Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
FUNNY THEORIES
3
How do we spot humor?
Freud on Humor
1) Incongruity
2) 2 part: recognize and resolve incongruity; “click” of getting it
3) Playful rather than serious—listener must feel safe
4) Incongruity is subjective
(Comic Effects Paul Lewis)
FUNNY THEORIES
Bergeson on Humor
Some Humorous Encounters
In what ways does the humor presented strengthen social bonds?
What sort of release from constrictions is offered by the humor?
If the humor is more chiding, what social function is it supporting?
If the humor reveals “unspeakable” truths, what truths? how?
Henri Bergson’s "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic" (1900) states that humor is a social tool by which we mildly scold each other for being insufficiently adaptive and flexible. On this account, the paradigm of humor is the absent-minded person, but any form of idiocy or freakishness or social ineptness also works: what’s funny is the disconnect between the logic of the clown’s behavior and what’s actually called for socially in the situation.
One key way such a disconnect can be brought about is through the divergence of body and spirit, or more generally between one’s intent and an opposing material reality. So a minister farting while giving a sermon would be especially funny.
(http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/05/03/topic57/)
Sigmund Freud argued that what is repressed returns to haunt us in disguise. Jokes, like dreams and slips of the tongue, bear the traces of repressed desires. Sexual and aggressive thoughts, which are forbidden in polite society, can be shared as if they are not serious. Humour then becomes a way of rebelling against the demands of social order. As Freud wrote in a later essay, ‘humour is not resigned; it is rebellious’ (1927/1990, p.429).
(http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_15-editionID_84-ArticleID_453-getfile_getPDF/thepsychologist%5Csep02billig.pdf)