First, regarding puns, yes that’s how I explain them. But puns and misplacements frequently aren’t funny...they usually create humor through 2nd person laughter (at someone else’s bold and forced punnery, showing either their lameness or utter disrespect for people who don’t like puns), or through being layered with something else (misplacement combined with further physical failure)
Misplacement by itself is kind of like a hamburger patty without any salt, bun, lettuce or tomato. If it’s a wrong enough misplacement, it CAN be funny, just like you CAN eat the plain old hamburger patty without preparing it...but it’s pretty uncommon. The “flushed with success” example is a layered pun. It’s not just the patty. The person is pointing out first that they didn’t use puns, implying that it’s lame, obvious, easy or silly, then immediately doing it. This is combined with the misplacement. So you get both him purposefully doing something that he just implied isn’t good humor, AND the sense of misplacement...it’s a hamburger patty combined with some seasoning, which is what we normally see. Plushed with success might still be somewhat funny because he’s failing at punning or still “stooping to it” after mentioning it, but not as funny as “flushed” since that has more pun characteristics.
By the way, I’m well-aware that this is one of the least obvious aspects of the theory, and I’m also well-aware that this is the most ripe for me to focus on and try to put more clearly and speak more about. I’m not proclaiming that this is or was stated perfectly, but I do have a strong feeling that I’ve gotten a handle on what’s going on and just need to trim and organize the thoughts on it well.
In general, this theory seems squarely aimed at humour that could be classified as “laughing at someone” (perhaps one’s hypothetical self, etc.). There is a lot of humour of this kind, but it’s by no means all there is.
At the risk of overgeneralizing (we’re covering a lot of ground here)...I’m essentially saying that yes, all humor is laughing at someone, but it’s done for the purposes of peaceful group organizing, so it’s not as evil or threatening as that might seem...and a lot of laughter is when someone says something or acts something out that we can imagine them saying and would cause us to laugh at them...of which the imagining causes us to laugh.
Also, we usually don’t realize which someone we’re laughing at. Sometimes the “someone” is an unknown person with an average-person expectation...and often our primitive brain will laugh at what it thinks is an error by an unknown person. and we get confused at who the someone is.
I am fairly sure (just from introspection, which is of course rather unreliable) that I sometimes find things funny because they’re much cleverer than they first appear—the exact reverse of your status loss mechanism. (But it fits nicely with Hurley&Dennett’s.) I suppose you could try to cram this into your framework by saying that I am the one whose status is being lowered here, but I don’t think this makes sense in your just-so story. What value would there be in drawing attention in a status-lowering manner to one’s own mistake? Especially a mistake one has made only internally?
Yes, this is a very valid concern that has been brought up. The example I’ve used elsewhere is here...
Obviously we can find more examples but just one makes things tidy. The commentator (Isiah Thomas) really clarifies what I’m proposing because he laughs after the HIGHER STATUS display by Jordan, but says “Excuse me! I’m sorry!” which I think underlines the idea that this display is making him laugh at his own expectation or claim (in this case that Jordan was losing his athleticism in his mid-30′s) being proven so starkly wrong.
The question of WHY we would laugh at ourselves is also a very good one to ask and I’ve thought about it. I think that 1) There’s a “fail-safe” switch for ruining your own status in that having anxiety about it would counteract the reflex, so it doesn’t happen in situations that would totally kill your status. And 2) We view people who can laugh at themselves as being likable and socially desirable. This fits with the idea that they accept their own errors being noticed and peacefully placing them wherever they may be in the status order.
You also asked why we would laugh when we’re alone. I think laughter is an unconscious reaction, like smiling, that happens whether we’re alone or not. We also, for example, sometimes unconsciously talk to ourselves out loud when we’re alone.
Typographical errors are not usually funny, even when their validty and wrongness are both comparable to those in a pun. For instance, in the foregoing sentence there happens to be a missing letter. Maybe you noticed it, maybe not; these things are eminently missable.
As you said yourself, the noticeability on that error is very low. It’s also not necessarily a display below expected quality. I make typos all the time, I see them all the time. They don’t surprise me. So the difference between “Qe” and “Qd” as well as the “N” (noticeability) are both very low or 0 in the equation.
