Ambivalence Theory

‘According to this concept of humour, our laughter is the symptom of an internal battle between opposing emotions. In 1653 Louis Joubert sowed the seeds of this theory when he proposed that comic laughter is an emotion located in the heart. When we experience a conflict between joy and sadness, the heart shakes the diaphragm, resulting in laughter.

A century or so later James Beattie wrote that laughter is evoked by ‘an opposition of suitableness and unsuitableness.’ William Hazlitt also contributed to this school of thought, noting in 1819 that ‘the jostling of one feeling against another’ was an essential element of the comical.

In recent years the platform for this debate has been increasingly philosophical rather than psychological – less emphasis on shaky diaphragms and even shakier anatomical knowledge – but for all these theorists, laughter is an outward sign of an inward conflict.

Psychologist J. Y. T. Greig asserts that all humour is based on a conflict between love and fear, while George Milner suggests that the clash between culture and nature is to blame. [...]

“Cleanliness is next to impossible.”
- Audrey Austin

According to ambivalence theorists, laughter is essentially a wobble of uncertainty – even, perhaps, a snort of embarrassment, of not knowing how to react.

It’s a nice theory, but its a bit sweeping. For a start, not every ‘jostling of one feeling against another’ results in humour – far from it. Ambivalence about such existential oppositions as love and fear is more likely to result in uncertainty, brow-furrowing, and panic attacks, even though joking about it might help to diminish the angst. You could also argue that the tension between nature and culture defines the human condition, and just the psychology of humour.

As human beings, we are essentially apes aspiring to the condition of angels. The results of this struggle seldom rise above the farcical. So, in effect, all the ambivalence theory tells us is what we think, therefore we laugh.’

- Carr J., Greeves L. 2006. The Naked Jape – Uncovering The Hidden World Of Jokes London, Great Britain: Penguin Books (2007) p. 94-95

Incongruity Theory

‘The incongruity theory was described rather badly by Immanuel Kant in 1790 when he said that laughter ‘is an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing’. His grouchy compatriot Schopenhauer later elaborated on this, defining humour as ‘the incongruity between a concept and the real object to which it was to relate’. And what hilarious gag did Arthur Schopenhauer put forward to support his theory? ‘… for example, the amusing look of the angle formed by the meeting of the tangent and the curve of the circle’. Yes, Frankfurt positively rocked with laughter in the 1840s – the golden age of German comedy.

“Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
- George Burns

The set-up of a joke creates a scenario with an assumed conclusion; the punchline provides quite a different conclusion, which subverts your previously held assumptions about the joke scenario. [...] For example:

How do you make a dog drink?
Put him in a blender.

[...] It’s not just the words that make the joke work. The best jokes use language with skill and economy to conjure up mental pictures which are hilarious by virtue of their incongruity, shock value, or just sheer silliness. Here’s a lovely one:

Two monkeys are having a bath. One of them turns to the other and says, ‘Oo oo ah ah!’ The other replies, ‘Well, put the cold tap on, then.’

It’s clear that even the shortest one-liner can be prodded and poked and analysed until an inch of its life [...].’

- Carr J., Greeves L. 2006. The Naked Jape – Uncovering The Hidden World Of Jokes London, Great Britain: Penguin Books (2007) p. 92-93

Superiority Theory

‘The superiority theory implies that the point of joking is to feel better about our sorry selves by mocking people or situations we find ridiculous. This is probably the oldest attempt to explain what’s going on when we tell jokes, dating back at least as far as Aristotle, who called humour ‘educated insolence’.

Seventeenth century stand-up Thomas Hobbes thought that laughter was ‘nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others’. Later refinements of the theory suggest that we also gain some psychological comfort from laughing at people who we purport to be ridiculous, but secretly hate and fear.

The superiority idea was revisited by Henri Bergson in his famous 1900 essay ‘Laughter and the meaning of the Comic’. He thought that in making a joke or at laughing at one we are experiencing a spontaneous failure of empathy: the situations which strike us as comic are those that enable us to see a human being as somehow mechanical, as less than human. For Bergson, joking had a social purpose: to ridicule eccentricity, thus brushing aside any untidy idiosyncrasies and weaknesses which might otherwise constitute triphazards on the pathway of society.

More recently, Charles R. Gruner has developed a new superiority theory which reads joking as a playful game, but one with clear winners and losers. Finding the winner and loser isn’t always simple. Often, the joke-teller ‘wins’ and the audience ‘loses’ – for example, in the case of a riddle where the teller’s intention is to leave his audience stumped. Even simple puns can be seen as expressions of superiority according to this reading, since the punner intends to prove himself intellectually superior to his audience.

“I used to think that the brain was the greatest organ in human body, then I realized ‘Hey! Look what’s telling me that!’”
- Emo Philips

Other jokes have a clearer butt – an Irishman, a lawyer or some other hapless (deserving?) victim – and joke-teller and audience both ‘win’ at the expense of the character in the joke.’

“You cannot have everything. I mean, where would you put it?”
- Steve Wright

- Carr J., Greeves L. 2006. The Naked Jape – Uncovering The Hidden World Of Jokes London, Great Britain: Penguin Books (2007) p. 89-90

On The Internet

“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”

- Robert Wilensky

On Interpretations

“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.”

- George Bernard Shaw

On Fake Religious Prosecution

“You have confused a war on your religion with not always getting everything you want. It’s called being part of a society; not everything goes your way. You know, I don’t let my kids eat icecream every night – they wish I did, but even they know that doesn’t make me the Hitler of icecream.”

- Jon Stewart

Lawn Mower Irony

“I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawn mower.”

- Mikhail Kalashnikov

On Questionnaires

‘Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?’

- Currently, one of the questions on document I-94W of the Visa Waiver Program for people visiting the United States of America.

How Does God Work?

“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness.”

- Emo Philips