Humour

Humour or humor (see spelling differences) is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy. The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavour) controlled human health and emotion. A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share,^[1] although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence, and context. For example, young children (of any background) may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons e.g. Tom and Jerry. Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences.^[1] Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery".^[2][3]

Smiling often reflects a sense of humour and amusement. Shown here is a painting by Eduard von Grützner.

Techniques for composing humour

Humour is a branch of rhetoric, there are hundreds of tropes that can be used to make jokes.

Non-verbal

• Bathos
  • Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
• Character driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
• Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water"
• Comic sounds
• Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by Andy Kaufman
• Unintentional humour, that is, making people laugh without intending to (as with Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space)
• Sight gags

Understanding humour

Humour can be defined as occurring:^[4]

• Researcher Thomas Veatch says that when an alternative or surprising shift in perception or answer is given, that still shows relevance and can explain a situation.
• when we laugh at something that points out another's inferiority
• Dr. Lisa Rosenberg says that humour can occur when sudden relief occurs from a tense situation

The term "humourific" as formerly applied in comedy referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy. Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the break of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter.. Irony is explicitly this form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms relating to physicality and plays with them. In other words, comedy can be a sign of a 'bug' in 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. Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist. This, however is in the areas of human creativity (science and art being the other two) that use structure mapping (then termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings^[5]. He argues that humour results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them. Tony Veale, who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did, has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour^[6][7][8], using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual blending. Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author F. B. White once said that "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." However, attempts to do just that have been made.

Evolution of humour

As with any form of art, the same goes for humor, acceptance depends on social demographics and varies from person to person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of entertainment all over the world, whether in the courts of the Western kings or the villages of the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.18th-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that "the more you know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness."

Sources of humor

The source of humor is believed to be the natural male-hormone - testosterone^[9]. Since this hormone is responsible for various characteristics, such as aggression, jokes made by men tend to be more aggressive, sometimes repetitive and predictable. According to prof. Sam Shuster, professor at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, the younger the man is, the more aggressive his jokes are.

Evolution and humor

Sight gags and language-based humour activate the two regions in the human brain known to have von Economo neurons, a specialization in neuron form that has evolved in the last 15 million years. This suggests that humour may have coevolved with the ability of great apes and humans to navigate through a shifting and complex social space.^[10]

Humour formulae

Root components:

• some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
• appealing to feelings or to emotions.
• similar to reality, but not real

Methods:

• metaphor
• hyperbole
• reframing
• timing

Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture in the documentary Funny Business".^[11], 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. Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life. Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing. Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all questions with a laugh.

See also

• Clowns
• Comedy and Comedians
• Comics
• Computational humor
• Internet humour
• Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
• Satire
  • Political satire

References

Further reading

• Basu, S (December 1999), "Dialogic ethics and the virtue of humor", Journal of Political Philosophy (Blackwell Publishing Ltd) Vol. 7 (No. 4): 378-403, doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00082, <http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14>. Retrieved on 2007-07-06 (Abstract)
• Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and ridicule: Towards a social critique of humour. London: Sage. ISBN 1412911435
• Bricker, Victoria Reifler (Winter, 1980) The Function of Humor in Zinacantan Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 411-418
• Buijzen, Moniek & Valkenburg, Patti M. (2004), "Developing a Typology of Humor in Audiovisual Media", Media Psychology Vol. 6 (No. 2): 147-167, doi:10.1207/s1532785xmep0602_2, <http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s1532785xmep0602_2?prevSearch=allfield%3A(buijzen)>(Abstract)
• Carrell, Amy (2000), Historical views of humour, University of Central Oklahoma. Retrieved on 2007-07-06.
• García-Barriocanal, Elena; Sicilia, Miguel-Angel & Palomar, David (2005), A Graphical Humor Ontology for Contemporary Cultural Heritage Access, Ctra. Barcelona, km.33.6, 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain,: University of Alcalá, <http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20050064.pdf>. Retrieved on 2007-07-06
• Goldstein, Jeffrey H., et al. (1976) "Humour, Laughter, and Comedy: A Bibliography of Empirical and Nonempirical Analyses in the English Language." It's a Funny Thing, Humour. Ed. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1976. 469-504.
• Holland, Norman. (1982) "Bibliography of Theories of Humor." Laughing; A Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 209-223.
• Luttazzi, Daniele (2004) Introduction to his Italian translation of Woody Allen's trilogy Side Effects, Without Feathers and Getting Even (Bompiani, 2004, ISBN 88-452-3304-9 (57-65).
• Martin, Rod A. (2007). The Psychology Of Humour: An Integrative Approach. London, UK: Elsevier Academic Press. ISBN 13: 978-0-12-372564-6
• McGhee, Paul E. (1984) "Current American Psychological Research on Humor." Jahrbuche fur Internationale Germanistik 16.2: 37-57.
• Mintz, Lawrence E., ed. (1988) Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. ISBN 0313245517; OCLC: 16085479.
• Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D.; Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. (2003) "Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers". Neuron, 40, 1041-1048.
• Nilsen, Don L. F. (1992) "Satire in American Literature." Humor in American Literature: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992. 543-48.
• Pogel, Nancy, and Paul P. Somers Jr. (1988) "Literary Humor." Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Ed. Lawrence E. Mintz. London: Greenwood, 1988. 1-34.
• Roth, G., Yap, R, & Short, D. (2006). "Examining humour in HRD from theoretical and practical perspectives". Human Resource Development International, 9(1), 121-127.
• Smuts, Aaron. "Humor". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Wogan, Peter (Spring 2006), "Laughing At First Contact", Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 22 (No. 1): 14-34, online December 12, 2006, doi:10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14, <http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14>. Retrieved on 2007-07-06 (Abstract)

External links

• Humor at the Open Directory Project
• International Society for Humor Studies
• No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality and Ethnicity International Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College