What is humor

Which of the following words would most likely be used to describe humor? This whole school from home thing is hard, I need some humor. A humor laden characters or less tweet can lead to massive exposure on Twitter, an achievement that would take other forms of advertising, very large budgets to achieve. This is comedy based on a cold humor , detached, euphemistic, devoid of any generosity. There was poop humor —literally—when Valerie's house becomes flooded with fecal matter after a pipe bursts.

Under the Sun King, such humor —and the laughter associated with it—was seen as more suitable for the masses. As ever, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show crew encouraged us to find some humor alongside the horror and the shame. Some cuts, a few slight character changes, an idea or two about putting some humor into the script.

I was a little riled at first myself, but the second and last lady who came out put me in excellent humor. The gray eyes, once flashing with the light of kindly humor , now softened with sympathy, now glowed with pity. He was judge of the admiralty court of Pennsylvania; his writings abound with wit, humor and satire. When Tim hesitates he loses his temper as a sensible man should lose it—he buries it, and his indomitable good humor wins.

He paused, and to illustrate the imperious humor of the Scot, he waved his fingers and a red wrister at me. An archaic term for any fluid substance in the body, such as blood , lymph , or bile. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for humor on Thesaurus.

See antonyms for humor on Thesaurus. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.

Idioms about humor. Also especially British , humour. Humor, wit refer to an ability to perceive and express a sense of the clever or amusing. Humor consists principally in the recognition and expression of incongruities or peculiarities present in a situation or character.

It is frequently used to illustrate some fundamental absurdity in human nature or conduct, and is generally thought of as more kindly than wit: a genial and mellow type of humor; his biting wit. Wit is a purely intellectual manifestation of cleverness and quickness of apprehension in discovering apparent analogies between things really unlike, and expressing them in brief, diverting, and often sharp observations or remarks. Humor, gratify, indulge imply attempting to satisfy the wishes or whims of oneself or others.

Wit, he says in the Rhetoric 2, 12 , is educated insolence. These objections to laughter and humor influenced early Christian thinkers, and through them later European culture. They were reinforced by negative representations of laughter and humor in the Bible, the vast majority of which are linked to hostility. The only way God is described as laughing in the Bible is with hostility:.

The kings of the earth stand ready, and the rulers conspire together against the Lord and his anointed king…. The Lord who sits enthroned in heaven laughs them to scorn; then he rebukes them in anger, he threatens them in his wrath Psalm —5. In the Bible, mockery is so offensive that it may deserve death, as when a group of children laugh at the prophet Elisha for his baldness:.

Bringing together negative assessments of laughter from the Bible with criticisms from Greek philosophy, early Christian leaders such as Ambrose, Jerome, Basil, Ephraim, and John Chrysostom warned against either excessive laughter or laughter generally. Sometimes what they criticized was laughter in which the person loses self-control.

Other times they linked laughter with idleness, irresponsibility, lust, or anger. John Chrysostom, for example, warned that. Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul.

Often from words and laughter proceed railing and insult; and from railing and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder. If, then, you would take good counsel for yourself, avoid not merely foul words and foul deeds, or blows and wounds and murders, but unseasonable laughter itself in Schaff , Not surprisingly, the Christian institution that most emphasized self-control—the monastery—was harsh in condemning laughter.

One of the earliest monastic orders, of Pachom of Egypt, forbade joking Adkin , — The Rule of St. The monastery of St. The Christian European rejection of laughter and humor continued through the Middle Ages, and whatever the Reformers reformed, it did not include the traditional assessment of humor. Among the strongest condemnations came from the Puritans, who wrote tracts against laughter and comedy. That makes us alert to signs that we are winning or losing. The former make us feel good and the latter bad.

If our perception of some sign that we are superior comes over us quickly, our good feelings are likely to issue in laughter. In Part I, ch. Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men.

And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and to compare themselves only with the most able.

He says that laughter accompanies three of the six basic emotions—wonder, love, mild hatred, desire, joy, and sadness.

