Hum, I’m skeptical about all that. It might be part of the evolutionary process behind humor, yes, but I don’t think it really qualifies modern humor.
You can very well laugh when you actually expect something bad. Like, all the “hotline jokes” about people calling hotline because their computer doesn’t work and after a while admitting that they didn’t plug the cable, well, we (people working in IT) do expect that level of “lameness” from some users, and yet we still find them funny.
There are many cases where this formula is true, but where it doesn’t generate humor. Like, if someone bakes a cake to me, and the cake isn’t very good while I was expecting it to be, it would rarely lead to humor.
Something which doesn’t have to do with failure or bad quality would also lead to humor. Like if during a causual conversion with a friend, he would suddenly start using a very elaborated language, it would likely make me smile, even if there is no failure or lower quality than expected, in fact, it’s because of higher quality than expected that humor will raise.
Anxiety, like many other negative feelings (anger, tiredness, pain, …) can make humor (and other positive feelings) harder, but it’s not as clear cut as you display it. Many people (and myself too, sometimes) actually use humor as a shield against anxiety. Like a friend of mine recently had to undergo surgery, she was anxious, I did a few silly jokes and while it didn’t lower much her anxiety, it did help a bit and make her smile.
I honestly don’t think humor can be summarized with such a simple formula, humor is a very complicated cluster in thingspace, different people having different boundaries to it, and lots of different things can contribute positively or negatively to it. Trying to summarize all of humor by such a single formula seems like trying to summarize all of human values by a single explanation (“humans want wealth” or whatever) and then creating ad-hoc twisted justification for people sacrificing themselves for a loved one or altruism, instead of acknowledging that human values are complicated, because “we are godshatter”.
Hi kilobug, skepticism makes for the best investigation and good discussion.
In this case, any old error doesn’t cause laughter, but it has to be one that violates your assumptions of what you or someone else is capable of. The example is of course anecdotal so I don’t have a ton of information, but I would suggest that most of us, especially people trained in computers, don’t expect the a person, or don’t find it acceptable, for them to not be able to plug in a cord, or not to check, so that would definitely be the type of thing that would illicit laughter from us...though the more it happens, we likely would laugh less and less and start to just become annoyed. It can also be a matter of “I know you screwed up in some absurd way, but I’ll be surprised by finding out what exactly you did this time.”
Something would have to violate what you were taking for granted or already assuming to find it funny. This is similar to the “Accounting Errors” example from page 13 of the second paper. For an example, you may not have expected the cake to be totally perfect, to where some missed seasoning or so on wouldn’t be outside of your assumptions. But you probably did, in fact, expect the person to know the basics of what would taste good. Let’s say that you bit into the cake, it tasted bizarre, then you found out that the person had tried to bake it with pickles. THAT’S the kind of error that would violate your expectations and cause you to laugh. Especially if they were right there and they genuinely looked like they thought it was a good idea.
This is probably a great example of “first person” laughter, where we’re actually laughing at our own expectations being sharply wrong. Like how we might laugh if we’re looking for our hat and find out it was on our head. The quality-gap in this case is in YOUR ability to estimate what was going on...laughing at yourself and not the person who exceeded expectations, since you didn’t expect that your friend could or would do that. As you can see the difference between first-person (at the self), second-person (such as at someone telling you a bad joke), and a known or unknown third person (the usual targets of jokes and humor) create a lot of the confusion.
Anxiety makes us less likely to laugh, but a good enough joke can overcome some anxiety, and the pleasure we feel from laughing certainly can make us feel better. Another cool thing about it is that laughter triggers from recognition in the brain of the person laughing, so a good joke can be stronger than simply telling someone that their problem is no big deal. I have a lot of this under the explanation for the saying “laughter is the best medicine” on page 18 of paper 2.
Humor certainly expresses itself in many complicated ways, but I think the underlying mechanism is pretty simple. It’s similar to how evolution expresses itself in thousands of ways in how it creates life and programs our instincts, but the underlying mechanism of variation and selection is fairly easy to understand and can be explained in a short form.
I hope some of these explanations for the examples help to demonstrate that. Regardless, friendly skepticism and disagreement is invaluable.
That’s likely too. In scenarios where we’re supposed to have a high expectation, we tend to laugh harder at anything humorous. The show “Silent Library” from Japan is an example I use, where people give each other harmless but painful punishments in a library while others struggle to conceal their laughter. The expectation of silence and scholarship in the library heightens the humor, and the show is very very successful and has spawned multiple spin-offs.
Being drilled that the customer must be respected and is always right would probably create a similar situation when they reveal themselves to have done totally idiotic things.