It seems to me that someone who starts out with visibly low status shouldn’t be able to generate humour by doing silly things. (This is about the “expectation” term in your equation.) I think clowns (and probably court jesters) are counterexamples, and I still think so having read what you write about them in your papers. Perhaps in some cases (as you propose) one can explain a jester as mocking the king or courtiers and hence abruptly lowering their status, but I don’t think that’s the whole of what a jester would do and it certainly doesn’t apply to a lot of what a clown does.
People with visibly low status can’t generate humor AS EASILY as people with high status. They have to find new ways to mess up or sink to new lows. I think clowns dress the way they do because it earns an initial laugh from kids (adults realize that it’s an act, but kids wouldn’t recognize high status as well as adults if the clown dressed more normally, so the outfit works better there), but they do all other kinds of things and jokes to keep the laughter going. If it was JUST the outfit, that would get a laugh or two, then people would stop. As you said, the same is true of court jesters, they could probably use their outfits to get an initial laugh, then use their low status to get extra laughter out of mocking others, but you’re right, they did other things to be entertaining as well, like maybe juggling or magic. These weren’t necessarily funny though.
I can summarize a lot of what I find unsatisfactory in your theory as follows: your theory locates humour in “sudden stupidity”, but it seems to me that “sudden cleverness” is approximately equally important and it appears to be entirely neglected in your theory.
I think this is similar to the above points on first-person laughter. Note that sudden cleverness can also be someone telling a clever joke, too.
I also think you exaggerate its novelty. Your theory isn’t far from the “superiority theory”, for instance. My memory (which is not very reliable) says that Hurley&Dennett’s description of this theory lays more stress on the object’s inferiority than on the laugher’s superiority, at which point the differences look very minor.
I don’t know if I’m as focused on “novelty” as I am on elegance, utility and consistency with evidence. Those would be the things I really am more excited about and that I think are most important. Having said that, yes, this theory definitely has things in common with Superiority Theory AND Incongruity Theory and probably some others. What I like is that I think it connects the claims of both in a manner that’s logical and (at least at the core) is simple enough to be explained to a child.
But also, I think Superiority Theory focuses on laughter being (as quoted in paper one) sudden joy arising from one’s own superiority. This goes much further then that, saying that laughter is not just happiness, but a DISTINCT reflex all its own that has its own physical characteristic (diaphragm spasm), and includes a pleasure chemical and a smile for a clear, logical and specific reason (peaceful social ordering etc). We also introduce a logical basis for anxiety lowering humor and so on.
Obviously, I haven’t read all 100+ humor theories so I’m not comfortable proclaiming something is “brand new” and would feel silly doing it. But, I do think it’s not true to say that this doesn’t have different ideas (or more advanced and logical ideas) than Superiority Theory.
All the best and if you want to focus on anything specific I’ve said, just let me know. I want to address all the points but I don’t want to bury people in mountains of text either. Long or short replies asking about specific issues are both welcome.
I really don’t think you’re engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any “misplacement” required; and (2) that even when a “misplacement” is involved, your theory doesn’t appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.
I agree that the particular one I cited, which was simply the first I had to hand, has an extra layer to it that enhances the humour. I already drew attention to that and made clear that it wasn’t the relevant point. Let me try again without that distraction.
I’ll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the “kidney beans” joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: “The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans.” I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing).
There is no “misplacement” here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It’s just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn’t made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader).
Now let’s take an example more favourable to your theory, where arguably there is a “misplacement”. It happens to be due to the same person who made the “flushed” pun; it purports (not very seriously) to be a quotation, and it goes like this: <<< “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking copse.”—Johnny Appleseed. >>> So, there’s a “misplacement” of sorts here: in some sense “copse” is obviously a mistake for “corpse”, and with that “corrected” one has the sort of thing that (say) rock’n’roll stars might say. On the other hand, there’s a contrasting element of rightness: Johnny Appleseed (as opposed to, say, Johnny Rotten) might indeed advocate leaving a good-looking copse to posterity.
