Why We Laugh and What Makes Us Laugh: 'The Enigma of Humor'

Arthur Asa Berger

doi:10.5964/ejop.v9i2.599

Abstract

Humor (and related concerns such as the nature of comedy and of laughter) is an enigmatic subject that has perplexed our greatest thinkers from Aristotle’s time to the present. There are four competing theories that explain humor, each of which argues that all humor is based on: superiority, incongruity, cognitive problems in processing humor and psychoanalytic perspectives (such as masked aggression).

Highlights

Aristotle explained that comedy is “an imitation of men worse than average; worse, not as regards any sort of fault, but only as regards on particular kind, the Ridiculous.” (McKeon, 1941, p. 1459). Hobbes wrote in his Leviathan “The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”
Schopenhauer explained incongruity in humor writing, “The cause of laughter in every case is the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.”. Another incongruity theorist, described laughter as “an affection rising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”
William Fry Jr., a psychiatrist, explained in his book Sweet Madness (1968, p. 153), “During the unfolding of humor, one is suddenly confronted by an explicit-implicit reversal when the punch line is delivered

Summary

Introduction

A joke can be defined as a short story, with a punch line, that generates mirthful laughter. With our understanding of the four most important theories of humor in mind, it is instructive to see how representatives of each of these theories might analyze the following joke: A man goes to Miami for a vacation.

Results

Conclusion