I think I’m much more of an incongruity theorist than this (though haven’t read the literature). More specifically: Humor generally involves playing around with frames / scripts, often crashing different frames together in interesting ways. Laughter involves distancing yourself from a frame you’re engaging with, so that you’re kinda acting with that frame but not fully immersed in it.
This fits the playfighting evolutionary context, which is engaging largely within the “fight” frame while keeping some detachment from it.
There is also a thing about social syncing on a shared frame, when the frame isn’t the obvious default (we both understand that this is not a real fight, just a play fight, hahaha). Which seems related to how “getting the joke” is such a central aspect of humor. And to how humor is involved in social bonding.
My experience of coming up with in-context jokes matches this theory much more than your theory. It generally starts by noticing some alternative interpretation or frame on something that just happened (e.g. something that someone said), then gets refined into a specific thing to say by some combination of trying to find the most interesting interplay / biggest tension between the two frames, and trying to best bring in the new frame, and fitting it all to the people around me and what they’ll understand & like. I’m not trying to track the amount of danger or the amount of safety. (Though maybe sometimes I’m tracking something like the level of physiological arousal—at some point you swapped that in for “danger” and it does resonate more.)
For a concrete example to talk about, I looked through recent SMBC comics and picked out the one I found funniest—this one. It is a good example of crashing two frames together, the Disneyfied frame on wild animals interacting with humans and a more realistic one, brought together by a picture that can be seen from either viewpoint. The phrase “tickborne diseases” really makes the realistic frame pop. Though there’s also definitely some danger vs safety stuff happening here, so it’s not a counterexample to your theory.
This other recent SMBC is also funny to me, and also has the playing around with frames thing without any obvious danger. So maybe is a counterexample? Though not sure if trying to find counterexamples is an important exercise; your theory seems more like it’s incomplete than like it’s totally wrong.
Trying my own hand at theorizing about this danger/arousal/whatever thing… Seems like there’s something about the content (at least one of the frames) being important to the person. So danger, sex, taboo things. Pulling on some sort of relevance / importance / salience system in the brain.
This other recent SMBC is also funny to me, and also has the playing around with frames thing without any obvious danger. So maybe is a counterexample? Though not sure if trying to find counterexamples is an important exercise; your theory seems more like it’s incomplete than like it’s totally wrong.
I’m asking myself: Where’s the physiological arousal (increased heart rate etc.) in the SMBC you linked? My tentative answers are: Maybe a bit of surprise, but also I think there’s some interpersonal tension from the fact that the people on the right are belittling the people on the left, including vicarious embarrassment when we imagine that the people on the left have revealed themselves (well, ourselves) to be morons, plus a side-dish of invoking sex and violence. I think if we removed all those things, there would be no humor left.
Like, suppose I say to you: “Once upon a time, Goldilocks was wandering through the woods, and came upon a little house. Oh by the way, it’s gonna take me about 4 minutes to tell you this story.” I just changed frames—from the fictional within-story frame, up a level to the nonfiction real-world frame in which we’re sitting here and I’m telling you a story. But that transition wasn’t funny at all, right?
Or here’s another example of playing with frames where there’s no physiological arousal and hence no laughter: “You know that bag of candy in your hands? It’s rectangular.” I invoked a different frame than what you were previously thinking about, but there’s no Ingredient (A), and hence no laughter.
Humor generally involves playing around with frames / scripts, often crashing different frames together in interesting ways.
Hmm, here’s an idea. Maybe the very same thought can’t trigger both Ingredient (A) and Ingredient (B), because there’s mutual inhibition or something. So that suggests that we can only get laughter in two ways:
Ingredient (A) doesn’t come from “a thought” at all, but rather straight from the brainstem, e.g. getting tickled.
We think two consecutive thoughts, of which one creates Ingredient (A), and the other creates Ingredient (B), and maybe we flip back and forth between those two thoughts a few times within a second or two, such that both ingredients wind up present in the hypothalamus / brainstem simultaneously. And thus we get laughter.
Then the second bullet point would suggest that it’s difficult or impossible to get humor or conversational laughter except by situations that can be viewed / analogized / framed in at least two different ways.
Do I believe that previous sentence? Hmm, I dunno.
I think I’m fully on-board with “that’s one way to invoke laughter”,
I’m uncertain about the much stronger statement “that’s pretty much the only way to invoke conversational laughter”,
I’m definitely against the even stronger statement “switching back and forth between two different frames is not only necessary but also sufficient for laughter”.
(I definitely don’t think it’s sufficient—the other condition would be that one of the frames creates Ingredient (A) and the other creates Ingredient (B), cf. those non-funny examples above.)
