Humour

• 1. Introduction

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  Humour begins as a medical theory. The word derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, who taught that the balance of fluids in the body, the humours, controlled human health and emotion. The Latin humor simply meant body fluid. Centuries later that clinical word came to describe something far less measurable: the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. People of all ages and cultures respond to it. Most people can be amused, smile, or laugh at something funny, and so are said to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking one would find such behaviour inexplicable, strange, or even irrational. Yet what makes something funny resists easy answers. Why does a young child laugh at a Punch and Judy puppet show while satire sails over their head? Why do scholars from ancient Athens to modern laboratories keep trying to dissect a thing that seems to die under the knife? And why would anyone measure a joke against an electric shock, a video clip, or a sample of antibodies in the blood?

• 2. Theories Of The Funny

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  Peter McGraw endorses the benign-violation theory, which holds that humour only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling, or threatening, but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable, or safe. By that logic, a joke can take away the awkward, uncomfortable, or uneasy feeling of a social interaction. Others argue more plainly that the appropriate use of humour can facilitate social interactions. The prevailing families of theory split along different lines. Psychological theories, the vast majority of which treat humour-induced behaviour as very healthy, sit alongside spiritual theories that may regard humour as a gift from God. A third family declines to explain it at all, treating humour as an unexplainable mystery, very much like a mystical experience. That instinct to leave it alone has a famous defender. Author E. B. White once said that humour 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. The counterargument is that protests against offensive cartoons force the dissection anyway, directing attention toward humour's politics and its assumed universality.

• 3. A Word With Many Meanings

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  Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of humour, a German loanword from English, to mean any type of comedy. The complaint points to a real distinction. Humour and comic are both used in theorising, but their connotations differ as response differs from stimulus. Humour was also thought to combine ridiculousness and wit in a single individual, the paradigmatic case being Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. Language itself preserves the older sense. The French were slow to adopt the term, and in French humeur and humour remain two different words. The former refers to a person's mood, or to the archaic concept of the four humours. The vocabulary keeps branching. Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed droll humour or recreational drollery. And the capacity is not confined to people. Humour is also observed in great apes.

• 4. Comedy Across Cultures

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  Western humour theory begins with Plato, who in the Philebus attributed to Socrates the view that the essence of the ridiculous is an ignorance in the weak, who are unable to retaliate when ridiculed. Aristotle followed in the Poetics, suggesting that an ugliness that does not disgust is fundamental to humour. In ancient Sanskrit drama, Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra defined humour, hasyam, as one of the nine nava rasas, the principal emotional responses inspired in an audience by bhavas, the imitations of emotions that actors perform. When Aristotle's Poetics was translated into Arabic in the medieval Islamic world, comedy and satire became synonymous. Writers and philosophers including Abu Bischr, his pupil Al-Farabi, the Persian Avicenna, and Averroes disassociated comedy from Greek dramatic representation. They tied it instead to Arabic poetic forms such as hija, satirical poetry, viewing comedy as the art of reprehension. In Islamic teachings, mocking others through humour is undesirable, and disrespect toward sacred figures, the Quran, mosques, the month of Ramadan, or the shrines of saints is regarded as a grave offense. From the Caribbean, the mento star Lord Flea said in a 1957 interview that West Indians have the best sense of humour in the world, pointing to the wit that shines through even a solemn song like Las Kean Fine, which tells of a deadly boiler explosion on a sugar plantation.

• 5. The Long Chinese Laugh

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  Confucianist and Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, with its emphasis on ritual and propriety, traditionally looked down upon humour as subversive or unseemly, perceiving it as irony and sarcasm. Yet the Analects depicts the Master as fond of humorous self-deprecation, once comparing his wanderings to the existence of a homeless dog. The Daoist text Zhuangzi went further, making fun of Confucian seriousness and casting Confucius himself as a slow-witted figure of fun. Joke books mixing wordplay, puns, situational humour, and taboo subjects like sex and scatology stayed popular over the centuries. The roster of named humourists runs long. It includes the ancient jesters Chunyu Kun and Dongfang Shuo, Ming and Qing writers such as Feng Menglong, Li Yu, and Wu Jingzi, and modern figures from Lu Xun and Lin Yutang to performers like Guo Degang and Zhou Libo. During the 1930s, Lin Yutang's phono-semantic transliteration youmo caught on as a new term for humour. It sparked a fad for humour literature and an impassioned debate about what humorous sensibility best suited a poor, weak country under partial foreign occupation. Under the rule of Mao Zedong the Party-state's approach was generally repressive, but social liberalisation in the 1980s, commercialisation of the cultural market in the 1990s, and the arrival of the internet each enabled new forms to flourish despite censorship.