So, does this fit your theory? A “misplacement” (copse for corpse) with some features matching to improve the validity? I don’t think it does. For one thing, unless you’re unusually quick-witted, there is a definite delay between the recognition of wrongness and the recognition of rightness. So at the point where the wrongness is noticed the extra validity (in comparison with a mere mistake) isn’t there. And when does the joke become funny? With the recognition of rightness, not the recognition of wrongness. If it happens to take you a few seconds to see what’s going on, the process goes like this: “Huh? I don’t get it. Has he mis-spelled ‘corpse’? … Ohhhh, I see.” and it’s at the latter part—after any hypothetical status loss—that you will laugh if you appreciate the pun.
But let’s leave all that aside and suppose that somehow your theory can accommodate those facts. What are we left with? Supposedly the pun is funny because it has a bad mistake (“copse” in place of “corpse”) but (because the Johnny Appleseed reference kinda-sorta explains the presence of the word “copse”) enough validity to … well, actually this might be a good point at which to mention that I don’t see where the validity requirement comes from in your just-so story about status loss: surely a low-validity case is a better sign that someone has demonstrated their unsuitability for leadership than a high-validity case. Well, never mind. Enough validity for laughing at the would-be leader not to anger them too much, or something.
But: “I make typos all the time. I see them all the time”. Apparently typographical errors, even when noticed, don’t constitute a serious enough loss of quality to be funny. So why would “copse” in place of “corpse” be suitable joke material, on your theory? It’s no worse an error—no more a sign of incompetence—than my example of “validty” in place of “validity”.
All I’m really doing here is giving more examples where “sudden cleverness” rather than “sudden stupidity” seems to produce humour. And, if I understand correctly, your answer to this is that here we are laughing at ourselves rather than at someone else. Leaving aside the question of whether laughing at oneself can be adaptive if the point of laughter is to indicate to everyone around “look who needs to be low-status” (yeah, maybe it could, just as gracefully losing a dominance fight can be adaptive), it seems to me that there is another big problem with fitting these cases into your theory: There is no substantial falling short of expected quality standards here.
Consider, for instance, the corpse/copse pun. If I’m laughing at myself when I laugh at it, what failure of mine am I laughing at? My brief interval of not seeing what’s going on? Unlikely—the pun is just as funny if seen quickly as if seen slowly, and in any case it’s hardly a shameful sign of low status to take a moment to grasp it. What else? I don’t see it.
Likewise with the kidney beans. What failure in myself am I laughing at if I find it funny to read that a cannibal tribe eats kidney beans when not dining on human kidneys? Again, I don’t see it.
Clowns
Yes, indeed, clowns do more than just dress up in silly clothes. I didn’t intend to suggest otherwise. My point is simply that their pies-to-the-face and comic pratfalls and absurd misunderstandings and whatnot are displays of conspicuous incompetence from people we expect to show conspicuous incompetence. So Qe-Qd in your equation can’t be large because Qe is low to begin with. And yet clowns can be pretty funny.
Novelty
Of course there’s no reason why you should be much concerned with novelty. The only reason I brought it up is that you were saying that your theory, if correct, would “redefine the field”: I don’t think it would.
I really don’t think you’re engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any “misplacement” required; and (2) that even when a “misplacement” is involved, your theory doesn’t appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.
I feel that puns, when by themselves, all play off of our misplacement instinct. But not all puns are equally funny. Some things are more “out of place” then others. And the more “obscure” your pun, (the more out-of-place) the funnier it will be. (assuming of course that it’s noticeable, low anxiety and the other requirements)
I think I know what you’re saying though. The “flushing” example fits in BOTH places, and thus isn’t “misplaced” by itself in the actual sentence where it’s used.
That’s probably an example of a pun which, by itself, would not be very funny. Something that could be out of place but not really...so you see it as potentially a small chuckle. But if “flushing” had less in common with where it was (rather than fitting in both places), I think it would be funnier.
That “double meaning” or “double placement” in flushing might earn a small chuckle, similar to how you might see a button on a computer that looks like candy and suddenly find yourself feeling a tiny bit hungry.
Obviously this is a subtle case we’re discussing so we might need to speak more.
