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Humour
Humour or Humor is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations
to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form
of entertainment or human communication which evokes 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 (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap,
metaphorically: flavour) 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 humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative
variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of
education, and context. For example, young children (of any background)
particularly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows. Satire
may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to
appeal to more mature audiences. Non-satirical humor can be specifically
termed "recreational drollery".[1][2]
Styles of humour
Verbal
* Black comedy
* Caustic humour
* Droll humour
* Deadpan
* Non-sequitur
* Obscenity
* Parody
* Mockery, such as the Darwin Awards
* Sarcasm
* Satire
* Self-irony / Self-deprecation
* Wit, as in many one-liner jokes
* Meta-humour
* Abuse
* Demented
* racial
Non-verbal
* Anti-humour
* Deadpan
* Form-versus-content humour
* Slapstick
* Surreal humour or absurdity
* Practical joke: luring someone into a humorous position or situation and
then laughing at their expense
Techniques for composing humour
Humour is a branch of rhetoric, there are about 200 tropes that can be used
to make jokes.
Verbal
* Figure of speech
o Humorous triple and paraprosdokian
o Enthymeme
o Syllepsis (zeugma)
o Hyperbole
o Understatement
* Inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in the language
of delivery
* Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial and a
concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
* Joke
o Adages, often in the form of paradox "laws" of nature, such as Murphy's
law or lemon law
o Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, viola
jokes.
o Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally
cruel scenarios. Soldiers in the field of battle often use 'trench humour'
to keep morale up in appalling circumstances.
* Riddle
* Word play
o Oxymoron
o Pun
Non-verbal
* Bathos
o Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
* Character driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific
situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and
Curb Your Enthusiasm.
* Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water"
* Comic sounds
* 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)
* Funny pictures: Photos or drawings/caricatures that are intentionally or
unintentionally humorous.
* Sight gags
* Visual humour: Similar to the sight gag, but encompassing narrative in
theatre or comics, or on film or video.
Understanding humour
Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. 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." However, attempts to do just that have been made.
The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy, referred to the
interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is
often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective
from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse
of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.
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 emotions such as 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 one explanation
why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.
Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected, often
sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object of this
perspective twist. This, however, does not explain why people being
humiliated and verbally abused, without it being unexpected or a shift in
perspective, is considered funny - ref. "The Office".
Another explanation is that the essence of humour lies in two ingredients;
the relevance factor and the surprise factor. First, something familiar (or
relevant) to the audience is presented. (However, the relevant situation may
be so familiar to the audience that it doesn't always have to be presented,
as occurs in absurd humour, for example). From there, they may think they
know the natural follow-through thoughts or conclusion. The next principal
ingredient is the presentation of something different from the audience's
expectations, or else the natural result of interpreting the original
situation in a different, less common way (see twist or surprise factor).
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!" ”
The Simpsons is noted for using this technique many times to evoke humour.
Former show runner David Mirkin often refers to it as the
“screw-you-audience” joke. A prime example is in the episode "And Maggie
Makes Three", wherein Patty and Selma are about to expose the secret of
Marge's pregnancy:
Selma: (Looking at the very beginning of the phonebook) "Hi Mr. Aaronson,
I'd like to inform you that Marge Simpson is pregnant."
Selma: (Looking exhausted at the very end of the phonebook) "Just thought
you'd like to know, Mr. Zackowski. There! Aaronson and Zackowski are the
town's biggest gossips. Within an hour, everyone will know.
Both explanations can be put under the general heading of "failed
expectations". In language, or a situation with a relevance factor, or even
a sublime setting, an audience has a certain expectation. If these
expectations fail in a way that has some credulity, humour results. It has
been postulated that the laughter/feel good element of humour is a
biological function that helps one deal with the new, expanded point of
view: a lawyer thinks differently than a priest or rabbi (below), a banana
peel on the floor could be dangerous. This is why some link of credulity is
important rather than any random line being a punchline.
For this reason, 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. Example of a variation:
“ A gardener, an architect, and a lawyer are discussing which of their
vocations is the most ancient. The gardener comments, "My vocation goes back
to the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam to tend the garden." The architect
comments, "My vocation goes back to the creation, when God created the world
itself from primordial chaos." They both look curiously at the lawyer, who
asks, "And who do you think created the primordial chaos?" ”
Knowing a punch line in advance, or some situation which would spoil the
delivery of the punchline, can destroy the surprise factor, and in turn
destroy the entertainment value or amusement the joke may have otherwise
provided. Conversely, a person previously holding the same unexpected
conclusions or secret perspectives as a comedian could derive amusement from
hearing those same thoughts expressed and elaborated. That there is
commonality, unity of thought, and an ability to openly analyse and express
these (where secrecy and inhibited exploration was previously thought
necessary) can be both the relevance and the surprise factors in these
situations. This phenomenon explains much of the success of comedians who
deal with same-gender and same-culture audiences on gender conflicts and
cultural topics, respectively.