Derision or scorn is a sort of joy mingled with hatred, which proceeds from our perceiving some small evil in a person whom we consider to be deserving of it; we have hatred for this evil, we have joy in seeing it in him who is deserving of it; and when that comes upon us unexpectedly, the surprise of wonder is the cause of our bursting into laughter… And we notice that people with very obvious defects such as those who are lame, blind of an eye, hunched-backed, or who have received some public insult, are specially given to mockery; for, desiring to see all others held in as low estimation as themselves, they are truly rejoiced at the evils that befall them, and they hold them deserving of these art.

With these comments of Hobbes and Descartes, we have a sketchy psychological theory articulating the view of laughter that started in Plato and the Bible and dominated Western thinking about laughter for two millennia. In the 20 th century, this idea was called the Superiority Theory. Simply put, our laughter expresses feelings of superiority over other people or over a former state of ourselves. Feelings of superiority, Hutcheson argued, are neither necessary nor sufficient for laughter.

In laughing, we may not be comparing ourselves with anyone, as when we laugh at odd figures of speech like those in this poem about a sunrise:. If self-comparison and sudden glory are not necessary for laughter, neither are they sufficient for laughter. A gentleman riding in a coach who sees ragged beggars in the street, for example, will feel that he is better off than they, but such feelings are unlikely to amuse him.

To these counterexamples to the Superiority Theory we could add more. Sometimes we laugh when a comic character shows surprising skills that we lack. In the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, the hero is often trapped in a situation where he looks doomed. But then he escapes with a clever acrobatic stunt that we would not have thought of, much less been able to perform.

Laughing at such scenes does not seem to require that we compare ourselves with the hero; and if we do make such a comparison, we do not find ourselves superior. At least some people, too, laugh at themselves—not a former state of themselves, but what is happening now. If I search high and low for my eyeglasses only to find them on my head, the Superiority Theory seems unable to explain my laughter at myself. While these examples involve persons with whom we might compare ourselves, there are other cases of laughter where no personal comparisons seem involved.

In experiments by Lambert Deckers , subjects were asked to lift a series of apparently identical weights. The first several weights turned out to be identical, and that strengthened the expectation that the remaining weights would be the same.

But then subjects picked up a weight that was much heavier or lighter than the others. Further weakening the dominance of the Superiority Theory in the 18 th century were two new accounts of laughter which are now called the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory. Neither even mentions feelings of superiority.

The Relief Theory is an hydraulic explanation in which laughter does in the nervous system what a pressure-relief valve does in a steam boiler.

John Locke , Book 3, ch. The natural free spirits of ingenious men, if imprisoned or controlled, will find out other ways of motion to relieve themselves in their constraint; and whether it be in burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to vent themselves, and be revenged upon their constrainers. Over the next two centuries, as the nervous system came to be better understood, thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud revised the biology behind the Relief Theory but kept the idea that laughter relieves pent-up nervous energy.

When we are angry, for example, nervous energy produces small aggressive movements such as clenching our fists; and if the energy reaches a certain level, we attack the offending person. In fear, the energy produces small-scale movements in preparation for fleeing; and if the fear gets strong enough, we flee.

The movements associated with emotions, then, discharge or release the built-up nervous energy. Laughter releases nervous energy, too, Spencer says, but with this important difference: the muscular movements in laughter are not the early stages of larger practical actions such as attacking or fleeing.

Unlike emotions, laughter does not involve the motivation to do anything. The nervous energy relieved through laughter, according to Spencer, is the energy of emotions that have been found to be inappropriate. Reading the first three lines, we might feel pity for the bereaved nephew writing the poem. But the last line makes us reinterpret those lines. Far from being a loving nephew in mourning, he turns out to be an insensitive cheapskate. So the nervous energy of our pity, now superfluous, is released in laughter.

If still more energy needs to be relieved, it spills over to the muscles connected with breathing, and if the movements of those muscles do not release all the energy, the remainder moves the arms, legs, and other muscle groups In the 20 th century, John Dewey — had a similar version of the Relief Theory.

In der Witz , that superfluous energy is energy used to repress feelings; in the comic it is energy used to think, and in humor it is the energy of feeling emotions. Der Witz includes telling prepared fictional jokes, making spontaneous witty comments, and repartee. In der Witz , Freud says, the psychic energy released is the energy that would have repressed the emotions that are being expressed as the person laughs.

