Humour
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- This article discusses humour in terms of comedy and laughter. For ancient Greek theories of humour in physiology, psychology and medicine, see four humors.
Humor (humour in British English) is the ability or quality of people, objects or situations to invoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses any form of entertainment or human communication which invokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy.
The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours controlled human health and emotion.
A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humourous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including but not limited to sex, age, geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education and context. For example, young children (of any background) particularly favour slapstick, while satire tends to appeal to more mature audiences.
Examples of various different styles of humour, or techniques for invoking humour or creating a humourous situation are listed below.
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Styles or techniques
- Verbal
- Figure of speech
- Word play
- Comic sounds or inherently funny words with certain sounds that make them amusing in a particular language
- Joke
- Adages, often in the form of parody "laws" of nature, such as Murphy's law
- Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes.
- Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally cruel scenarios
- Riddle
- Irony, for example Dennis Leary's rants about celebrity drug use and rehabilitation.
- Wit, as in many one-liner jokes
- Non-sequitur
- Droll
- Sarcasm
- Satire
- Parody
- Ridicule, such as the Darwin Awards
- Self-ridicule, such as Rodney Dangerfield's self-deprecating humour
- Nonverbal
- Deadpan, Fake stern manner (inappropriate in a comic setting)
- Slapstick
- Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
- Inflicting pain, such as kick in the groin
- Faking stupidity
- Absurdity or context inappropriateness
- Practical joke: deliberately luring someone into a humorous position or situation and then laughing at their expense
- Form-versus-content humour
- Anti-humour
- Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by Andy Kaufman
- Unintentional humour, that is, making people laugh without intending to (as with Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space)
- Character Driven, deriving humor from the way the characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
- Note - many more exist
Explanation
One explanation bases itself 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 only funny 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:
- A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to play the piano?" The doctor replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!"
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 Arthur 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 and Salvatore Attardo.
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.
Humour formula
Required components:
- some unexpected surprise, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
- appealing to feelings or to emotions.
- similar to reality, but not real
Methods:
See also
- Laughter
- Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
- Black comedy
- Clowns
- Comedy and Comedians
- Comedy film
- Comics (also known as funnies)
- Humour in crime fiction
- Internet humour
- Jokes
- Metahumour
- Practical jokes and pranks
- Professional humour, e.g. lawyer jokes
- Ribaldry
- Surreal humour
- Toilet humour
- WeinzWorld (http://weinzworld.com)
- Humour by nationality
References
- Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D., Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers. Neuron (http://www.neuron.org/), 40, 1041 - 1048, (2003).
External links
- WikiHumor.com (http://www.wikihumor.com) A wiki dedicated to humor.
- Humour - Encyclopædia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9106291) (by Arthur Koestler)
- Dictionary of the History of ideas: (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-58) Sense of the Comic
- Template:ODP
- Humor reference guide (http://facstaff.uww.edu/shiblesw/humorbook/): a comprehensive classification and analysisda:Humor
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