A History and Philosophy of Jokes

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A History and Philosophy of Jokes
There are many theories of humor which try to explain what humor is, the social function it serves, and what would be considered humorous or funny. It would be very hard to explain humor to a hypothetical person who doesn’t have a sense of humor already. Actually, to such a person, humor would appear to be quite weird if not outright irrational behavior. Among the existing types of theories that try to account for the existence of humor there are: psychological theories, the majority of which consider humor to be a very healthy behavior; there are spiritual theories which may, for example consider humor to be a "gift from God”; there are also other theories that consider humor to be an unexplainable mystery, so much like a mystical experience. However, there are three major theories of jokes: Superiority, incongruity and relief (Holt 81-84).
The superiority theory of humor traces back to Aristotle and Plato, and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. Clint tries to explain that a person laughs about misfortunes of others, because these misfortunes and shortcomings assert the person's superiority on the background of shortcomings of others. Aristotle argues that people laugh at ugly or inferior individuals, because they feel a joy at being superior to them. Very often people laugh at others because they have some defect or failing or because they find themselves at a disadvantage in a certain way or suffer a small misfortune. The miser, the drunkard and the glutton are commonly stock figures of comedy; so is the man who gets hit with a custard pie or the henpecked husband. People laugh, too, at mistakes: at schoolboy howlers, bad grammar and faulty pronunciation. These are all fairly crude instances, but it may be that even the most subtle humor is primarily a development of this, and that the pleasure we take in humor comes from our feeling of superiority over those we laugh at.
The incongruity theory states that humor is fully perceived at the moment of realization of incongruity between a concept involved in a certain situation and the real objects thought to be in some relation to the same concept. Since the major point of the theory is not the incongruity per se, but its realization and resolution i.e., putting the objects in question into the real situations, it is often known as the incongruity-resolution theory. The first formulation of the incongruity theory is credited to the Scottish poet Beattie (Bergson 76)
Relief theories try to describe humor along the lines of a tension-release model. Rather than defining what’s funny, they discuss the...