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 :)
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 :)