A theory of humour: part 3

 

Incongruity resolution (IR) theory

 

The central idea of incongruity resolution theory is that when we have an expectation that is suddenly resolved, we find it funny. IR theory comes in many different flavours: Kant claimed humour is when we have 'strained expectations that come to nothing", other modern researchers have claimed that it's when we develop two competing frames/expectations from a setup, which is then resolved in favour of one by the punchline, or that we have one frame for the setup and another for the punchline and the humour comes from resolving the two, or that it's when our perceptions and our abstract representations clash, or any number of other variations that involve unexpectedness. And not just any old unexpectedness - pretty much everything that happens to us isn't anything we actively expect. The kind of unexpectedness IR theory calls for are things that we expected *not* to happen as opposed to things that we merely weren't expecting. I didn't expect to see the particular guy at the library who checked my books out for me today, but if he'd been dressed up as Death I probably would have found it amusing.

 

What incongruity resolution theory gets right:

It accounts for why watching people fall down is widely considered hilarious. It explains most wordplay (where the incongruity comes from ambiguity in meaning). It somewhat explains parodies and obscure humour, where the requirement of being able to draw on your previous knowledge is likely to bring a set of expectations with it to be shattered. It explains unhelpful humour, since we have expectations of people saying things to us that are relevant and truthful (see Grice's maxims for more detail), and to a certain extent mean humour (by the same maxims I expect people not to be unnecessarily mean).

 

What incongruity resolution theory gets wrong:

There are lots of examples of incongruousness that aren't funny. Some examples: a patient with baffling symptoms, lies, mysteries and puzzles, snow out of season, an instrument out of tune at a concert.

There are plenty of jokes that remain funny even when you already know the punchline, including ingroup humour and really good comedy movies and shows like Monty Python or the earlier seasons of the Simpsons. In these cases, there aren't any expectations being proven false or resolved in an unexpected way, since I already know what's going to happen

IR theory also does a bad job of explaining the social aspects of humour - why other people's laughter makes things funnier, although we could stretch the theory to cover it by guessing that other people laughing makes you more likely to reach the same interpretation as them and therefore also find it funny. Finally, there's still a lot of vagueness in the theory: what is incongruity exactly? Most of the proposed definitions contradict each other. IR theory is more of a description than an explanation.