Theories of humor
Many theorists also now hold that the three main theories are of narrower focus than originally intended, and that there are examples of humor in which more than one of them explain some aspect.
In this theory, laughter serves as a homeostatic mechanism by which psychological stress is reduced[1][3][7] Humor may thus facilitate ease of the tension caused by one's fears, for example.
In Poetics, he suggested humor to be a way in which one releases pent-up negative emotions that may have been caused by trauma or tragedy we have experienced.
[9] In the eighteenth century, English drama theorists John Dryden and Samuel Johnson argued that relief theory was to be used as a dramatic tool.
[11] Comparably, an English Scholar, Lucas (1958), wrote that audiences respond better based on the "strain-rest-strain-rest" idea in which a tragic event may happen with moments of relaxation.
[12] According to Herbert Spencer, laughter is an "economical phenomenon" whose function is to release "psychic energy" that had been wrongly mobilized by incorrect or false expectations.
[13] Eddie Tafoya uses the idea of a physical urge tied to a psychological need for release when describing relief theory in his book The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great Literary Form.
Tafoya explains "…that each human being is caught in a tug-of-war: part of us strains to live free as individuals, guided by bodily appetites and aggressive urges, while the other side yearns for conformity and acceptance.
Therefore, whether through jokes, situations, or physical characteristics, while humor's laughter-inducing quality primarily stems from incongruity, aggression is also intertwined with it.
[18] In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes described superiority theory in two pieces, Human Nature (1650) and Leviathan (1651), which have very similar views.
The disposition theory adds a psychological perspective by suggesting that individual differences play a crucial role in determining what people find funny.
Francis Hutcheson in Thoughts on Laughter (1725) was the first modern thinker to account for humor by the term "incongruity," which became a major concept in the evolution of this field.
Their ideas build on the work of Linguist Tom Veatch, who proposed that humor emerges when one's sense of how the world "ought to be" is threatened or violated.
According to Benign violation, people often laugh when being tickled or play fighting because laughter signifies the situation is somehow threatening but safe.
[38] For example, McGraw and Warren find that most consumers were disgusted when they read about a church raffling off a Hummer SUV to recruit new members, but many were simultaneously amused.
A violation that one person finds amusing might be offensive or upsetting to another, and the perception of benignity plays a crucial role in determining the overall humor response.
As such it concerns itself only with verbal humor: written and spoken words used in narrative or riddle jokes concluding with a punch line.
[49] It integrated Raskin's ideas of Script Opposition (SO), developed in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor [SSTH], into the GTVH as one of six levels of independent Knowledge Resources (KRs).
Whereas Raskin's SSTH only deals with jokes, the GTVH considers all humorous text from spontaneous one-liners to funny stories and literature.
Willibald Ruch, a distinguished German psychologist, and humor researcher,[56] wanted to test empirically the ordering of the Knowledge Resources, with only partial success.
[57][58] Nevertheless, both the listed Knowledge Resources in the GTVH and their relationship to each other has proven to be fertile ground in the further investigation of what exactly makes humor funny.
[60] Investigation of the general scheme of information processing shows the possibility of a specific malfunction, conditioned by the need that a false version should be quickly deleted from consciousness.
[24] Zillmann and Bryant (1980) conducted a study to test Freud's ideology and combine or separate non-tendentious and tendentious humor.
[67] In 2011, three researchers, Hurley, Dennett and Adams, published a book that reviews previous theories of humor and many specific jokes.
They propose the theory that humor evolved because it strengthens the ability of the brain to find mistakes in active belief structures, that is, to detect mistaken reasoning.
[68] This is somewhat consistent with the sexual selection theory, because, as stated above, humor would be a reliable indicator of an important survival trait: the ability to detect mistaken reasoning.
However, the three researchers argue that humor is fundamentally important because it is the very mechanism that allows the human brain to excel at practical problem solving.
According to George Eman Vaillant's (1977) categorization, humor is level 4 defense mechanism: overt expression of ideas and feelings (especially those that are unpleasant to focus on or too terrible to talk about) that gives pleasure to others.
The various interactions of the model allow for a wide range of comedy; for example, a joke need not rely on high levels of incongruity if it triggers feelings of superiority, aggression, relief, or identification.
[86] Applications of this theory include Tschacher and Haken's (2023) study of incongruity and resolution using visual puns or verbal jokes, in which they connected the results of their research with dynamics seen in psychotherapy.