I’ll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the “kidney beans” joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: “The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans.” I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing).
There is no “misplacement” here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It’s just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn’t made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader).
Yup, you’re absolutely right, I would laugh at that. I think I did correctly see what you’re putting across too. In addition to what I said above, I also feel this is likely the brain’s misplacement instinct being triggered by something that looks VERY much like a misplacement. After the fact of course, you may realize that it’s not misplaced, but laughter is a reflex that serves its purpose by triggering in the moment to allow others to potentially see the fail and adjust their opinion of the social order.
So it senses the potential misplacement and reacts, like how you might feel what you think is a bug on your arm, pull your arm away, then realize it was just a hair. It was the potential thing that caused the reflex.
This is a great thing to bring up.
But: “I make typos all the time. I see them all the time”. Apparently typographical errors, even when noticed, don’t constitute a serious enough loss of quality to be funny. So why would “copse” in place of “corpse” be suitable joke material, on your theory? It’s no worse an error—no more a sign of incompetence—than my example of “validty” in place of “validity”.
Typographical errors CAN produce funny, if they are very egregious, or if they get layered with some other fail. Think of the “Autocorrect Fails” that get sent around as memes. You see a correction that ends up making someone say something they really didn’t mean to say and thus makes them look really bad. But a simple missing letter that doesn’t lead to anything else, like “valdty” instead of “validity” is just run of the mill, generally not a surprise at all, and isn’t even layered with any other failure.
If this doesn’t cover it, let me know and I’ll go through the rest of what you said. I don’t want to bury you in too much text so I’ll move on otherwise.
Clowns
Yes, indeed, clowns do more than just dress up in silly clothes. I didn’t intend to suggest otherwise. My point is simply that their pies-to-the-face and comic pratfalls and absurd misunderstandings and whatnot are displays of conspicuous incompetence from people we expect to show conspicuous incompetence. So Qe-Qd in your equation can’t be large because Qe is low to begin with. And yet clowns can be pretty funny.
Ah, people WE expect, and I agree that we do expect clowns to do those things. But we as adults don’t laugh as much at clowns as kids do, right? Kids don’t have the same thorough understanding and expectations of the world as adults, so they will buy into certain acts that adults don’t...and clowns naturally perform more often for kids.
I would suggest that once kids have seen quite a few clowns and realize that they’re doing an act, they find the outfit and most of the standard stuff less funny. (though they may still laugh at some of the jokes and so on) Just like how we might laugh at some of the clown’s jokes if we haven’t heard them before, but the outfit and the horn and so on are generally “ho-hum” and not funny. (at least to me).
(obviously some kids are terrified by clowns, etc etc but that’s a separate issue)
Novelty
Of course there’s no reason why you should be much concerned with novelty. The only reason I brought it up is that you were saying that your theory, if correct, would “redefine the field”: I don’t think it would.
I say that mainly because I think it provides a logical reason for both “superiority” and “incongruity” to be found in humor, which relates quite clearly to an evolutionary pressure and has some elegance and simplicity. I’ve found that “uniting theories” like this tend to quickly become the main theories in a field (from what I understand, M-Theory united the 5 or 6 competing forms of string theory and is now by far the main idea)
On top of that, the ability to study jokes using this system and adjust different things to (at least in my testing on myself) make them more and less funny in many different ways is unique enough that it’s called “The Holy Grail of humor studies” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.
Uniting the previous theories under a single elegant umbrella and finding the “holy grail,” in my opinion, would be a pretty major shift in a field of research.
First, regarding puns, yes that’s how I explain them. But puns and misplacements frequently aren’t funny...they usually create humor through 2nd person laughter (at someone else’s bold and forced punnery, showing either their lameness or utter disrespect for people who don’t like puns), or through being layered with something else (misplacement combined with further physical failure)
Misplacement by itself is kind of like a hamburger patty without any salt, bun, lettuce or tomato. If it’s a wrong enough misplacement, it CAN be funny, just like you CAN eat the plain old hamburger patty without preparing it...but it’s pretty uncommon. The “flushed with success” example is a layered pun. It’s not just the patty. The person is pointing out first that they didn’t use puns, implying that it’s lame, obvious, easy or silly, then immediately doing it. This is combined with the misplacement. So you get both him purposefully doing something that he just implied isn’t good humor, AND the sense of misplacement...it’s a hamburger patty combined with some seasoning, which is what we normally see. Plushed with success might still be somewhat funny because he’s failing at punning or still “stooping to it” after mentioning it, but not as funny as “flushed” since that has more pun characteristics.