Notable studies of humour have come from the pens of Aristotle in The
Poetics (Part V) and of Schopenhauer.
There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of humour, irony,
parody and pretence. Prominent theoreticians in this field include Raymond
Gibbs, Herbert Clark, Michael Billig, Willibald Ruch, Victor Raskin, Eliot
Oring, and Salvatore Attardo. Although many writers have emphasised the
positive or cathartic effects of humour some, notably Billig, have
emphasised the potential of humour for cruelty and its involvement with
social control and regulation.
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.
Approaches to a general theory of humour have generally referred to analogy
or some kind of analogical process of mapping structure from one domain of
experience onto another. An early precursor of this approach would be Arthur
Koestler, who identified humour as one of three areas of human creativity
(science and art being the other two) that use structure mapping (then
termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings[3]. Tony Veale,
who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did,
has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour[4][5][6], using
inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of
structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual
metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual
blending.
Humour evolution
As any form of art, humour techniques evolve through time. Perception of
humour varies greatly among social demographics and indeed from person to
person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of entertainment
all over the world, whether in the courts of the kings or the villages of
the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be
displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.18th-century German author Georg
Lichtenberg said that "the more you know humour, the more you become
demanding in fineness."
Humour formulae
Root components:
* some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
* appealing to feelings or to emotions.
* similar to reality, but not real
Methods:
* metaphor
* hyperbole
* reframing
* timing
Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture in the documentary Funny
Business".[7], that an object or a person can become funny in three
different ways. They are:
* By being in an unusual place
* By behaving in an unusual way
* By being the wrong size
Most sight gags fit into one or more of these categories.
Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life.
Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are
hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing.
Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous
figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all
questions with a laugh.
References
1. ^ Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT
2003 p.13
2. ^ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World [1941, 1965]. Trans. Hélène
Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press p.12
3. ^ Koestler, Arthur (1964): "The Act of Creation".
4. ^ Veale, Tony (2003): "Metaphor and Metonymy: The Cognitive Trump-Cards
of Linguistic Humor"[1]
5. ^ Veale, Tony (2006): "The Cognitive Mechanisms of Adversarial Humor"[2]
6. ^ Veale, Tony (2004): "Incongruity in Humour: Root Cause of Epiphenomonon?"[3]
7. ^ Rowan Atkinson/David Hinton, Funny Business (tv series), Episode 1 -
aired 22 November 1992, UK, Tiger Television Productions
Literature
* Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D., Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. Humor
modulates the mesolimbic reward centers. Neuron, 40, 1041 - 1048, (2003).
* Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and ridicule: Towards a social critique of
humour. London: Sage.
* Daniele Luttazzi, Introduction to his Italian translation of Woody Allen's
trilogy Side Effects, Without Feathers and Getting Even (Bompiani, 2004,
ISBN 88-452-3304-9 (57-65).
* Victoria Reifler Bricker The Function of Humor in Zinacantan Journal of
Anthropological Research, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 411-418
* Goldstein, Jeffrey H., et al. "Humour, Laughter, and Comedy: A
Bibliography of Empirical and Nonempirical Analyses in the English
Language." It's a Funny Thing, Humour. Ed. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C.
Foot. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1976. 469-504.
* Holland, Norman. "Bibliography of Theories of Humor." Laughing; A
Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1982. 209-223.
* Martin, Rod A. (2007). The Psychology Of Humour: An Integrative Approach.
London, UK: Elsevier Academic Press. ISBN 13: 978-0-12-372564-6
* McGhee, Paul E. "Current American Psychological Research on Humor."
Jahrbuche fur Internationale Germanistik 16.2 (1984): 37-57.
* Mintz, Lawrence E. Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and
Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988.
* Pogel, Nancy, and Paul P. Somers Jr. "Literary Humor." Humor in America: A
Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Ed. Lawrence E. Mintz. London:
Greenwood, 1988. 1-34.
* Nilsen, Don L. F. "Satire in American Literature." Humor in American
Literature. New York: Garland, 1992. 543-48.
* Roth, G., Yap, R, & Short, D. (2006). Examining humour in HRD from
theoretical and practical perspectives. Human Resource Development
International, 9(1), 121-127.
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