I’m not sure I understand why it’s quality expected minus quality displayed. It seems like something can be funny when you expected low quality and something of high quality is what is observed. Suppose your daughter says she has a drawing to show you, and she hands you something that Michelangelo would have drawn, and you laugh. It definitely seems like you would be laughing at the violation of your expectations, but the quality you expected was low. I guess you can recast it in terms of your expectations about your ability to set your own expectations, but that seems kind of meta and allows for the same flexibility as just putting absolute value signs around that term anyway.
Suppose that your friend is showing you slides from his vacation, and one of the slides is from an exact same location that you took a picture which is somewhat out of context with the rest of his slides, and you laugh. What is causing you to laugh according to this theory, and specifically what quality is being decreased?
Second, you have a section on bullying where you explain why bullying isn’t funny and doesn’t trigger laughter. But the bully and his friends DO laugh when they trip their target or whatever, even if they are a total social outcast already. How is that explained by the theory? It would seem like a stretch to say that the bullies themselves see some sort of quality in the target and that lowering that quality is what causes it to be funny, when the point of your argument is that even other people don’t laugh because the target is known to have low quality.
All in all, a very interesting read and I think there is an interesting idea here.
The first example is first-person laughter, where you laugh at yourself for your own expectations turning out to be so wrong, similar to looking for your phone then realizing you’re on the phone already. I would hope this doesn’t seem like a forced explanation (apologies if it does). We have standards about what we ourselves are capable of, and oftentimes we find out that we were way off-base. I like the example of finding out that you already had your phone because there’s no one else involved and it hopefully thus isolates the issue and demonstrates clearly that you can laugh purely as a result of realizing your own errors.
The second example is a good one, and that’s something that I had to think about a lot. I eventually noticed that those incidents result from a misplacement, which almost always comes from something that has something in common with their surroundings but are noticeably out of place. I think that most often these are combined with some other source of humor, like the misplacement being combined with someone else’s mess-up, or a reminder of a mess-up, or laughing at someone’s bad pun.
I wrote a bit more on this in the papers, right now I’m trying to do several different things so sorry if my explanation of that is jumbled (especially because that’s one of the most important and least straightforward aspects).
In regards to bullies laughing at the target, I think it involves them not feeling anxiety at the target’s misfortune, and usually their laughter (I say usually because I’m not in their brains so I can’t totally dissect or make concrete statements), seems to come from pushing the victim to new lows, like making them carry their bags or embarrassing them in new ways. This would put them below whatever quality-expectation the bully has of them. (apologies here, an expectation of very little quality is still a “quality expectation,” sorry if the word “quality” sounds like it always means something above average. I know the word is sometimes used that way.)
The first example is first-person laughter, where you laugh at yourself for your own expectations turning out to be so wrong, similar to looking for your phone then realizing you’re on the phone already.
This sounds fishy. In particular, it seems like a very ad hoc way to shoehorn a category of joke that doesn’t quite fit into your theory—which is a failure mode that seems common to theories of humour.
This is actually pretty easy to demonstrate though. You can laugh at your own expectations failing when you’re alone, as per the phone example. So we KNOW this can happen.
Now, let’s change the expectation, and we can see clearly that the laughter will change or disappear. For example, when I look at Da Vinci’s notebook, who I obviously think of as an amazing artist, I don’t laugh the least bit at the quality of the drawings contained within, and no one that I know of looks at Da Vinci’s notebooks and the amazing quality of his thought as a source of comedy. The different aspect that creates the humor in the case is your own expectations turning out to be wrong.
We know this can cause humor by itself, and we know it’s here in this case, so the theory addresses it quite clearly and it seems very well defined as laughter at the self.
Here’s one more piece of information that strongly indicates this...
Here, Michael Jordan, in his mid-30′s, dunks on a center, and it makes the commentator laugh. Notice what he says...”Excuse me! I’m sorry!” In other words, apologizing for his own statement or belief that Jordan was no longer capable of that. He’s laughing at how wrong he himself just turned out to be.
(having said that, there is a separate emotional reaction that’s triggered when someone’s ability surpasses expectations, which I have as a solution to another classic “mystery” of human behavior, but that’s for another topic)
There may be such a thing as first-person laughter (laughing at yourself for having a mistaken expectation), but my point is that it seems like a stretch to say that the examples 9eB1 gave fit that pattern (though perhaps your phone example does).
I’m working on a longer comment in which I’ll explain my points in more detail.
Well unfortunately we can’t reach into each other’s brains and experiment on the situations. I’ve dissected my own humorous laughter relentlessly to find these things, so I have to make some assumptions or estimations when discussing what makes other people laugh...especially given anecotes that naturally have limited information.
Does the Youtube video help demonstrate the general principle I’m referencing though? That the commentator laughs after the dunk, but does so as he says “Excuse me, I’m sorry!” as a clear reference to he himself turning out to be wrong...?