By the way, I’m well-aware that this is one of the least obvious aspects of the theory, and I’m also well-aware that this is the most ripe for me to focus on and try to put more clearly and speak more about. I’m not proclaiming that this is or was stated perfectly, but I do have a strong feeling that I’ve gotten a handle on what’s going on and just need to trim and organize the thoughts on it well.
At the risk of overgeneralizing (we’re covering a lot of ground here)...I’m essentially saying that yes, all humor is laughing at someone, but it’s done for the purposes of peaceful group organizing, so it’s not as evil or threatening as that might seem...and a lot of laughter is when someone says something or acts something out that we can imagine them saying and would cause us to laugh at them...of which the imagining causes us to laugh.
Also, we usually don’t realize which someone we’re laughing at. Sometimes the “someone” is an unknown person with an average-person expectation...and often our primitive brain will laugh at what it thinks is an error by an unknown person. and we get confused at who the someone is.
Yes, this is a very valid concern that has been brought up. The example I’ve used elsewhere is here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww2d_o0N62w&t=2s
Obviously we can find more examples but just one makes things tidy. The commentator (Isiah Thomas) really clarifies what I’m proposing because he laughs after the HIGHER STATUS display by Jordan, but says “Excuse me! I’m sorry!” which I think underlines the idea that this display is making him laugh at his own expectation or claim (in this case that Jordan was losing his athleticism in his mid-30′s) being proven so starkly wrong.
The question of WHY we would laugh at ourselves is also a very good one to ask and I’ve thought about it. I think that 1) There’s a “fail-safe” switch for ruining your own status in that having anxiety about it would counteract the reflex, so it doesn’t happen in situations that would totally kill your status. And 2) We view people who can laugh at themselves as being likable and socially desirable. This fits with the idea that they accept their own errors being noticed and peacefully placing them wherever they may be in the status order.
You also asked why we would laugh when we’re alone. I think laughter is an unconscious reaction, like smiling, that happens whether we’re alone or not. We also, for example, sometimes unconsciously talk to ourselves out loud when we’re alone.
As you said yourself, the noticeability on that error is very low. It’s also not necessarily a display below expected quality. I make typos all the time, I see them all the time. They don’t surprise me. So the difference between “Qe” and “Qd” as well as the “N” (noticeability) are both very low or 0 in the equation.
People with visibly low status can’t generate humor AS EASILY as people with high status. They have to find new ways to mess up or sink to new lows. I think clowns dress the way they do because it earns an initial laugh from kids (adults realize that it’s an act, but kids wouldn’t recognize high status as well as adults if the clown dressed more normally, so the outfit works better there), but they do all other kinds of things and jokes to keep the laughter going. If it was JUST the outfit, that would get a laugh or two, then people would stop. As you said, the same is true of court jesters, they could probably use their outfits to get an initial laugh, then use their low status to get extra laughter out of mocking others, but you’re right, they did other things to be entertaining as well, like maybe juggling or magic. These weren’t necessarily funny though.
I think this is similar to the above points on first-person laughter. Note that sudden cleverness can also be someone telling a clever joke, too.
I don’t know if I’m as focused on “novelty” as I am on elegance, utility and consistency with evidence. Those would be the things I really am more excited about and that I think are most important. Having said that, yes, this theory definitely has things in common with Superiority Theory AND Incongruity Theory and probably some others. What I like is that I think it connects the claims of both in a manner that’s logical and (at least at the core) is simple enough to be explained to a child.
But also, I think Superiority Theory focuses on laughter being (as quoted in paper one) sudden joy arising from one’s own superiority. This goes much further then that, saying that laughter is not just happiness, but a DISTINCT reflex all its own that has its own physical characteristic (diaphragm spasm), and includes a pleasure chemical and a smile for a clear, logical and specific reason (peaceful social ordering etc). We also introduce a logical basis for anxiety lowering humor and so on.