According to Freud, the emotions which are most repressed are sexual desire and hostility, and so most jokes and witty remarks are about sex, hostility, or both. In telling a sexual joke or listening to one, we bypass our internal censor and give vent to our libido.

In telling or listening to a joke that puts down an individual or group we dislike, similarly, we let out the hostility we usually repress. In both cases, the psychic energy normally used to do the repressing becomes superfluous, and is released in laughter. Here it is the energy normally devoted to thinking. An example is laughter at the clumsy actions of a clown. Our laughter at the clown is our venting of that surplus energy.

These two possibilities in my imagination amount to a comparison between the observed movement and my own. His example is a story told by Mark Twain in which his brother was building a road when a charge of dynamite went off prematurely, blowing him high into the sky. Having sketched several versions of the Relief Theory, we can note that today almost no scholar in philosophy or psychology explains laughter or humor as a process of releasing pent-up nervous energy.

There is, of course, a connection between laughter and the expenditure of energy. Hearty laughter involves many muscle groups and several areas of the nervous system.

Laughing hard gives our lungs a workout, too, as we take in far more oxygen than usual. But few contemporary scholars defend the claims of Spencer and Freud that the energy expended in laughter is the energy of feeling emotions, the energy of repressing emotions, or the energy of thinking, which have built up and require venting.

Funny things and situations may evoke emotions, but many seem not to. Consider P. These do not seem to vent emotions that had built up before we read them, and they do not seem to summon emotions and then render them superfluous.

So whatever energy is expended in laughing at them does not seem to be superfluous energy being vented. In fact, the whole hydraulic model of the nervous system on which the Relief Theory is based seems outdated. To that hydraulic model, Freud adds several questionable claims derived from his general psychoanalytic theory of the mind. He says that the creation of der Witz —jokes and witty comments—is an unconscious process of letting repressed thoughts and feelings into the conscious mind.

This claim seems falsified by professional humorists who approach the creation of jokes and cartoons with conscious strategies. If Freud is right that the energy released in laughing at a joke is the energy normally used to repress hostile and sexual feelings, then it seems that those who laugh hardest at aggressive and sexual jokes should be people who usually repress such feelings.

The difference between the two packets is surplus energy discharged in laughter. More generally, the Relief Theory is seldom used as a general explanation of laughter or humor. The second account of humor that arose in the 18 th century to challenge the Superiority Theory was the Incongruity Theory.

While the Superiority Theory says that the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority, and the Relief Theory says that it is the release of nervous energy, the Incongruity Theory says that it is the perception of something incongruous—something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. It is now the dominant theory of humor in philosophy and psychology.

Although Aristotle did not use the term incongruity , he hints that it is the basis for at least some humor. In the Rhetoric 3, 2 , a handbook for speakers, he says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create an expectation in the audience and then violate it.

Cicero, in On the Orator ch. This approach to joking is similar to techniques of stand-up comedians today. They speak of the set-up and the punch line. The set-up is the first part of the joke: it creates the expectation. The punch line is the last part that violates that expectation. The first philosopher to use the word incongruous to analyze humor was James Beattie Immanuel Kant [], First Part, sec. In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction.

Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.

An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. A joke amuses us by evoking, shifting, and dissipating our thoughts, but we do not learn anything through these mental gymnastics. In humor generally, according to Kant, our reason finds nothing of worth. The jostling of ideas, however, produces a physical jostling of our internal organs and we enjoy that physical stimulation.

For if we admit that with all our thoughts is harmonically combined a movement in the organs of the body, we will easily comprehend how to this sudden transposition of the mind, now to one now to another standpoint in order to contemplate its object, may correspond an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of our intestines which communicates itself to the diaphragm like that which ticklish people feel.

In connection with this the lungs expel the air at rapidly succeeding intervals, and thus bring about a movement beneficial to health; which alone, and not what precedes it in the mind, is the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at bottom represents nothing.

On this point, Kant compares the enjoyment of joking and wit to the enjoyment of games of chance and the enjoyment of music. Music and that which excites laughter are two different kinds of play with aesthetical ideas, or of representations of the understanding through which ultimately nothing is thought, which can give lively gratification merely by their changes. Thus we recognize pretty clearly that the animation in both cases is merely bodily, although it is excited by ideas of the mind; and that the feeling of health produced by a motion of the intestines corresponding to the play in question makes up that whole gratification of a gay party.

