A theory of humour: addendum to part 2
It occurs to me that I may have misrepresented part of the status/signalling/superiority theory of humour, in that I focussed on why you would tell jokes but only very briefly mentioned why it is that we might find things funny even when they have no obvious author. So just to make things clear: another way to state the status/superiority theory of humour is that people find it funny when they recognise their superiority over someone else, and this can include your past self. But all the other points still hold: not all humour can be explained in terms of status (eg. nonsequitur, some forms of wordplay), and it doesn't do a good job of explaining why we find the things funny that we do