Humour: Encyclopedia II - Humour - Understanding humour

Humour - Understanding humour

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 why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.

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, such as this one:

Perhaps the essence of humour lies in the presentation of something familiar to a person, so they think they know the natural follow-on thought or conclusion, then providing a twist through presentation something different from what the audience expected (see surprise), or else the natural result of interpreting the original situation in a different, less common, way. For example:

For this reason also, 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.

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.

Users of some psychoactive drugs tend to find humour in many more situations and events than one normally would.

One notable trait of Australians (perhaps inherited from the British) lies in their use of deadpan humour, in which the joker will make an outrageous or ridiculous statement without giving any explicit signs of joking. Americans visiting Australia have gained themselves a reputation for gullibility and a lack of a sense of humour by not recognising that tales of kangaroos hopping across the Sydney Harbour Bridge exemplify the propensity for this style of leg-pulling.

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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Understanding humour", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki