When I was an undergraduate, I came up with an idea about why people laugh: Laughter is triggered by sudden pleasure. Not pleasure alone, it must increase quickly. Sudden pleasure is the necessary and sufficient condition for laughter. The threshold goes up and down — easier to make someone laugh if they’re nervous or cold, for example — but the basic rule never changes. (Tickling is an exception, of course.) Two old friends unexpectedly encounter each other, they embrace, laughing.
Humor is a subset of what causes laughter. Obviously we enjoy humor and jokes have punchlines — the necessary conditions are met. Maybe humor can tell us something about evolution: What is funny reveals what we enjoy, which may have a genetic basis.
I figured out that many jokes derive their pleasure from more than one source. These sources include:
1. Something forbidden. We have something we want to say or would enjoy saying; humor lets us say it.Insults, sexual stuff, scatological stuff (for children), swear words. Political jokes, a much bigger deal in the former Soviet Union than in America, tell forbidden truth about the government.
2. Something clever. Connecting two things that are quite different.
3. Something incongruous. Many New Yorker cartoons involve animals talking or children talking like adults.
Many jokes are clever insults, for example. Maybe the “did somebody say something” joke that I was puzzled about is an example. The speaker is saying “I don’t care about what you care about” (an insult of sorts) in a clever way.
I suspect this list is incomplete — but now that I’ve made it I can test it.
Interesting. This has always seemed to me like an incredibly tricky nut to crack (necessary/sufficient conditions for humor), but here are some thoughts.
I think “pleasure” is wrong, because most cases of physical pleasure I can think of are counterexamples. When you’re starving to death and you tear into a sandwich, that’s a pretty sudden increase in pleasure. Or when you’re freezing and someone lets you into a heated room (or vv). Those don’t tend to cause laughter.
My leading theory has to do more with relief, but a particular kind of relief – simultaneously empathizing with a belief about the world and seeing that it’s completely wrong. Nearly every case I can think of where I have a “bird’s-eye view” of someone’s situation, and can see why their interpretation of it and reactions to it are totally misguided, is funny. (This describes a surprisingly large # of jokes and funny scenes, so if you can’t think of examples I haven’t put it well enough.) Another thing that is pretty reliably funny is watching two people come from completely different perspectives, and seeing just how out of whack each’s perception of the other is (while understanding the perspective that leads them to this crazy perception).
Even slapstick seems to work this way: a guy walking merrily along before falling into a pothole or bumping into a pole is funny (again, the viewer sees what he “should have known”). But a piano falling on a guy who’s been walking cautiously along, actively looking for something dangerous, is not funny.
This also would explain why a joke’s power fades with familiarity. You stop feeling the relief at having escaped the wrong belief about the world, because you get so used to how wrong the belief is that you lose any empathy for it. Similarly, it would explain why there is no easy or systematic way to come up with funny jokes, except when targeting a very stupid audience. You need to create relief in your audience – that means finding a belief that is wrong but still draws them in in some way.
A couple more thoughts:
1. The counterexamples to your theory aren’t just physical. Watch someone as they watch their sports team turn a win into a loss in under a second (this happens with buzzer-beaters in basketball, walkoff HR in baseball, etc.) You’ll see shouting and displays of aggression, no laughter.
2. My theory is also consistent with the fact that humor nearly always feels “profound” – it seems like there is something higher about laughter and comedy than strict pleasure (or stories with happy endings). Under my definition, humor is always built on recognizing a fallacy, so it always represents “learning” something in some small sense.
“When you’re starving to death and you tear into a sandwich.” The sandwich isn’t unexpected. The increase in pleasure is therefore gradual — it started long before you actually started eating the sandwich. Likewise someone letting you into a heated room.
Relief would not explain why old friends laugh upon unexpected encountering each other. Lots of everyday examples of laughter don’t involve relief.