Humour

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This article discusses humour in terms of comedy and laughter. For ancient Greek theories of humour in physiology, psychology and medicine, see four humours.

Humour 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 controlled human health and emotion.

A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including, but not limited to geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education and context. For example, young children (of any background) particularly favour slapstick, while satire tends to appeal to more mature audiences.

1 Styles or techniques
2 Understanding humour
3 Humour formula
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

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Styles or techniques

Image:Pongo pygmaeus (orangutang).jpg

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

Verbal
- Figure of speech
  - Triple and paraprosdokian
  - Enthymeme
  - Syllepsis (zeugma)
  - Hyperbole
  - Understatement
- Word play
  - Oxymoron
  - Pun
- Comic sounds or inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in a language
- Joke
  - Adages, often in the form of paradox "laws" of nature, such as Murphy's law
  - Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, viola jokes.
  - Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally cruel scenarios
- Riddle
- Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial and a concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
- Wit, as in many one-liner jokes
- Sarcasm
- Non-sequitur
- Dry humour
- Caustic humour
- Droll
- Obscenity
- Parody
- Random humour
- Black humour
- Satire
- Self-irony
- Ridicule, such as the Darwin Awards
  - Self-ridicule, such as Rodney Dangerfield's self-deprecating humour
    - Ridicule of self through absurdism, as in the surreally dry, deadpan, and bizarre comedy of Steven Wright
Nonverbal
- Deadpan Fake stern manner
- Slapstick
  - Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
  - Inflicting pain, such as kick in the groin
- Faking stupidity
- Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water".
- Surreal humour or absurdity
- Practical joke: luring someone into a humorous position or situation and then laughing at their expense
- Form-versus-content humour
- Funny pictures: Photos or drawings/cartoons that are intentionally or unintentionally humorous.
- Sight gags
- Visual humour: Like the above, but encompassing narrative in theater or comics ,or on film or video.
Anti-humour
- 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)
Character Driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Note - many more exist

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Understanding humour

Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. 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, as follow.

The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy referred to the interpenetration of the sublime and the ridiculous. For this reason humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. By comparison, the use of irony creates the perception of a passage from the serious to the comic, while in humour the opposite is true. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.

One explanation of humour is based on the fact that 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. In other words, comedy is 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 the essence of humour lies in two ingredients; the relevance factor and the surprise factor. First, it is necessary to present of something familiar (or relevant) to the audience to gain their involvement. From there, they may think they know the natural follow-through thoughts or conclusion. The next principal ingredient is the presentation of something different from what the audience expected, or else the natural result of interpreting the original situation in a different, less common way (see twist or surprise factor). For example:

A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to play the piano?" The doctor replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!"

For this reason, many jokes work in threes. For instance, a class of jokes exists beginning with the formulaic line "A priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer are sitting in a bar..." (or close variations on this). 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?"

In this vein of thought, knowing a punch line in advance, or some situation which would flub the delivery of the punchline, can destroy the surprise factor, and in turn destroy the entertainment value or amusement the joke may have otherwise provided. Conversely, a person previously holding the same unexpected conclusions or secret perspectives as a comedian could derive amusement from hearing those same thoughts expressed and elaborated. That there is commonality, unity of thought, and an ability to openly analyze and express these (where secrecy and inhibited exploration was previously thought necessary) can be both the relevance and the surprise factors in these situations. 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.

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 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 humorist, 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.

A Bergsonian might explain puns in the same spirit. Puns classify words not by what lives (their meaning) but by mechanics (their mere sound).

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.

A number of science fiction writers have explored the theory of humour. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein proposes that humour comes from pain, and that laughter is a mechanism to keep us from crying. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, 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.

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Humour formula

Required components:

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

Methods:

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.

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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.

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