I need to ponder it more. But that was a very fruitful comment, thank you :)
Actively searching for counterexamples to the post’s danger+safety theory… What about when people who are in love with each other get giggly around each other? (As an example of laughter, not humor.) I mean the sickly-sweet they’re-in-their-own-world-together kind of giggling, not the nervous unsure-of-oneself laughter. Doesn’t seem like there’s danger.
Similarly, people laughing more when they’re on drugs such as weed. (Though that seems more open to alternative physiological explanations.)
Do the stoners and giggly lovers fit the sketch of a theory that I’m maybe building towards? There is playing around with frames in both of them, I think. People on drugs see things fresh, or from a different perspective from usual; lovers-in-their-own-world have stepped out of the default social framework for interacting with the social world into their own little world. There is definitely syncing on frames with the lovers, though often not with the people on drugs. And there’s an importance thing going on in the relationship, and a perception-of-importance thing with drug use. So mostly fits, except with an exception on the syncing bit.
Giggly lovers is a good example of why I maybe should have just used the term “physiological arousal” throughout, instead of the word “danger”. I think it’s just generally exciting / stimulating / etc. to be newly in love! There’s a lot of Ingredient (A) floating around, even if there isn’t really any “danger” in the normal sense of that word. (It’s high-stakes in regards to one’s reproductive prospects, I guess.)
Not sure about marijuana. Maybe I’d guess that the chemical somehow sets Ingredients (B) + (C) anomalously high, so that almost any physiological arousal triggers laughter, even things that would normally just be scary or exciting. Like laughing through an entire episode of Oz (true story, if I recall correctly from a very long time ago).
This is much closer to my model of humor as well. I think most humor can be categorized as novel patterns of ideas at a certain level of abstraction, that the brain is not used to processing.When the brain gets used to the pattern, the joke and similar jokes are no longer funny.
I find it unlikely that sexual selection hasn’t played a major role in the development of humor given that people report it as highly attractive. If humor is mostly novel patterns, then pattern recognition is a skill required to be good at it. Being funny could therefore be a proxy for intelligence. This seems to be he case if you look at the IQ scores of comedians.
Displaying honest signs of intelligence seems adaptive in general in a social primate for various obvious reasons. Combining novel frames might also allow you to convey a concept in a way that is challenging a taboo without risking to actually make statements that are taboo. A useful tool in ancestral politics.
The playfighting theory does a very good job of explaining why tickling and scaring people make people laugh on the other hand. My guess is that humor and laughter started out with the evolutionary purpose described by the theory, before being adapted for other purposes like sexual selection and tribal politics.
I think I’m much more of an incongruity theorist than this (though haven’t read the literature). More specifically: Humor generally involves playing around with frames / scripts, often crashing different frames together in interesting ways. Laughter involves distancing yourself from a frame you’re engaging with, so that you’re kinda acting with that frame but not fully immersed in it.
This fits the playfighting evolutionary context, which is engaging largely within the “fight” frame while keeping some detachment from it.
There is also a thing about social syncing on a shared frame, when the frame isn’t the obvious default (we both understand that this is not a real fight, just a play fight, hahaha). Which seems related to how “getting the joke” is such a central aspect of humor. And to how humor is involved in social bonding.
My experience of coming up with in-context jokes matches this theory much more than your theory. It generally starts by noticing some alternative interpretation or frame on something that just happened (e.g. something that someone said), then gets refined into a specific thing to say by some combination of trying to find the most interesting interplay / biggest tension between the two frames, and trying to best bring in the new frame, and fitting it all to the people around me and what they’ll understand & like. I’m not trying to track the amount of danger or the amount of safety. (Though maybe sometimes I’m tracking something like the level of physiological arousal—at some point you swapped that in for “danger” and it does resonate more.)
For a concrete example to talk about, I looked through recent SMBC comics and picked out the one I found funniest—this one. It is a good example of crashing two frames together, the Disneyfied frame on wild animals interacting with humans and a more realistic one, brought together by a picture that can be seen from either viewpoint. The phrase “tickborne diseases” really makes the realistic frame pop. Though there’s also definitely some danger vs safety stuff happening here, so it’s not a counterexample to your theory.
This other recent SMBC is also funny to me, and also has the playing around with frames thing without any obvious danger. So maybe is a counterexample? Though not sure if trying to find counterexamples is an important exercise; your theory seems more like it’s incomplete than like it’s totally wrong.
Trying my own hand at theorizing about this danger/arousal/whatever thing… Seems like there’s something about the content (at least one of the frames) being important to the person. So danger, sex, taboo things. Pulling on some sort of relevance / importance / salience system in the brain.
Thanks!
