Humour

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See also: Humor

Who can really define humour? The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of humour, also spelled humor is not very illuminating; it refers to concepts such as amusement, comicality, and fun, but that just begs the question: what do those words mean? The fact that is that humor is a basic emotion, a form of entertainment, and as such it is something that must be experienced to be truly understood. Words such as comicality, amusement, comedy and laughter, if themselves looked up, invariably end up leading to circular definitions.

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The problem of definition

But the problem is much deeper than that. A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, and we claim that all people share it. The difficulty is that it is relative: my sense of humor may differ from yours. De gustibus non est disputandum – "There is no accounting for taste" – is as true as ever when it comes to humor. A sense of humour is dependent on many [[[variables]], including, but not limited to geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education and context.

The word itself, humour comes from medical beliefs in Ancient Greece, the four humours. The Ancient Greeks stated that a mix of fluids known as humours controlled human health and emotion. Later, the term humour referred to the interpenetration of the sublime and the ridiculous. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.

Styles or techniques

Examples of various different styles of humour, or techniques for evoking humour or creating a humorous situation are listed below.

The above list is incomplete; many more forms of humour exist.

Additional work on this article is appreciated.

Understanding humour

File:Pongo pygmaeus (orangutang).jpgHumans often find the behaviour of animals amusing or humorous.

Despite our varying senses of humour, some of us like to say that certain things are funny. Seinfeld is funny. Walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper coming out of the back of your pants is funny. We may ask, then, what is funny to a large number of people, or in other words, what is least subject to relativity?

There is no easy answer to this question. Some persons even claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. B. White once said, "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

Let us examine certain things that tend to be true of things, people, and concepts that people find funny.

Language bug

A great deal of humour is a consequence of language. Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the breaking of those expectations leads to laughter. Irony is explicitly this form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms relating to physicality and plays with them.

Consider a simple example from Lollerpedia:

  • Q: What's the range of a tuba?
  • A: Twenty yards if you've got a good arm!

Or another example:

These examples confuse the words range and pitch in their musical and non-musical contexts. In cases like this, comedy is the sign of a bug in the the symbolic make-up of language, as well as a self-correcting mechanism for such bugs. Once the problem in meaning has been described through a joke, people immediately begin correcting their impressions of the symbols that have been mocked. This is one explanation why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.

Unexpectedness, surprise, irony

Did you ever hear a joke for the second or third time? It wasn't as funny, was it? One of the hallmarks of what makes something funny seems to be that the punch line was unexpected or the opposite of what one would expect.

  • Man: Doctor, after my hand surgery, will I be able to play the piano?
  • Doc: Sure.
  • Man: That's amazing; I could never play before.

Isaac Asimov proposes (in his first jokebook, Treasury of Humor) that the essence of humour is anticlimax: an abrupt change in point of view, in which trivial matters are suddenly elevated in importance above those that would normally be far more important. Again, this is the opposite of what one would expect.

This same trait makes taboos perfect targets for humor, because we are expecting people to make fun of taboos:

  • Moses and Jesus were playing a round of golf. Moses misses a putt. Jesus putts and the ball ricochets off a tree, bounces off a barn, rolls down a hill, is picked up by a squirrel and dropped in the hole.
  • Moses says, "Jesus, do you want to play golf or don't you?"

To exploit surpise, many jokes work in groups of three. A class of jokes exists beginning with the lines similar to "A priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer are sitting in a bar...". Typically, the priest will make a remark, the rabbi will continue in the same vein, and then the lawyer will make a third point that forms a sharp break from the established pattern, but nonetheless forms a logical (or at least stereotypical) response. Example of a variation:

A gardener, an architect, and a lawyer are discussing which of their vocations is the most ancient. The gardener comments, "My vocation goes back to the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam to tend the garden." The architect comments, "My vocation goes back to the creation, when God created the world itself from primordial chaos." They both look curiously at the lawyer, who asks, "And who do you think created the primordial chaos?"

Advance knowledge of the final punch line destroys the surprise factor, which in turn destroys the entertainment value or amusement. An exception is when one derives amusement from hearing an old punch line being expressed and elaborated. This phenomenon explains much of the success of comedians who deal with same-gender and same-culture audiences on gender conflicts and cultural topics, respectively.

Neutralization of fears, breaking of taboos.

There are certain subjects that most of us are afraid to talk about openly; these are sex, politics, religion. Some comedians tap into this by talking about these topics in detail, often saying exactly what is on our minds but that we are too polite or too scared to say. In this fashion, humor becomes a sort of catharsis; by saying what's on our minds, comedians give us a metaphorical green light to go laugh at something that really is wrong, absurd or ridiculous and unacceptable in other contexts.

Mark Twain was a master when discussing politics:

...when you are in politics you are in a wasp's nest with a short shirt-tail, as the saying is. – Mark Twain in The Chronicle of Young Satan

Deviance from reality

Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture Funny Business, that an object or a person can become funny in three different ways. They are:

  • By being in an unusual place
  • By behaving in an unusual way
  • By being the wrong size

Most sight gags fit into one or more of these categories.

Validation of the human experience

The greatest comedians and writers try to appeal to every person; they talk about foibles, pitfalls, and absurdity "that we all face" – relationship troubles, troubles at work, taxes, family, in-laws, and so on. Thus they allow us to laugh at ourselves and in so doing lighten our emotional burdens. The most useful targets for humour are those that bring stress, as in the next example:

A bus of lawyers went off a cliff and crashed in a farmer's field. The police arrived to find the farmer burying the last lawyer.
"Any survivors?" the police asked the farmer.
"There was one who said he was alive," replied the farmer. "But you know how them lawyers lie."

In Stranger in a Strange Land, the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein proposes that humour comes from pain, and that laughter is a mechanism to keep us from crying.

More studies of humour

Notable studies of humour have come from the pens of Aristotle in The Poetics (Part V), of Sigmund Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and of Arthur Schopenhauer. The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote an essay on "the meaning of the comic", in which he viewed the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humourist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.

There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of humour, irony, parody and pretence. Prominent theoreticians in this field include Raymond Gibbs, Herbert Clark, Michael Billig, Willibald Ruch, Victor Raskin, Eliot Oring, and Salvatore Attardo. Although many writers have emphasised the positive or cathartic effects of humour some, notably Billig, have emphasises the potential of humour for cruelty and its involvement with social control and regulation.

We emphasise that humor is a great gift. Make sure humor is part of your day, every day.

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History

This Wikinfo article is adapted from two parts of the GFDL corpus:

See also

A different article: Humor

References

  • Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D., Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers. Neuron, 40, 1041 - 1048, (2003).
  • Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and ridicule: Towards a social critique of humour. London: Sage.

External links

Retrieved from "http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Humour"