It has generally been accepted that amongst the Great Apes (including Homo Sapiens
[Nelson Muntz]
Ha-Ha!
[/Nelson Muntz]
Most knock-knock jokes and puns aren’t mean, and that’s why they’re usually not funny.
I had some esoteric post about meanness and teeth and all that, but this pretty much does it.
This leads nicely to one possible answer: “humor of recognition.” Hanna-Barbera specialized in it for years. Nearly all of their characters have a signature phrase – Yabba Dabba Doo, Rats Right, Reorge, I Hates Meeses to Pieces – that we take a (childish) delight in recognizing. It’s a little like playing peekaboo.
(I don’t know if the sensation we get from this kind of recognition can properly be called “humor,” but it is, at least, close to it.)
(Here on the SDMB, we play a similar game, by citing relatively obscure quotes from movies or books, to see who recognizes them. Say goodnight, Gracie.)
Puns aren’t about pain?
I haven’t met a punster yet who’s enjoyment of a pun did not increase in direct proportion to how loudly people groaned at it.
Puns aren’t humor. They’re assault.
As has been noted, there are forms of humor that don’t depend on pain and suffering. A lot of humor overlaps categories, but I’d say that wordplay (puns, double entendres, etc.), exaggeration, observational humor, the unexpected/surprise, and sheer silliness are all types of humor that don’t necessarily involve pain, suffering, or meanness.
And the humor that does depend on pain and suffering is only funny if it doesn’t involve real pain and suffering, if you know what I mean. It’s funny when a cartoon character falls off a cliff or gets shot in the face despite, or probably because of, the fact that it’s really only their dignity that suffers. In fact, I suspect that the tension-and-release between “something awful happened to them” and “but they’re okay” is part of why we laugh at such things.
There’s a lot of wordplay humor that’s not mean at all – and there is a lot of wordplay besides puns.*
There’s also movement humor that one of my professors called “Grace” – where things move and come together in a calculated motion that givers the sense of being purely coincidental to achieve a constructive end. Sometimes it edges toward “meanness”, because a person just escapes being hurt, but not all “grace” requires this element of avoided danger. You can see a lot of this ion Buster Keaton’s silent comedies.
These are the kinds of things that sprang to mind the first time I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and got to the part where Valentine Michael Smith asserts that ALL humor is based on hurting. It ain’t so.**
- examples – Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine; Monty Python’s “THe Argument Clinic”
** (And if you stoop to claiming that one person in either of the verbal examples I give is trying to somehow “hurt” the other, all I can say is that you’re working to make it seem that way.)
“Rice is great when you are hungry and want 2000 of something.”
– Mitch Hedberg, mean bastard
Readers Digest, many years ago, had an example that points to this. Seems a rich tycoon had gathered together all the men whom he had ruined in business. He invited them to his great mansion, for dinner. Most of them had little choice to come; they needed the food. So they, in their rags, stared up at the landing where the great tycoon made his appearance.
He approached the vast, wide, marble stairway. Everyone glared up at him in hatred. He came to the first stair…and slipped. He fell flat on his immense overstuffed butt. His eyes went wide in surprise. He tumbled, and fell, and rolled, and flopped, all the way down the stairs, until he came to rest on the floor.
Dead.
“If you can tell,” R.D. asked, “at exactly which step in his descent that this story stopped being funny, you will know what humor truly is.”
“People either loved us or they hated us, or they thought we were okay.”
– Mitch Hedberg
Or farts, which are sometimes neither painful nor discomfiting.
It being the Reader’s Digest, I suppose “at no point did it stop being funny” isn’t the right answer.
“Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.” ― Mel Brooks.
There’s gallows humor, cringe comedy, and uncomfortable subjects like sex, drugs, and death that don’t have to involve making fun of anyone in particular, it can actually be an appeal to empathy. Better to laugh than cry.
There’s a huge slice of the humor spectrum I don’t think has a name and I don’t see people talk about it much – cuteness. If something is cute enough it becomes funny. People don’t watch cute animal vids stone faced. They laugh and snort and lose their shit. Ditto irl. Kittens and puppies make even bitter cynics smile. Same thing with zoos when they have the animals performing tricks and routines. Applies to cartoons too, where a character just walking around in a weird or cute way or making a certain facial expression can be funny all on its own. There are popular cartoon series where I think this might be one of the main appeals.
As a specific example, Despicable Me. Lots of making fun of people and weird situations, but the most popular laugh is the over the top cute “it’s so fluffy I’m gonna die!” scene, which isn’t even really a joke. One clip of it on youtube has almost 10 million hits.
In visual mediums in general you can get a laugh just by using contrasts or the unexpected. I guess for the fluffy scene you could say it’s making fun of Gru’s beaten down personality by contrasting it with the little girls’ over the top enthusiasm, but that’s a bit of a stretch to call it mean.
There’s also funny voices. Hard to pull off though. I think Zoidberg reading the phone book would be funny.
The foolishness of the statement is part of what makes it funny, hence there’s meanness here too. (I qualify what I just said by stipulating that I don’t think “meanness” is exactly the right word, as what the OP is discussing can manifest itself as pity and sympathy, which isn’t mean in the usual sense.)
Bill Cosby, Himself, is the show where he tells the Jeffery story, isn’t it? And also the story of his wife in natural childbirth? And how his daughters are planning on killing his son because he doesn’t lift the toilet seat when he goes the bathroom? And how, in order to get his kids to bed, he and his wife are forced to rely on nightly beatings? And the agony he’s in when he goes to the dentist?
No, there’s no humor based on pain or suffering in Bill Cosby, Himself.
One of the most famous statements about comedy, and one that I couldn’t help thinking of as I read this thread. And, thinking about it, I realize it has more than one lesson to teach. Yes, it says something about the nature of comedy; but when you think about why the statement itself is funny, you realize it’s not just the hostility (which is, indeed, an element of it), but also the exaggeration, the over-the-top-ness, the unequal juxtaposition. If you took Mel’s statement completely literally and at face value, it would be neither true nor funny.
This probably won’t win me any friends, but:
I had an English teacher in high school who told us something like this; Comedy, like all other literature (just go with me on this) is based on conflict. Anything humorous is basically a short story–sometimes a very short, short story–and a story needs a protagonist, an antagonist and conflict. Sometimes the pro-/antagonist is YOU, and sometimes you’re not aware of that until the story’s over. Laughter is a release of tension, just as a scream is a release of tension in a horror film. If you don’t laugh at a joke, no matter what the other reasons, it’s because the tension was not released. (Numerous boring–at the time–examples followed; insert your own).
I could spend several hours deconstructing more in this vein, but you’re all pretty sharp individuals and will fill in the blanks, as needed. But you can probably see where “conflict” = “meanness.”
At this point the class yelled, en masse, Just turn on Blazing Saddles, will ya?
I apologize for the lecture. 
Why apologize? That’s the cure for a lot of things.
I disagree – most “cute” humor is rooted in meanness. Exhibit A.