A theory of humour: part 1
NB: I should probably note that a lot of what I'm going to be writing in this series was formulated during long chats with my Skype group. If this was a paper I would totally list them in my acknowledgements.
I feel like procrastinating, so this is as good a time as any to start writing some of my half-assed research up. My plan of attack: Part 1 will cover the types of phenomena a good theory of humour would need to cover. Parts 2-5 (+/- 2) will cover current theories of humour and examine how well they account for different categories of humour. Subsequent parts will try to pull in other cogsci research and personal observations to make sense of it all. And I don't have a grand conclusion that I'm leading up to :)
Categories of humour that any model would need to account for:
* Ingroup humour.: jokes that aren't actually funny (assuming they ever were) but which people in your social circle use and which you and your friends use and laugh at anyway. (your mother and that's what she said tend to fall into this category)
* Obscure humour: the relatively well-known phenomenon where the more obscure the knowledge required to understand the joke, the more likely you are to find it hilarious
* Status effects on humour: you laugh more at jokes made by people who you consider to be higher status than you, and less at jokes made by people who are lower status
* Seeing/hearing other people laugh makes things funnier.
* Parodies and other heavily derivative humour are much funnier than you would reasonably expect.
* Jokes where the humour comes due to the unexpectedness of the punchline (absurdist humour falls under this a lot of the time)
* Jokes that are still funny or even funnier when you know the punchline in advance ("the Hammer is my penis"). At the extreme end of this are jokes that start out not-funny or marginally funny and become hilarious through repetition. (can't think of any examples of this at the moment)
* Puns and other wordplay
* Slapstick and other visual humour
* Mean humour (It's always sunny in Philadelphia is good for this. I can't stand it because the characters are all dicks but I know lots of people who love it)
* Toilet humour and other humour that derives from inappropriateness and taboo topics
* Humour that consists of saying things that are obviously false or unhelpful. This includes sarcasm, but there are also lots of instances of this that lack the connotations of sarcasm. (Example: one of my fellow grad students saying that preservatives are healthy and make you live longer, that's why they're called preservatives).
So, what have I missed?
I feel like procrastinating, so this is as good a time as any to start writing some of my half-assed research up. My plan of attack: Part 1 will cover the types of phenomena a good theory of humour would need to cover. Parts 2-5 (+/- 2) will cover current theories of humour and examine how well they account for different categories of humour. Subsequent parts will try to pull in other cogsci research and personal observations to make sense of it all. And I don't have a grand conclusion that I'm leading up to :)
Categories of humour that any model would need to account for:
* Ingroup humour.: jokes that aren't actually funny (assuming they ever were) but which people in your social circle use and which you and your friends use and laugh at anyway. (your mother and that's what she said tend to fall into this category)
* Obscure humour: the relatively well-known phenomenon where the more obscure the knowledge required to understand the joke, the more likely you are to find it hilarious
* Status effects on humour: you laugh more at jokes made by people who you consider to be higher status than you, and less at jokes made by people who are lower status
* Seeing/hearing other people laugh makes things funnier.
* Parodies and other heavily derivative humour are much funnier than you would reasonably expect.
* Jokes where the humour comes due to the unexpectedness of the punchline (absurdist humour falls under this a lot of the time)
* Jokes that are still funny or even funnier when you know the punchline in advance ("the Hammer is my penis"). At the extreme end of this are jokes that start out not-funny or marginally funny and become hilarious through repetition. (can't think of any examples of this at the moment)
* Puns and other wordplay
* Slapstick and other visual humour
* Mean humour (It's always sunny in Philadelphia is good for this. I can't stand it because the characters are all dicks but I know lots of people who love it)
* Toilet humour and other humour that derives from inappropriateness and taboo topics
* Humour that consists of saying things that are obviously false or unhelpful. This includes sarcasm, but there are also lots of instances of this that lack the connotations of sarcasm. (Example: one of my fellow grad students saying that preservatives are healthy and make you live longer, that's why they're called preservatives).
So, what have I missed?