Humor | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

(b) Any breach of the usual order of events that is also felt to break a rule, whether of morality or etiquette. The drunkard, the glutton, the hypocrite, the miser are all stock figures of comedy, on the stage and elsewhere. (c) A special case of the second type is indecency, as in Restoration comedy or any smoking-room story. This has a different flavor from comic vice, just as comic vice has a different flavor from mere novelty and oddity. (d) Introduction into one situation of what is felt to belong to another, as George Bernard Shaw's reference to conventional sexual morality as "the trade unionism of married women" or Mark Twain's introduction of a Connecticut Yankee into the Court of King Arthur. Finding connections between things we usually keep in separate compartments of our minds is, according to one version of the incongruity theory, the ultimate source of all humor. Whether this is correct or not, it is certainly one source that needs to be noted.

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