What makes something humorous?
I realize that sometimes, humor is cruelty e.g.: laughing at people you dislike because something unfortunate happened to them. This is not the type of humor I mean. There is also another type of humor which is just a way of spitting on people like when I was told that the reason Jews have big noses it to better smell money. I am also not talking about bathroom humor where some people laugh because of embarrassment or discomfort more than anything else. I am not interested in learning more about those types of humor unless they really do contain lessons for humor in general.
I realize that there may be many more types of humor. I would like to identify them and detail how and why they work.
Here’s a few starting points:
Comedian Jimmy Carr said that humor comes down to:
Noticing something that is incongruous. The ah-ha! moment of a joke is similar to the ah-ha! moment of having an idea.
Humor rewards noticing difference and linguistic ability. Those are the two things that lead our evolution.
Humor also works when you reverse expectations.
Chessic sense once said about memes and humor:
"Anyway, here’s the thing about memes: They’re never funny on their own. The amusement value is how well the meme is applied to a seemingly unrelated topics. They’re funny when used in a way that makes you go “Oh! I didn’t see that coming. But now that you point it out, I see the relationship. You’re clever for having noticed it, and that amuses me.”
For example, if someone’s puzzling over a math problem and goes “This is hard.” and someone goes “That’s what she said,” it’s not funny. It’s too obvious. Too easy. ‘Hard’ is just too directly related to sex to make it funny. But if you’re packing up your car for a move and you say “I think it we turn the mattress this way, you might be able to fit it in better,” then “That’s what she said” becomes funny because the phrase is long and complicated, which at first seems unlikely to relate to sex.
So back to “Arrow in the knee”. The thing is, you can easily relate that to so many things and they don’t really have anything to do with arrows and knees. “I used to go to college, but then I took an arrow to the knee.” College and arrows are unrelated. The only thing tying the phrase and meme together is “I used to”. But if you were to say “I used to be the archery captain at my college, but then I took an arrow to the knee,” it’s funny because it’s more directly related."
I notice that humor often crops up when something is congruous, expected and logical when seen from one perspective but not from another. The mindfuck of integrating the perspective where it makes sense and the perspective where it doesn’t make sense is what creates humor.
For example, in bar school I had to act the role of an employer sitting down for a legal settlement negotiation with an employee who had left the company because of the way she said the employer had treated her. As the employer, I was supposed to be dead set against her coming back to the company and the employee was supposed to be in favor of coming back. So I started telling her “With all that I’ve done to you, how can you possibly want to come back to the company, it just wouldn’t be possible!” The audience found that very funny (you had to be there) because on the one hand, it didn’t make sense at all and was completely unexpected for an employer to highlight that he’d mistreated his employee. On the other hand, it made perfect to use that argument because if the employer had been an utter bastard to her to the point where she couldn’t work there anymore (like she alleged), then she shouldn’t come back.
Do you agree with this? Are there other elements which help something be humorous? Are there more types of humor I haven’t described and how do they work?