I’m not sure I understand why it’s quality expected minus quality displayed. It seems like something can be funny when you expected low quality and something of high quality is what is observed. Suppose your daughter says she has a drawing to show you, and she hands you something that Michelangelo would have drawn, and you laugh. It definitely seems like you would be laughing at the violation of your expectations, but the quality you expected was low. I guess you can recast it in terms of your expectations about your ability to set your own expectations, but that seems kind of meta and allows for the same flexibility as just putting absolute value signs around that term anyway.
Suppose that your friend is showing you slides from his vacation, and one of the slides is from an exact same location that you took a picture which is somewhat out of context with the rest of his slides, and you laugh. What is causing you to laugh according to this theory, and specifically what quality is being decreased?
Second, you have a section on bullying where you explain why bullying isn’t funny and doesn’t trigger laughter. But the bully and his friends DO laugh when they trip their target or whatever, even if they are a total social outcast already. How is that explained by the theory? It would seem like a stretch to say that the bullies themselves see some sort of quality in the target and that lowering that quality is what causes it to be funny, when the point of your argument is that even other people don’t laugh because the target is known to have low quality.
All in all, a very interesting read and I think there is an interesting idea here.
Hi 9e,
The first example is first-person laughter, where you laugh at yourself for your own expectations turning out to be so wrong, similar to looking for your phone then realizing you’re on the phone already. I would hope this doesn’t seem like a forced explanation (apologies if it does). We have standards about what we ourselves are capable of, and oftentimes we find out that we were way off-base. I like the example of finding out that you already had your phone because there’s no one else involved and it hopefully thus isolates the issue and demonstrates clearly that you can laugh purely as a result of realizing your own errors.
The second example is a good one, and that’s something that I had to think about a lot. I eventually noticed that those incidents result from a misplacement, which almost always comes from something that has something in common with their surroundings but are noticeably out of place. I think that most often these are combined with some other source of humor, like the misplacement being combined with someone else’s mess-up, or a reminder of a mess-up, or laughing at someone’s bad pun.
I wrote a bit more on this in the papers, right now I’m trying to do several different things so sorry if my explanation of that is jumbled (especially because that’s one of the most important and least straightforward aspects).
In regards to bullies laughing at the target, I think it involves them not feeling anxiety at the target’s misfortune, and usually their laughter (I say usually because I’m not in their brains so I can’t totally dissect or make concrete statements), seems to come from pushing the victim to new lows, like making them carry their bags or embarrassing them in new ways. This would put them below whatever quality-expectation the bully has of them. (apologies here, an expectation of very little quality is still a “quality expectation,” sorry if the word “quality” sounds like it always means something above average. I know the word is sometimes used that way.)
This sounds fishy. In particular, it seems like a very ad hoc way to shoehorn a category of joke that doesn’t quite fit into your theory—which is a failure mode that seems common to theories of humour.
This is actually pretty easy to demonstrate though. You can laugh at your own expectations failing when you’re alone, as per the phone example. So we KNOW this can happen.
Now, let’s change the expectation, and we can see clearly that the laughter will change or disappear. For example, when I look at Da Vinci’s notebook, who I obviously think of as an amazing artist, I don’t laugh the least bit at the quality of the drawings contained within, and no one that I know of looks at Da Vinci’s notebooks and the amazing quality of his thought as a source of comedy. The different aspect that creates the humor in the case is your own expectations turning out to be wrong.
We know this can cause humor by itself, and we know it’s here in this case, so the theory addresses it quite clearly and it seems very well defined as laughter at the self.
Here’s one more piece of information that strongly indicates this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww2d_o0N62w
Here, Michael Jordan, in his mid-30′s, dunks on a center, and it makes the commentator laugh. Notice what he says...”Excuse me! I’m sorry!” In other words, apologizing for his own statement or belief that Jordan was no longer capable of that. He’s laughing at how wrong he himself just turned out to be.
(having said that, there is a separate emotional reaction that’s triggered when someone’s ability surpasses expectations, which I have as a solution to another classic “mystery” of human behavior, but that’s for another topic)
There may be such a thing as first-person laughter (laughing at yourself for having a mistaken expectation), but my point is that it seems like a stretch to say that the examples 9eB1 gave fit that pattern (though perhaps your phone example does).
I’m working on a longer comment in which I’ll explain my points in more detail.
Well unfortunately we can’t reach into each other’s brains and experiment on the situations. I’ve dissected my own humorous laughter relentlessly to find these things, so I have to make some assumptions or estimations when discussing what makes other people laugh...especially given anecotes that naturally have limited information.
Does the Youtube video help demonstrate the general principle I’m referencing though? That the commentator laughs after the dunk, but does so as he says “Excuse me, I’m sorry!” as a clear reference to he himself turning out to be wrong...?