• 6. Desire And Self-Mockery

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  Self-deprecating humour carries a strange power in courtship. It communicates weakness and fallibility in a bid to gain another's affection, yet the social transformation model predicts it can increase romantic attraction when other variables are favourable. That model links a humorist, an audience, and the subject matter, and treats humour as adaptive because it signals both present and future intentions to be funny. The evidence is sharply gendered. In the mid-20th century, a majority of American college students called a sense of humour a crucial trait in a partner, and in the late-20th century British college students named humour and honesty the two most important attributes in a significant other. Women rate humorous men more desirable for a serious relationship or marriage, but only when those men are also physically attractive. Funny men pay a hidden price. They are perceived as less intellectual, and when women in a forced-choice study picked them as partners, they rated them as less honest and intelligent. A study at McMaster University found humour most reliably boosts desirability when men use it and women evaluate it. The pattern does not travel. Studies in East Asia rank humour lower among traits than Western cultures do, especially when men evaluate women, and in some mate-selection studies humour does not make the list at all.

• 7. Measuring The Medicine

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  In 1994, Karen Zwyer, Barbara Velker, and Willibald Ruch tested whether humour could raise pain tolerance using the cold pressor test. Their fifty-six female participants, split into cheerfulness, exhilaration, and humour-production groups, watched a short humorous clip that scored a mean of 3.64 out of 5 for funniness. All three groups showed higher pain thresholds afterward, with no significant difference between them. Antibodies tell a similar story. SIgA, which protects the body from infection, rose significantly in participants shown a humorous clip. Other supposed benefits prove thinner on inspection. An early study by Paskind showed laughter can decrease skeletal muscle tone, because the short intense contractions are followed by longer relaxation. A test of oxygen saturation found that laughter creates sporadic deep breaths but does not change oxygen levels. The picture grows more precise with the styles. Research proposes two types of humour, adaptive and maladaptive, each split into two styles. Affiliative and self-enhancing humour are adaptive and tie to better self-esteem and anxiety control. Aggressive humour, built on sarcasm and disparagement, and self-defeating humour, built on self-disparaging jokes used to win acceptance, link to higher anxiety and depression. Madelijn Strick and colleagues at Radboud University found in 2009 that a joke distracts the bereaved, and that humour grows more effective as negative affect intensifies.

• 8. Anatomy Of A Joke

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  Rowan Atkinson, in the documentary Funny Business, argued that an object or person becomes funny in three ways: by behaving in an unusual way, by being in an unusual place, or by being the wrong size. Most sight gags fit one or more of those categories. Beyond the visual, humour can be verbal, visual, or physical, and even music or visual art can carry it. Its root components include being reflective of reality, and surprise, contradiction, paradox, and ambiguity. The methods read like a craftsman's toolkit: farce, hyperbole, metaphor, pun, reframing, self-deprecation, and timing. Some theoreticians single out exaggeration as a universal comic device, since the easiest way to make something laughable is to exaggerate its salient traits to the point of absurdity. The frontal lobe does its share of the work. An article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience reports that humour engages a core network including temporo-occipito-parietal areas that detect and resolve incongruity, the mismatch between expected and presented stimuli, along with the dopaminergic reward system and the amygdala. Even the laugh resists a clean reading. In 2009, Diana Szameitat had actors laugh with four emotional associations and reached an overall recognition rate of 44 percent, with taunt correctly classified half the time and schadenfreude barely a third. Joy and tickle were positive, schadenfreude and taunt were not, which raises a stubborn question: if laughter can be negative, is humour itself a thing of positive emotion, or something far less tidy?