Obviously, I haven’t read all 100+ humor theories so I’m not comfortable proclaiming something is “brand new” and would feel silly doing it. But, I do think it’s not true to say that this doesn’t have different ideas (or more advanced and logical ideas) than Superiority Theory.
All the best and if you want to focus on anything specific I’ve said, just let me know. I want to address all the points but I don’t want to bury people in mountains of text either. Long or short replies asking about specific issues are both welcome.
Puns
I really don’t think you’re engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any “misplacement” required; and (2) that even when a “misplacement” is involved, your theory doesn’t appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.
I agree that the particular one I cited, which was simply the first I had to hand, has an extra layer to it that enhances the humour. I already drew attention to that and made clear that it wasn’t the relevant point. Let me try again without that distraction.
I’ll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the “kidney beans” joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: “The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans.” I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing).
There is no “misplacement” here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It’s just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn’t made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader).
Now let’s take an example more favourable to your theory, where arguably there is a “misplacement”. It happens to be due to the same person who made the “flushed” pun; it purports (not very seriously) to be a quotation, and it goes like this: <<< “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking copse.”—Johnny Appleseed. >>> So, there’s a “misplacement” of sorts here: in some sense “copse” is obviously a mistake for “corpse”, and with that “corrected” one has the sort of thing that (say) rock’n’roll stars might say. On the other hand, there’s a contrasting element of rightness: Johnny Appleseed (as opposed to, say, Johnny Rotten) might indeed advocate leaving a good-looking copse to posterity.
So, does this fit your theory? A “misplacement” (copse for corpse) with some features matching to improve the validity? I don’t think it does. For one thing, unless you’re unusually quick-witted, there is a definite delay between the recognition of wrongness and the recognition of rightness. So at the point where the wrongness is noticed the extra validity (in comparison with a mere mistake) isn’t there. And when does the joke become funny? With the recognition of rightness, not the recognition of wrongness. If it happens to take you a few seconds to see what’s going on, the process goes like this: “Huh? I don’t get it. Has he mis-spelled ‘corpse’? … Ohhhh, I see.” and it’s at the latter part—after any hypothetical status loss—that you will laugh if you appreciate the pun.
But let’s leave all that aside and suppose that somehow your theory can accommodate those facts. What are we left with? Supposedly the pun is funny because it has a bad mistake (“copse” in place of “corpse”) but (because the Johnny Appleseed reference kinda-sorta explains the presence of the word “copse”) enough validity to … well, actually this might be a good point at which to mention that I don’t see where the validity requirement comes from in your just-so story about status loss: surely a low-validity case is a better sign that someone has demonstrated their unsuitability for leadership than a high-validity case. Well, never mind. Enough validity for laughing at the would-be leader not to anger them too much, or something.
But: “I make typos all the time. I see them all the time”. Apparently typographical errors, even when noticed, don’t constitute a serious enough loss of quality to be funny. So why would “copse” in place of “corpse” be suitable joke material, on your theory? It’s no worse an error—no more a sign of incompetence—than my example of “validty” in place of “validity”.
All I’m really doing here is giving more examples where “sudden cleverness” rather than “sudden stupidity” seems to produce humour. And, if I understand correctly, your answer to this is that here we are laughing at ourselves rather than at someone else. Leaving aside the question of whether laughing at oneself can be adaptive if the point of laughter is to indicate to everyone around “look who needs to be low-status” (yeah, maybe it could, just as gracefully losing a dominance fight can be adaptive), it seems to me that there is another big problem with fitting these cases into your theory: There is no substantial falling short of expected quality standards here.
Consider, for instance, the corpse/copse pun. If I’m laughing at myself when I laugh at it, what failure of mine am I laughing at? My brief interval of not seeing what’s going on? Unlikely—the pun is just as funny if seen quickly as if seen slowly, and in any case it’s hardly a shameful sign of low status to take a moment to grasp it. What else? I don’t see it.
