Humor [addendum]

Know this topic well? Help others and get FREE products!

Since 1980 a number of philosophers have explored the psychology, aesthetics, and ethics of humor. The incongruity theory dominates though, as in earlier theorizing, the precise relation of humor to incongruity is seldom made clear. Not just any experience of incongruity constitutes humor. Coming home to find one's family murdered would be incongruous but not funny. Even incongruity intended to be humorous may not be funny to everyone. What seems necessary for humorous amusement is that the incongruity be enjoyed.

The enjoyment of incongruity is not sufficient for amusement, however, for one may enjoy something bizarre or fantastic for its incongruity without being amused. Some people also enjoy grotesque and macabre works of art and horror movies and novels in part for their incongruity. In aesthetics there is no general agreement on what distinguishes amusement from such cases; one suggestion is that in amusement we tend to laugh.

Another psychological and aesthetic issue is the relation of humor to emotions. Since Plato most philosophers have treated amusement as an emotion, but there are significant differences between amusement and standard emotions. The practical orientation of standard emotions is lacking in amusement. Emotions evolved in early mammals as adaptive reactions to threats and opportunities. The bodily changes in fear and anger, for example, energize animals and humans for fighting or fleeing. Sexual love motivates reproductive activity and parental love motivates nurturing. But the bodily changes in amusement do not prepare us to take action; indeed, uncontrollable laughter is incapacitating.

A second difference is that amusement does not require belief in the reality of its object as emotions typically require belief in the reality of their objects. News that I have won the lottery might make me feel joy, but that joy evaporates when I discover that the news was false. Humor, by contrast, seems to work as well with playful, merely entertained thoughts as with beliefs. Indeed, those who produce jokes and other forms of comedy work mostly with intentional objects known by everyone to be fictional. A third difference is that in standard emotions, there is a positive or negative attitude toward the object of those emotions while in amusement there need be no positive attitude toward the amusing object. People value what they love and what brings them joy, but they need not value the things they find funny. If at a funeral one sees someone dressed in a garish yellow and pink outfit, one may be amused without having a positive attitude toward that person or the outfit. Indeed, Aristotle classified the humorous as a species of the ugly.

These differences between amusement and standard emotions suggest that humor involves a more sophisticated kind of mental processing than is found in at least the basic emotions, and a different relation between its mental and physical components. Those who want to continue the Platonic classification of amusement as an emotion, then, one should at least provide an explanation of why these differences should not push amusement out of the category of emotion.

Turning lastly to the ethics of humor, since the mid-1970s, philosophers have examined humor that seems to express morally objectionable beliefs and attitudes, such as racism and sexism. Joke telling is often based on stereotypes representing various groups as stupid, lazy, greedy, or promiscuous. Are those who tell such jokes asserting or presupposing the truth of those stereotypes? One strong position, called moralism by Berys Gaut, says that appreciating a joke involves subscribing to the beliefs and attitudes it expresses, and so joke tellers are fully answerable to ethical considerations. At the other extreme is antimoralism, which treats humor as a form of play in which ideas and attitudes are merely entertained and not subscribed to, so that joke telling is not bound by ethical constraints. Antimoralists often point out that one can laugh at an ethnic joke merely for its cleverness. A joke about stupid Frisians can be amusing even though one has no idea who Frisians are! However, moralists point out that racists tell racist jokes to express and spread their beliefs and attitudes and not simply to play with ideas.

Whereas ethical examinations of humor have focused on what can be wrong with it, a few have shown how humor, particularly about oneself, can foster virtues such as humility, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness. The person with a rich sense of humor also tends to think critically, which has made humor a natural accompaniment to philosophy since Socrates.

Plato; Socrates.

Monro, D. H. Argument of Laughter. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963.

Morreall, John, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Morreall, John. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004.

Leacock, Stephen. Humour: Its Theory and Techniques. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1935.

Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Laughter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2nd ed. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1974.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Harmondsworth, NY: Penguin, 1976.

Bergmann, Merrie. "How Many Feminists Does It Take to Make a Joke: Sexist Humor and What's Wrong with It." Hypatia 1(1986): 63–82.

Buckley, Francis H. The Morality of Laughter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Carroll, Nöel. "Horror and Humor." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 145–160.

Gaut, Berys. "Just Joking: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humor." Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 51–68.

Roberts, Robert C. "Humor and the Virtues." Inquiry 31 (1988): 127–149.

This is the complete article, containing 936 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).