ok, semester is over and obviously the humour series sort of got away from me. So instead of trying to continue it in detail, I'll offer a summary of the key points ( Read more... )

(preamble: anyone who's a regular reader of LW can safely skip this post, it's nothing that hasn't been covered there a few hundred times ( Read more... )

Benign violation (BV) theory

There isn't actually that much to say here that doesn't properly fit into either IR theory or status/superiority theory, but here goes.

The central premise of benign violation theory is that humour exists in the violation of social norms as long as there's no real harm in it. The main point in favour of it is ( Read more... )

Incongruity resolution (IR) theory

The central idea of incongruity resolution theory is that when we have an expectation that is suddenly resolved, we find it funny. IR theory comes in many different flavours: Kant claimed humour is when we have 'strained expectations that come to nothing", other modern researchers have claimed that it's ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

All the theories of humour I've seen can be described as falling into one of  4 categories:

1. Status/signalling
2. Incongruity/unexpectedness
3. Norm violation (has overlap with both the previous categories but has been advanced in enough different forms to deserve its own category)
4. Humour/laughter is a defense mechanism against negative emotions

I ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )