Abstract.— Humor is a strategem for relating the collective social reality of a group of persons (the rational world) to their personal imaginations of alternative social worlds, meanings, or identities (the irrational world). The humorist is committed to the rational world. At the same time he permits idiosyncratic phantasies to occur within the social context if they are accompanied by an explicit message saying that the performance is made for fun. By such communications the rational social world is kept stable as well as more tolerable. The comical situation is composed of three essential elements: (1) the message, (2) the audience, and (3) the target or content treated by the message. The message brings the target to the irrational level, where it is brought into disrespect in favor of the alliance between the humorist and his audience. Laughter is the announcement that the disrespect is accepted just for fun. A person may, however, keep a straight face for different reasons. A conceptual scheme is proposed for prediction of laughter. It is based upon three dimensions of the comic situation: (1) the humorous message, (2) the interpersonal likings, and (3) the permissiveness towards actual laughter. The corresponding personal dispositions are the habitual sensitivity to such messages, the habitual tendency to favor comical situations and persons, and the habitual need for emotional‐impulse control. Suggestions are made as to the modification of laughter by constellations of high and low values on these variables.