While Kant located the lack of fit in humor between our expectations and our experience, Schopenhauer locates it between our sense perceptions of things and our abstract rational knowledge of those same things. We perceive unique individual things with many properties. But when we group our sense perceptions under abstract concepts, we focus on just one or a few properties of any individual thing.

Thus we lump quite different things under one concept and one word. Think, for example, of a Chihuahua and a St. Bernard categorized under dog. For Schopenhauer, humor arises when we suddenly notice the incongruity between a concept and a perception that are supposed to be of the same thing. Many human actions can only be performed by the help of reason and deliberation, and yet there are some which are better performed without its assistance.

This very incongruity of sensuous and abstract knowledge, on account of which the latter always merely approximates to the former, as mosaic approximates to painting, is the cause of a very remarkable phenomenon which, like reason itself, is peculiar to human nature, and of which the explanations that have ever anew been attempted, as insufficient: I mean laughter….

As an example, Schopenhauer tells of the prison guards who allowed a convict to play cards with them, but when they caught him cheating, they kicked him out. He also comments on an Austrian joke the equivalent of a Polish joke in the U. Creating jokes like these requires the ability to think of an abstract idea under which very different things can be subsumed. With this theory of humor as based on the discrepancy between abstract ideas and real things, Schopenhauer explains the offensiveness of being laughed at, the kind of laughter at the heart of the Superiority Theory.

That the laughter of others at what we do or say seriously offends us so keenly depends on the fact that it asserts that there is a great incongruity between our conceptions and the objective realities. The laugh of scorn announces with triumph to the baffled adversary how incongruous were the conceptions he cherished with the reality which is now revealing itself to him Supplement to Book I, Ch.

In every suddenly appearing conflict between what is perceived and what is thought, what is perceived is always unquestionably right; for it is not subject to error at all, requires no confirmation from without, but answers for itself. For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which everything that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself.

It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended with no exertion. With thinking the opposite is the case: it is the second power of knowledge, the exercise of which always demands some, and often considerable exertion. Besides, it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness, they are the vehicles of our fears, our repentance, and all our cares.

It must therefore be diverting to us to see this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that of joy Supplement to Book I, Ch. Irony marks the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, while humor marks the boundary between the ethical and religious spheres.

The person with a religious view of life is likely to cultivate humor, he says, and Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history [JP], Entries — There was another here recently whom I had to send away without giving anything, too: we cannot give to everybody. The violation of our expectations is at the heart of the tragic as well as the comic, Kierkegaard says. The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction….

The comic apprehension evokes the contradiction or makes it manifest by having in mind the way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. The tragic apprehension sees the contradiction and despairs of a way out. Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps: for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles….

To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of the two! It is a tragedy or a comedy—sad or merry, as it happens…. Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before it has had time to reconcile its feelings to the change of circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere surprise or contrast in the absence of any more serious emotion , before it has time to reconcile its belief to contrary appearances Hazlitt [], 1.

If we are listening to a joke for the second time, of course, there is a sense in which we expect the incongruous punch line, but it still violates our ordinary expectations. Beyond that core meaning, various thinkers have added different details, many of which are incompatible with each other.

In contemporary psychology, for example, theorists such as Thomas Schultz and Jerry Suls , have claimed that what we enjoy in humor is not incongruity itself, but the resolution of incongruity. After age seven, Schultz says, we require the fitting of the apparently anomalous element into some conceptual schema. Got a guess? The word Humor, as defined by Random House Dictionary, means a comic, absurd, or incongruous quality causing amusement. Humor vs Comedy vs Jokes To better understand what is humor, lets look at two other words most people relate to humor — comedy and jokes.

The House of Random says Comedy is: any comic or humorous incident or series of incidents. So What is Humor? Humor and Laughter Many people assume that in order for something to be deemed humorous, it must evoke laughter. Humor At Work With our new understanding of humor, you start to see how easy it can be to bring it into the workplace and have some fun at work.

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