Psychology of Humor, Test 1

Humor Process

1. stimulus event — something happens

2. cognitive perceptual process — you have to understand what happened

3. emotional response — you feel amused, shocked, embarrassed, or offended depending on the type of humor used

4. expression of response — physical reaction to the event (usually laughter)

Types of Humor

1. performance humor — created with the goal to make you laugh (staged)

2. jokes — has a set-up and a subsequent punchline

3. wit — spontaneous conversation humor (e.g. anecdotes, wordplay, satire, self-deprecation)

   • about 70% of humor falls into this category

4. unintentional humor — you don’t mean for what happened to be funny

History of Humor

Humorem means fluid in Greek. If your body fluids weren’t right, then people would say you were in “bad humor” which usually referred to mentally illness. A “humorist” was someone who acted odd and was viewed as an object of laughter. “Men of humor” would follow the humorist around and imitate them which ilicited laughter from observers.

What do Classic Theories of Humor have in common?

They focus on the motivation for and function of humor in our everyday lives, but they don’t look at the mechanisms of the stimuli

• Relief theories, superiority theories, and incongruity theory

Arousal Theories

• Humor is a mechanism that allows you to release your sense of arousal and come down to a more comfortable state

• Hydraulic Theory of Nervous Energy and Berlyne’s Modern Arousal Theory

Hydraulic Theory of Nervous Energy

• We hold nervous energy inside and need to expel it

• This explains why we laugh at things that are stressful even though we aren’t amused

• The expulsion could be as simple as tension building during the set-up of a joke and then we laugh in relief that we understand the joke

Berlyne’s Modern Arousal Theory

• Humor contains collative variables that arouse people and require them to think about different elements at the same time

• Inverted U relationship between psychological arousal and pleasure

  • Greatest pleasure occurs with moderate amount of arousal, but most studies actually support a linear relationship between arousal and pleasure

• Arousal boost — arousal elevated by means of the collative variables which causes pleasure to an optimal level

• Arousal jag — decrease in pleasure when arousal has been elevated beyond the optimal level

• Laughter is not an energy release, but is a pleasurable result from being aroused to the optimal level

Collative Variables

Surprise, redundancy, complexity, incongruity, novelty, etc.

Psychoanalytical Approach

• Humor is a safe way to release repressed sexual and aggressive urges and is a defense mechanism

• See Freud cards for more details

Assumptions of Freud’s Approach

1. psychic determinism — nothing happens by chance, so every joke, slip of the tongue means something

2. influence of the unconscious mind — we have a lot of unconscious feelings that we can’t verbalize because we aren’t aware of them, and they sometimes slip out

3. personality is a dynamic but closed system — energy can shift from one part of your personality to another, but we cannot take in anything new or give it out

Freud’s Structures of the Psyche

1. Id — the core of personality, urges, and desires

2. Ego — the master of reality that determines how to get your urges in a socially acceptable way

3. Superego — conscience (suppresses urges of the Id that are morally unacceptable)

Freud’s Laughter-Related Phenomena

1. Jokes/wit

   • Tendentious — relating to sexual, aggressive desires or other dark impulse that is not socially acceptable

   • Non-tendentious (jokework) — cleverness of the joke allows you to laugh at the dark impulse without realizing how dark it is

2. Humor — defense mechanism (being able to laugh at benign misfortunes) to make you feel better about yourself

3. Comic — non-verbal aspect of humor (ex. slipping on a banana peel)

Superiority Theories

• Others’ misfortunes make us feel superior to them and look better in comparison (“sudden glory”)

• No one wants to be laughed at, so humor is a form of social control

• Humor is like a game because the swift conclusion is victory for the winner and defeat for the loser

Incongruity Theory

• Things that are incongruous, surprising, or unusual are funny if they are resolved by the listener

Process:

• Detect incongruity: story set-up, listener predicts outcome, if the outcome is a surprise then there is incongruity (if this is lacking then it’s not funny)

• Resolution of incongruity: listener finds a rule to make the ending follow from the preceding material (if the rule isn’t found then it’s not funny)

Note: incongruity is not sufficient to make something funny

Typical Superiority Theories

Affiliations — objects and relationships that are extensions of oneself

Identification Classes and Reference Groups — groups to which you psychologically identify with and aspire to be like

General theory: People find more humor in things that disparage the groups that they are not affiliated with

Dispositional Theory

• The more intense the negative disposition toward the disparaged agent, the greater the magnitude of the humor response and vice-versa

• The more intense the positive disposition toward the disparaging agent, the greater the magnitude of humor response and vice-versa

Dispositional Theory vs. Affiliation/Reference/Identification Theories

• Dispositional doesn’t rely on dichotomous group identification of others (it’s just about how you feel towards the other person)

• Dispositional address how you feel towards both the person being disparaged and the disparaging agent

• Dispositional uses a spectrum of feeling while the other theories focus only on the presence of positive disposition towards the group

Contemporary Theories

• focused on explaining the cognition of humor but still includes elements of motivation (e.g. how you want to feel)

  • more comprehensive than classic theories (which only try to explain one aspect of humor)

Reversal Theory

Humor is a form of play for adults → things are funny because we know it’s meant to be entertaining

• paratelic state — playful state of mind where a high state of arousal is pleasurable

• telic state — goal and future-oriented where high state of arousal is unpleasant

• synergy — energy you get from holding two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time

To enjoy humor, we need to be in a paratelic state. We switch between the two states throughout the day, but environmental cues can help us enter a paratelic state. In this state, synergy is fun and enjoyable and increases your feelings of arousal.

How does Reversal Theory differ from Incongruity Theory?

• Reversal Theory’s idea of synergy says that we need to hold the incongruous ideas in our mind simultaneously while Incongruity Theory says that we have to resolve the incongruity to find something funny

• Reversal Theory also diminishes the first interpretation via the second one which Incongruity Theory doesn’t necessarily do

Comprehension-Elaboration Theory

• Humor develops through how people perceive an event and reinterpret it based on new information

Cognitive Process:

1. Comprehension — humorous punchline is incongruous to our schemas of how life works and therefore requires us to reinterpret the event

   • need to be able to hold two different ideas in their mind at once

2. Humor elicitation — amount of humor that you feel depends on three things

   • degree to which the reinterpretation of the event diminishes the importance of the event (bigger diminishment = funnier)

   • type/amount of cognitive elaboration that is generated in response to the reinterpretation (more elaboration = funnier)

   • degree to which the humor is difficult to comprehend

     • inverted U-relationship → moderately difficult is the funniest

Note: this theory articulates the cognitive mechanisms involved and emphasizes the importance of elaboration

Benign-Violation Theory

Three conditions facilitate humor:

1. violation occurs → anything threatening to one’s sense of how the world should be

2. the context of the violation is benign (see McGraw)

3. an interpretive process involving synergy or incongruity occurs

McGraw on Benign-Violation Theory

Psychological distance (temporal, social, spatial, and hypothetical) and severity of the violation interact to determine if the violation is funny

• humor increases with the distance of the event if it is a perceived tragedy but decreases if it’s a perceived mishap

  • this is because a close tragedy is not safe (therefore not benign) and a distant mishap is extremely safe (therefore not a violation)