Humour

Humour (humor in American English) is a form of entertainment and a form of human communication, intended to make people laugh and feel happy. The origins of the word are in the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids, or humours, controlled human health and emotion.

There are different types of humour which appeal to different sectors of humanity – for instance, slapstick is particularly popular with young children, while satire tends to be more popular with the older and better-educated. Humour is usually localised and does not easily transfer from one culture to another. This happens because humour is often context sensitive and someone not understanding the context will usually not understand the humour. Various techniques are used to deliver humour:

• Slapstick,
• Sarcasm,
• Satire,
• Parody,
• Adages, often in the form of parody "lawss" of nature,
• Practical joke: deliberately luring someone into a humourous position and then laughing at their expense,
• Silly acts inappropriate for the situation or age of person,
• Fake stern manner that is inappropriate in a comic setting,
• Ridiculous gestures and movements,
• Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality (such as in Andy Kaufman's humour),
• Play of words such as oxymorons, puns, etc,
• Unexpected outcome, such as a witty punchline,
• Wit, as in many one-liners,
• Absurdity,
• Triple,
• Irony,
• Humorous "Lawss" such as Murphy's law,
• Self-inflicted embarrassing situation, e.g. losing one's swimming trunks after a dive,
• Comic sounds or inherently funny words with certain sounds that make them amusing in a particular language,
• Self-degradation (such as in Rodney Dangerfield's humour),
• Faking stupidity,
• Pointing out real stupidity (such as the Darwin Awards),
• Stereotyping (such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, etc),
• Inflicting pain (such as kick in the groin or in the film "Home Alone", etc).
• Unintentional humor, that is, making people laugh without trying.

It has been claimed that humour cannot be explained. However, attempts can be made, such as this one:

Perhaps the essence of humour is the presentation of something familar to a person, so they think they know the natural follow-on thought or conclusion, then providing a twist through presentation of the opposite of what was expected, or else the natural result of interpreting the original situation in a different, less common, way. For example:

A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to play the piano?" The doctor replies "Of course!" The man says "Good, because I couldn't before!"

This is also why many jokes work in threes. For instnace the standard a Priest a Rabbi and a sailor sitting in a bar, the Priest makes a remark, the Rabbi continues in teh same vein, and then the sailor makes a third point that is a sharp break from the established pattern, but a response that is still logical.

Notable studies of humour have been made by Aristotle in The Poetics, Part V, Sigmund Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and by Arthur Schopenhauer. The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote an essay on "the meaning of the comic", in which he maintained that the essence of humour is the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humourist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This is a funny idea because although a genuine impulse of charity is living, a vital impulse, here it has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it is to manifest itself.

A Bergsonian might explain puns in the same spirit. Puns classify words not by what is living (their meaning) but by what is mechanical (their mere sound).

There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies or humour, irony, parody and pretence. Some prominent theoreticians of this field are Raymond Gibbs, Herbert Clark, and Salvatore Attardo.

Users of some psychoactive drugs tend to find humour in many more situations and events than one normally would.

One notable trait of Australians, inherited from the British, is the use of deadpan humour, in which the joker will make an outrageous or ridiculous statement without explicitly indicating they are joking. Americans visiting Australia have gained themselves a reputation for gullibility and a lack of a sense of humour by not recognising that tales of kangaroos hopping across the Sydney Harbour Bridge are examples of this propensity.

• laughter
• Mark Twain Prize for American Humor
• Black comedy
• Clowns
• Comedy and Comedians
• Comedy film
• Comics (also known as funnies)
• Humour in crime fiction
• Internet humour
• Jewish humour
• Jokes
• Practical jokes and pranks
• Professional humour, e.g. lawyer jokes
• Ribaldry
• Toilet humour

• Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D., Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers. Neuron, 40, 1041 - 1048, (2003).