A theory of humour: part 2
Nov. 20th, 2011 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erratioAll the theories of humour I've seen can be described as falling into one of 4 categories:
1. Status/signalling
2. Incongruity/unexpectedness
3. Norm violation (has overlap with both the previous categories but has been advanced in enough different forms to deserve its own category)
4. Humour/laughter is a defense mechanism against negative emotions
I'll cover each one in a separate post. Since it's Thanksgiving break my aim for this week is to get a post out every day or two.
Status/signalling theories
According to these theories, the main purpose of humour is to signal how clever you are (so that more people want to mate with you), and in the process raise your status relative to everyone else (so that more people want to mate with you). So if you make a joke and people laugh, you've scored points against the people laughing (since they've accepted this particular bid for dominance) and against whoever was the butt of the joke. If a person or group is the butt of the joke you've also increased ingroup-outgroup bias, by explicitly pointing out one of the differences between us and them and implying that we would never be as dumb as them.
What this theory is good at:
It does an excellent job of explaining why we laugh more at jokes told by people with high status than low and why other people's laughter makes things funnier. It explains why a large portion of humour consists of clever insights and wordplay. It explains why people enjoy slapstick and mean humour (other people getting their status lowered), and it explains why obscure jokes and parodies are funnier to the people who get them (more ingroup effects, plus the general high status of knowing more about that field/derivative work). Oh and it also explains sarcastic/unhelpful humour, since not getting the joke means you don't have the same shared knowledge as the person telling it.
What this theory isn't good at:
It doesn't explain toilet humour, which is anything but clever, or why some jokes are funnier due to their unexpectedness while others are funny regardless of their expectedness value or get even funnier through anticipation. The 'mean humour' part of the explanation falls apart when you take into account people like my friend Anton, who's one of the least competitive/status-driven people I know and yet finds mean sitcoms hilarious, or my friend McKenzie, who describes herself as very status-driven but hates them. It also doesn't explain why only particular types of cleverness are eligible for humour - I've been taught by several quite brilliant teachers, and yet I somehow managed not to fall out of my seat laughing whenever they explained a new concept.
Trying to deal with the problems
Some of these objections can be dealt with given a suitable amount of wiggle room.
The variance in the :"mean humour'' category makes more sense if you introduce a term for empathy, where the default would be that mean humour is funny but to find it less funny the more empathetic you are. Then you could try running an experiment involving varying amounts of disassociation between the person being hurt and the person who's meant to find it funny. But regardless of the results, I think this still doesn't quite account for all the nuances of humour in "people getting hurt". For example, a guy getting hit in the balls is generally considered to be hilarious, even though this is one of the situations you would expect guys to have the most empathy. Other situations with comparable amounts of damage/pain, like getting punched in the face or a woman getting hit in the breasts aren't nearly as funny. Similarly, a person finding out their spouse has been sneaking out to pursue their dream of being a singer isn't funny, but a person finding our their spouse has been sneaking out to pursue their dream of being a clown is funnier, even though most people don't want to be either.
Toilet humour generally requires an appropriate context (ie. cleverness. Just blurting out "penis" isn't funny after the age of 15), and could be considered to have a status-related component in that only high-status individuals would risk talking about taboo topics. This doesn't feel like it explains the facts that well though - in some groups, toilet humour will get you a dirty look no matter how high status or clever you are. And the people who find toilet humour the funniest (children, some of the people at my old workplace) tend to be the ones with the lower status.
Types of cleverness: this isn't explainable at all without appeal to outside variables like unexpectedness, as far as I can tell.
Conclusion
Status explanations can't account for why we find the things funny that we do. But like pretty much everything else, humour has been co-opted into the status game and is treated as a marker for high status, which then feeds back into our sense of humour and influences how funny potentially-funny-things are to us.
1. Status/signalling
2. Incongruity/unexpectedness
3. Norm violation (has overlap with both the previous categories but has been advanced in enough different forms to deserve its own category)
4. Humour/laughter is a defense mechanism against negative emotions
I'll cover each one in a separate post. Since it's Thanksgiving break my aim for this week is to get a post out every day or two.
Status/signalling theories
According to these theories, the main purpose of humour is to signal how clever you are (so that more people want to mate with you), and in the process raise your status relative to everyone else (so that more people want to mate with you). So if you make a joke and people laugh, you've scored points against the people laughing (since they've accepted this particular bid for dominance) and against whoever was the butt of the joke. If a person or group is the butt of the joke you've also increased ingroup-outgroup bias, by explicitly pointing out one of the differences between us and them and implying that we would never be as dumb as them.
What this theory is good at:
It does an excellent job of explaining why we laugh more at jokes told by people with high status than low and why other people's laughter makes things funnier. It explains why a large portion of humour consists of clever insights and wordplay. It explains why people enjoy slapstick and mean humour (other people getting their status lowered), and it explains why obscure jokes and parodies are funnier to the people who get them (more ingroup effects, plus the general high status of knowing more about that field/derivative work). Oh and it also explains sarcastic/unhelpful humour, since not getting the joke means you don't have the same shared knowledge as the person telling it.
What this theory isn't good at:
It doesn't explain toilet humour, which is anything but clever, or why some jokes are funnier due to their unexpectedness while others are funny regardless of their expectedness value or get even funnier through anticipation. The 'mean humour' part of the explanation falls apart when you take into account people like my friend Anton, who's one of the least competitive/status-driven people I know and yet finds mean sitcoms hilarious, or my friend McKenzie, who describes herself as very status-driven but hates them. It also doesn't explain why only particular types of cleverness are eligible for humour - I've been taught by several quite brilliant teachers, and yet I somehow managed not to fall out of my seat laughing whenever they explained a new concept.
Trying to deal with the problems
Some of these objections can be dealt with given a suitable amount of wiggle room.
The variance in the :"mean humour'' category makes more sense if you introduce a term for empathy, where the default would be that mean humour is funny but to find it less funny the more empathetic you are. Then you could try running an experiment involving varying amounts of disassociation between the person being hurt and the person who's meant to find it funny. But regardless of the results, I think this still doesn't quite account for all the nuances of humour in "people getting hurt". For example, a guy getting hit in the balls is generally considered to be hilarious, even though this is one of the situations you would expect guys to have the most empathy. Other situations with comparable amounts of damage/pain, like getting punched in the face or a woman getting hit in the breasts aren't nearly as funny. Similarly, a person finding out their spouse has been sneaking out to pursue their dream of being a singer isn't funny, but a person finding our their spouse has been sneaking out to pursue their dream of being a clown is funnier, even though most people don't want to be either.
Toilet humour generally requires an appropriate context (ie. cleverness. Just blurting out "penis" isn't funny after the age of 15), and could be considered to have a status-related component in that only high-status individuals would risk talking about taboo topics. This doesn't feel like it explains the facts that well though - in some groups, toilet humour will get you a dirty look no matter how high status or clever you are. And the people who find toilet humour the funniest (children, some of the people at my old workplace) tend to be the ones with the lower status.
Types of cleverness: this isn't explainable at all without appeal to outside variables like unexpectedness, as far as I can tell.
Conclusion
Status explanations can't account for why we find the things funny that we do. But like pretty much everything else, humour has been co-opted into the status game and is treated as a marker for high status, which then feeds back into our sense of humour and influences how funny potentially-funny-things are to us.