Hum, I’m skeptical about all that. It might be part of the evolutionary process behind humor, yes, but I don’t think it really qualifies modern humor.
You can very well laugh when you actually expect something bad. Like, all the “hotline jokes” about people calling hotline because their computer doesn’t work and after a while admitting that they didn’t plug the cable, well, we (people working in IT) do expect that level of “lameness” from some users, and yet we still find them funny.
There are many cases where this formula is true, but where it doesn’t generate humor. Like, if someone bakes a cake to me, and the cake isn’t very good while I was expecting it to be, it would rarely lead to humor.
Something which doesn’t have to do with failure or bad quality would also lead to humor. Like if during a causual conversion with a friend, he would suddenly start using a very elaborated language, it would likely make me smile, even if there is no failure or lower quality than expected, in fact, it’s because of higher quality than expected that humor will raise.
Anxiety, like many other negative feelings (anger, tiredness, pain, …) can make humor (and other positive feelings) harder, but it’s not as clear cut as you display it. Many people (and myself too, sometimes) actually use humor as a shield against anxiety. Like a friend of mine recently had to undergo surgery, she was anxious, I did a few silly jokes and while it didn’t lower much her anxiety, it did help a bit and make her smile.
I honestly don’t think humor can be summarized with such a simple formula, humor is a very complicated cluster in thingspace, different people having different boundaries to it, and lots of different things can contribute positively or negatively to it. Trying to summarize all of humor by such a single formula seems like trying to summarize all of human values by a single explanation (“humans want wealth” or whatever) and then creating ad-hoc twisted justification for people sacrificing themselves for a loved one or altruism, instead of acknowledging that human values are complicated, because “we are godshatter”.
Hi kilobug, skepticism makes for the best investigation and good discussion.
In this case, any old error doesn’t cause laughter, but it has to be one that violates your assumptions of what you or someone else is capable of. The example is of course anecdotal so I don’t have a ton of information, but I would suggest that most of us, especially people trained in computers, don’t expect the a person, or don’t find it acceptable, for them to not be able to plug in a cord, or not to check, so that would definitely be the type of thing that would illicit laughter from us...though the more it happens, we likely would laugh less and less and start to just become annoyed. It can also be a matter of “I know you screwed up in some absurd way, but I’ll be surprised by finding out what exactly you did this time.”
Something would have to violate what you were taking for granted or already assuming to find it funny. This is similar to the “Accounting Errors” example from page 13 of the second paper. For an example, you may not have expected the cake to be totally perfect, to where some missed seasoning or so on wouldn’t be outside of your assumptions. But you probably did, in fact, expect the person to know the basics of what would taste good. Let’s say that you bit into the cake, it tasted bizarre, then you found out that the person had tried to bake it with pickles. THAT’S the kind of error that would violate your expectations and cause you to laugh. Especially if they were right there and they genuinely looked like they thought it was a good idea.
This is probably a great example of “first person” laughter, where we’re actually laughing at our own expectations being sharply wrong. Like how we might laugh if we’re looking for our hat and find out it was on our head. The quality-gap in this case is in YOUR ability to estimate what was going on...laughing at yourself and not the person who exceeded expectations, since you didn’t expect that your friend could or would do that. As you can see the difference between first-person (at the self), second-person (such as at someone telling you a bad joke), and a known or unknown third person (the usual targets of jokes and humor) create a lot of the confusion.
Anxiety makes us less likely to laugh, but a good enough joke can overcome some anxiety, and the pleasure we feel from laughing certainly can make us feel better. Another cool thing about it is that laughter triggers from recognition in the brain of the person laughing, so a good joke can be stronger than simply telling someone that their problem is no big deal. I have a lot of this under the explanation for the saying “laughter is the best medicine” on page 18 of paper 2.
Humor certainly expresses itself in many complicated ways, but I think the underlying mechanism is pretty simple. It’s similar to how evolution expresses itself in thousands of ways in how it creates life and programs our instincts, but the underlying mechanism of variation and selection is fairly easy to understand and can be explained in a short form.
I hope some of these explanations for the examples help to demonstrate that. Regardless, friendly skepticism and disagreement is invaluable.
This strikes me as a case of status lose, from a high status customer (the customer is always right), to a total idiot.
That’s likely too. In scenarios where we’re supposed to have a high expectation, we tend to laugh harder at anything humorous. The show “Silent Library” from Japan is an example I use, where people give each other harmless but painful punishments in a library while others struggle to conceal their laughter. The expectation of silence and scholarship in the library heightens the humor, and the show is very very successful and has spawned multiple spin-offs.
Being drilled that the customer must be respected and is always right would probably create a similar situation when they reveal themselves to have done totally idiotic things.
Wrong spot.