The Philosophy of Humor: What Makes Something Funny?

People can laugh at almost anything. What's the problem with that? What

makes

something

fun? This essay reviews some theories about

what

it means for

something

to be

funny

. Each theory offers insights into this question, but no single approach provides a comprehensive answer.  According to the theory of superiority

humor

,

funny

results from feeling superior to another person, or to an older version of ourselves, and we laugh at them: “Ha! “I’m better than you (or before me)!” We look with contempt at the butt of the joke and, in comparison, smugly perceive how different we are from that person.

Consider laughing at someone who slips on a banana peel. Maybe we laugh because we assume we are better than them; After all, we have never slipped on pieces of fruit. However, I can feel superior to all kinds of things, like oysters, and still not laugh at them. Let us also imagine Socrates, who is notoriously ugly, exclaiming to a group of people: "I am the most attractive man here." It's curious, but there is no obvious claim of superiority.  But imagine People magazine's “Sexiest Man Alive” saying that: that's just superiority, and it's not very funny. This reveals, for most

humor

scholars, that superiority theory misses the mark.

After all, sometimes things are fun without coming off as superior, and some feelings of superiority don't make things fun. Laughter feels good! Perhaps this is because laughing releases pent-up pressure.  According to the relief theory of humor, the main function of laughter is to vent nervous energy;   Release energy, emotions or thoughts that are considered inappropriate or unnecessary. Consider an example from Sigmund Freud about a criminal who says, as he is being led to his execution on a Monday: "Well, this is a good start to the week." Here, tension builds on stage: we feel apprehension or pity for the criminal.

When we recognize that you are not concerned about his condition, that energy becomes “excess” and is released through laughter. The joking context offers a cover for expressing ourselves about topics we might feel pressured to repress, such as death or sex. Since we do not need to repress these impulses here, superfluous energy is released in laughter. But sometimes humor doesn't involve accumulating energy at all. Consider this joke from Steven Wright: "On the other hand, you have different fingers."   There is no time to induce any mental energy based on the preparation of this joke. There is no time to accumulate the energy that needs to be released.

It is funny regardless of any repressed feelings, so the relief theory of humor cannot explain this joke. According to the incongruity theory of humor, humor results from the sudden recognition of dissonance or incongruity when our expectations had prepared us for something completely different. Temporal confusion is replaced with humor as we reinterpret the setup and its relationship to the punchline. Instead of confusion, there is a kind of resolution, and our reward for achieving it is humor. The element of surprise cannot be scary or dangerous, as it creates negative emotions that block feelings of fun. Finding the severed head of your favorite horse in your bed is incongruous, but few would laugh.

Mere surprise is not enough for humor. Consider: “The unfaithful artist heard his wife coming up the stairs. He told his lover: 'Quickly, take off your clothes!'” On an immediate and superficial reading, we are taken aback by his unexpected and incongruous request. But we can reinterpret the setup to make it fit: he is an artist who “paints” her, and that sometimes happens naked, so the wife wouldn't suspect a thing. Many simple and fun riddles rely on similar forms of ambiguity, such as this one: “Why was 6 afraid of 7?” Because, 7, 8, 9”. We easily switch between the meaning of ate and the phonetically identical number eight and enjoy the alternating and incongruent frames of reference.

With humor, we experience a psychological and conceptual shift "from a serious state of perceiving and thinking about things that fit our conceptual patterns, to a non-serious state of being amused by some incongruity." When we are serious, we worry when the world is not consistent with

what

we expect it to be. When we are playful, inconsistencies are enjoyed. This analysis provides the basis for an empirical study on humor in which the degree of incongruity can be modified in a laboratory, thereby increasing or decreasing the level of humor. While most current theorists lean toward some version of incongruity theory, it has limitations.

The theory is best applied to cases of humor that are clearly verbal, where ambiguity, for example, is more easily constructed; but not all humor is verbal. Additionally, sometimes we enjoy re-experiencing moments of humor, like re-watching a comedy, where our expectations are not violated; in fact, we consciously anticipate the impending mood.   Finally, the sense of “incongruity” is so broad, and includes dissonance, contradiction, and outright absurdity, that it loses its meaning, making the theory difficult to refute: the concept of “incongruity” is so elastic that it can be expanded ad hoc. to cover any example of humor, even one that, at first glance, does not seem to depend on incongruity as such. 4.

Conclusion: It's funny, none of these theories seem appropriate. Perhaps a combination of these theories can explain what

makes

something fun. There is little consensus on which theory is best, but, like most philosophical puzzles worth thinking about, this is not uncommon. The

philosophy

of humor draws on many other philosophical areas, including logic,

philosophy

of language, aesthetics, and others. And since humor and laughter are emotions and expressions present in all known societies at all times, it is not a frivolous endeavor. Not being able to find a full explanation of what makes something fun may be because it is in the early stages of study.

Or maybe we're just not in on the joke.