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Humour

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Humour or humor (see spelling differences) is the ability of people, objects, situations or words to evoke feelings of amusement or happiness in people.

The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavour) controlled human health and emotion.

A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, although the extent to which an individual will find something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence, and context. For example, young children may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons (e.g. Tom and Jerry). Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery".

Theories of humor

Modern theory of humor is a multidisciplinary effort combining the insights of humor theorists from various fields including especially philosophers, psychologists, and linguists.

Understanding humour

Humour can occur when an alternative or surprising shift in perception or answer is given, that still shows relevance and can explain a situation.
Humour can occur when we laugh at something that points out another's errors, lack of intelligence or unfortunate circumstances, granting a sense of superiority.
Humour can occur when sudden relief occurs from a tense situation "humourific" as formerly applied in comedy referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.

Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the break of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter.. Irony is explicitly this form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms relating to physicality and plays with them. In other words, comedy can be a sign of a 'bug' in the symbolic make-up of language, as well as a self-correcting mechanism for such bugs. Once the problem in meaning has been described through a joke, people immediately begin correcting their impressions of the symbols that have been mocked. This is one explanation why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.

Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist. This, however is in the areas of human creativity (science and art being the other two) that use structure mapping (then termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings. He argues that humour results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.

Tony Veale, who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did, has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour, using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual blending.

Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author F. B. White once said that "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

Evolution of humour

As with any form of art, the same goes for humour, acceptance depends on social demographics and varies from person to person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of entertainment all over the world, whether in the courts of the Western kings or the villages of the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.18th-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that "the more you know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness."

Evolution and humour

Sight gags and language-based humour activate the two regions in the human brain known to have von Economo neurons, a specialization in neuron form that has evolved in the last 15 million years. This suggests that humour may have coevolved with the ability of great apes and humans to navigate through a shifting and complex social space.

Humour formulae

Root components:

some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
appealing to feelings or to emotions.
similar to reality, but not real

Methods:

Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture in the documentary Funny Business"., that an object or a person can become funny in three different ways. They are:

By being in an unusual place
By behaving in an unusual way
By being the wrong size

Most sight gags fit into one or more of these categories.

Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life. Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing. Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all questions with a laugh.

References

Peter Balow