Theories of humor
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.
[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.
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.
[15] A famous version of the incongruity theory is that of Immanuel Kant, who claimed that the comic is "the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.
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.
[42] These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world.
[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.
This specific malfunction can be identified with a humorous effect on psychological grounds: it exactly corresponds to incongruity-resolution theory.
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.
This information will require a level of cognitive process to interpret, and contain a degree of incongruity (based on predictive likelihood).
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.
This model defines laughter as an acoustic signal to make individuals aware of an unnoticed fall-back to former behaviour patterns.
[83] He defines laughter as an intellectual activity that requires an immediate approach to a comic situation, detached from any form of emotion or sensibility.
[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.
