by entering into a raffle for an SUV anyone who joins in the next six months. Study participants all judged the situation to be incongruous, but only nonbelievers readily laughed at it.
Levity can also partly be a product of distance from a situation—for example, in time. It has been said that humor is tragedy plus time, and McGraw, Warren and their colleagues lent support to that notion in , once again in Psychological Science.
The recollection of serious misfortunes a car accident, for example, that had no lasting effects to keep its memory fresh can seem more amusing the more time passes. Geographical or emotional remoteness lends a bit of distance as well, as does viewing a situation as imaginary. In another test, volunteers were amused by macabre photos such as a man with a finger stuck up his nose and out his eye if the images were presented as effects created with Photoshop, but participants were less amused if told the images were authentic.
Conversely, people laughed more at banal anomalies a man with a frozen beard if they believed them to be true. McGraw argues that there seems to be an optimal comic point where the balance is just right between how bad a thing is and how distant it is. Several other theories, all of which contain elements of older concepts, try to explain humor from an evolutionary vantage. Gil Greengross, an anthropologist then at the University of New Mexico, noted that humor and laughter occur in every society, as well as in apes and even rats.
This universality suggests an evolutionary role, although humor and laughter could conceivably be a byproduct of some other process important to survival.
Wilson is a major proponent of group selection, an evolutionary theory based on the idea that in social species like ours, natural selection favors characteristics that foster the survival of the group, not just of individuals. Wilson and Gervais applied the concept of group selection to two different types of human laughter.
Spontaneous, emotional, impulsive and involuntary laughter is a genuine expression of amusement and joy and is a reaction to playing and joking around; it shows up in the smiles of a child or during roughhousing or tickling. This display of amusement is called Duchenne laughter, after scholar Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, who first described it in the midth century.
Extremism is difficult to widely cultivate in a culture constantly waiting to prick the bubble of pretention. Orwell, therefore, has to excise humor to build his nightmare realm—though what excuse the novels of DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy have is less clear. I made a similar point at an evening discussing humor in fiction, and an audience member took exception.
It felt to me a conflation of two distinct things. Humor is amateur and collaborative, but comedy is mercantile. It is the commercialization of humor, the taking of its component parts and reassembling it for consumption. The humor I was talking about does not require laughs, just recognition that something is supposed not to be serious; comedy on the other hand is busted without it.
The skill to take ordinary humor, mine life for its absurdity, and then turn it into comedy is a rich and astonishing skill. You have an audience around you also wanting to laugh. The last story in my collection, though the first to be written, was inspired by Old Jews Telling Jokes , a television series that does exactly what you would expect from its title: against a white background, a silver-haired man or woman delivers gags older even than they are.
In it she accused him of joking constantly, unable to cast off his stage persona. But it can also be a deflection and a dereliction. A way to make time stand still. A way to speak, but actually to say nothing. In the story, Clive and his mother speak almost exclusively in quotations from comedy, make up their own routines. It is a kind of idioglossia, one that continues even in the presence of a new boyfriend perplexed by two people unable to look reality head on without a sideways glance.
Their comedy is depressingly devoid of authentic humor. I rewrote at length, cut back to the barest minimum. It was a discipline of which I had no experience: the sole purpose to make people laugh. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.
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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. Freud one-upped Superiority Theory with Relief Theory, which posited that humor is a sort of release valve for our inner desires. The theory explained dirty jokes, but not others, like puns.
In the seventies, linguists rallied behind a more palatable idea, called Incongruity Theory: essentially, that we laugh at surprises, violations of our expectations. But Incongruity Theory had a hard time explaining why we laugh when tickled. The death of a very young person, for example, is surprising and incongruous, but hardly humorous.
These days, many scholars still champion versions of Incongruity Theory, including such prominent figures as Victor Raskin, a linguistics professor at Purdue University and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Humor , who refined Incongruity Theory into the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humor, in It is a universal theory. He claims that, while linguists rely on thought experiments to back up Incongruity-based theories, researchers have used the scientific method to disprove it.
In , for example, two University of Tennessee professors asked undergraduate students to watch Bill Cosby videos.
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