I’m asking myself: Where’s the physiological arousal (increased heart rate etc.) in the SMBC you linked? My tentative answers are: Maybe a bit of surprise, but also I think there’s some interpersonal tension from the fact that the people on the right are belittling the people on the left, including vicarious embarrassment when we imagine that the people on the left have revealed themselves (well, ourselves) to be morons, plus a side-dish of invoking sex and violence. I think if we removed all those things, there would be no humor left.
Like, suppose I say to you: “Once upon a time, Goldilocks was wandering through the woods, and came upon a little house. Oh by the way, it’s gonna take me about 4 minutes to tell you this story.” I just changed frames—from the fictional within-story frame, up a level to the nonfiction real-world frame in which we’re sitting here and I’m telling you a story. But that transition wasn’t funny at all, right?
Or here’s another example of playing with frames where there’s no physiological arousal and hence no laughter: “You know that bag of candy in your hands? It’s rectangular.” I invoked a different frame than what you were previously thinking about, but there’s no Ingredient (A), and hence no laughter.
Hmm, here’s an idea. Maybe the very same thought can’t trigger both Ingredient (A) and Ingredient (B), because there’s mutual inhibition or something. So that suggests that we can only get laughter in two ways:
Ingredient (A) doesn’t come from “a thought” at all, but rather straight from the brainstem, e.g. getting tickled.
We think two consecutive thoughts, of which one creates Ingredient (A), and the other creates Ingredient (B), and maybe we flip back and forth between those two thoughts a few times within a second or two, such that both ingredients wind up present in the hypothalamus / brainstem simultaneously. And thus we get laughter.
Then the second bullet point would suggest that it’s difficult or impossible to get humor or conversational laughter except by situations that can be viewed / analogized / framed in at least two different ways.
Do I believe that previous sentence? Hmm, I dunno.
I think I’m fully on-board with “that’s one way to invoke laughter”,
I’m uncertain about the much stronger statement “that’s pretty much the only way to invoke conversational laughter”,
I’m definitely against the even stronger statement “switching back and forth between two different frames is not only necessary but also sufficient for laughter”.
(I definitely don’t think it’s sufficient—the other condition would be that one of the frames creates Ingredient (A) and the other creates Ingredient (B), cf. those non-funny examples above.)
I need to ponder it more. But that was a very fruitful comment, thank you :)
Actively searching for counterexamples to the post’s danger+safety theory… What about when people who are in love with each other get giggly around each other? (As an example of laughter, not humor.) I mean the sickly-sweet they’re-in-their-own-world-together kind of giggling, not the nervous unsure-of-oneself laughter. Doesn’t seem like there’s danger.
Similarly, people laughing more when they’re on drugs such as weed. (Though that seems more open to alternative physiological explanations.)
Do the stoners and giggly lovers fit the sketch of a theory that I’m maybe building towards? There is playing around with frames in both of them, I think. People on drugs see things fresh, or from a different perspective from usual; lovers-in-their-own-world have stepped out of the default social framework for interacting with the social world into their own little world. There is definitely syncing on frames with the lovers, though often not with the people on drugs. And there’s an importance thing going on in the relationship, and a perception-of-importance thing with drug use. So mostly fits, except with an exception on the syncing bit.
Giggly lovers is a good example of why I maybe should have just used the term “physiological arousal” throughout, instead of the word “danger”. I think it’s just generally exciting / stimulating / etc. to be newly in love! There’s a lot of Ingredient (A) floating around, even if there isn’t really any “danger” in the normal sense of that word. (It’s high-stakes in regards to one’s reproductive prospects, I guess.)
Not sure about marijuana. Maybe I’d guess that the chemical somehow sets Ingredients (B) + (C) anomalously high, so that almost any physiological arousal triggers laughter, even things that would normally just be scary or exciting. Like laughing through an entire episode of Oz (true story, if I recall correctly from a very long time ago).
This is much closer to my model of humor as well. I think most humor can be categorized as novel patterns of ideas at a certain level of abstraction, that the brain is not used to processing.When the brain gets used to the pattern, the joke and similar jokes are no longer funny.
I find it unlikely that sexual selection hasn’t played a major role in the development of humor given that people report it as highly attractive. If humor is mostly novel patterns, then pattern recognition is a skill required to be good at it. Being funny could therefore be a proxy for intelligence. This seems to be he case if you look at the IQ scores of comedians.
Displaying honest signs of intelligence seems adaptive in general in a social primate for various obvious reasons. Combining novel frames might also allow you to convey a concept in a way that is challenging a taboo without risking to actually make statements that are taboo. A useful tool in ancestral politics.
The playfighting theory does a very good job of explaining why tickling and scaring people make people laugh on the other hand. My guess is that humor and laughter started out with the evolutionary purpose described by the theory, before being adapted for other purposes like sexual selection and tribal politics.