Likewise with the kidney beans. What failure in myself am I laughing at if I find it funny to read that a cannibal tribe eats kidney beans when not dining on human kidneys? Again, I don’t see it.
Clowns
Yes, indeed, clowns do more than just dress up in silly clothes. I didn’t intend to suggest otherwise. My point is simply that their pies-to-the-face and comic pratfalls and absurd misunderstandings and whatnot are displays of conspicuous incompetence from people we expect to show conspicuous incompetence. So Qe-Qd in your equation can’t be large because Qe is low to begin with. And yet clowns can be pretty funny.
Novelty
Of course there’s no reason why you should be much concerned with novelty. The only reason I brought it up is that you were saying that your theory, if correct, would “redefine the field”: I don’t think it would.
I feel that puns, when by themselves, all play off of our misplacement instinct. But not all puns are equally funny. Some things are more “out of place” then others. And the more “obscure” your pun, (the more out-of-place) the funnier it will be. (assuming of course that it’s noticeable, low anxiety and the other requirements)
I think I know what you’re saying though. The “flushing” example fits in BOTH places, and thus isn’t “misplaced” by itself in the actual sentence where it’s used.
That’s probably an example of a pun which, by itself, would not be very funny. Something that could be out of place but not really...so you see it as potentially a small chuckle. But if “flushing” had less in common with where it was (rather than fitting in both places), I think it would be funnier.
That “double meaning” or “double placement” in flushing might earn a small chuckle, similar to how you might see a button on a computer that looks like candy and suddenly find yourself feeling a tiny bit hungry.
Obviously this is a subtle case we’re discussing so we might need to speak more.
Yup, you’re absolutely right, I would laugh at that. I think I did correctly see what you’re putting across too. In addition to what I said above, I also feel this is likely the brain’s misplacement instinct being triggered by something that looks VERY much like a misplacement. After the fact of course, you may realize that it’s not misplaced, but laughter is a reflex that serves its purpose by triggering in the moment to allow others to potentially see the fail and adjust their opinion of the social order.
So it senses the potential misplacement and reacts, like how you might feel what you think is a bug on your arm, pull your arm away, then realize it was just a hair. It was the potential thing that caused the reflex.
This is a great thing to bring up.
Typographical errors CAN produce funny, if they are very egregious, or if they get layered with some other fail. Think of the “Autocorrect Fails” that get sent around as memes. You see a correction that ends up making someone say something they really didn’t mean to say and thus makes them look really bad. But a simple missing letter that doesn’t lead to anything else, like “valdty” instead of “validity” is just run of the mill, generally not a surprise at all, and isn’t even layered with any other failure.
If this doesn’t cover it, let me know and I’ll go through the rest of what you said. I don’t want to bury you in too much text so I’ll move on otherwise.
Ah, people WE expect, and I agree that we do expect clowns to do those things. But we as adults don’t laugh as much at clowns as kids do, right? Kids don’t have the same thorough understanding and expectations of the world as adults, so they will buy into certain acts that adults don’t...and clowns naturally perform more often for kids.
I would suggest that once kids have seen quite a few clowns and realize that they’re doing an act, they find the outfit and most of the standard stuff less funny. (though they may still laugh at some of the jokes and so on) Just like how we might laugh at some of the clown’s jokes if we haven’t heard them before, but the outfit and the horn and so on are generally “ho-hum” and not funny. (at least to me).
(obviously some kids are terrified by clowns, etc etc but that’s a separate issue)
I say that mainly because I think it provides a logical reason for both “superiority” and “incongruity” to be found in humor, which relates quite clearly to an evolutionary pressure and has some elegance and simplicity. I’ve found that “uniting theories” like this tend to quickly become the main theories in a field (from what I understand, M-Theory united the 5 or 6 competing forms of string theory and is now by far the main idea)
On top of that, the ability to study jokes using this system and adjust different things to (at least in my testing on myself) make them more and less funny in many different ways is unique enough that it’s called “The Holy Grail of humor studies” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.
Uniting the previous theories under a single elegant umbrella and finding the “holy grail,” in my opinion, would be a pretty major shift in a field of research.