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Encyclopedia of Humor Studies
The Encyclopedia of Humor: A Social History explores the concept of humor in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. This work’s scope encompasses the humor of children, adults, and even nonhuman primates throughout the ages, from crude jokes and simple slapstick to sophisticated word play and ironic parody and satire. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, child development, social psychology, life style history, communication, and entertainment media. Readers will develop an understanding of the importance of humor as it has developed globally throughout history and appreciate its effects on child and adult development, especially in the areas of health, creativity, social development, and imagination. This two-volume set is available in both print and electronic formats.
Features & Benefits: This two-volume, A-to-Z set provides a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers in such diverse fields as communication and media studies, sociology and anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, history, literature and linguistics, and popular culture and folklore.
Features & Benefits: This two-volume, A-to-Z set provides a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers in such diverse fields as communication and media studies, sociology and anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, history, literature and linguistics, and popular culture and folklore.
984 pages, Hardcover
First published March 18, 2014
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About the author
Salvatore Attardo
22 books3 followersSalvatore Attardo holds a PhD in English/Linguistics from Purdue University. He is the Head of the department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas A&M – Commerce. He has authored two monographs (Linguistic Theories of Humor, 1994, and Humorous Texts, 2001, both published by Mouton De Gruyter) and a sociolinguistics textbook, co-authored with Steven Brown (Understanding Language Structure, Interaction and Variation, University of Michigan Press 2000, 2nd ed, 2005), as well as numerous articles on semantics, pragmatics, and humor research. He is the Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research.
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November 28, 2025
The editor of this book created the General Theory of Verbal Humor (1991). Building on Victor Raskin's Semantic Scripts Theory, the GTVH is a theory of jokes, claiming to extend to other genres. Like semantic scripts, it has almost no originality, and enables linguistics to academically sanction the false incongruity theory. It takes up no psychological questions, and only externally describes content. The forms and verbal structures of linguistic humor, in fact, surpass the GTVH. But the problem is not that such theories are descriptive, but that they are not sufficiently so, and are too prescriptive.
The prime example of misplaced prescriptive schemas is the incongruity theory. It is an extremely influential idea involving both triviality and falsehood, and is an era that must end. It misdefines incongruity in humor and ignores many differences. In the dominant model, often called appropriate incongruity, a sign or thing fits and does not fit a context as in a pun. Seeming too specific, this describes all humor, even non-verbal in an implicit way not normally noticed. Yet it is so broad as to be not unique to humor, matching a general idea called bisociation, so it has counterexamples and is not a sufficient condition for humor.
While the incongruity theory is falsely held together by the above inert structural concept, yet there are further reasons the view lacks a connection between linguistic and non-linguistic. First, the theory scants this difference. (A) In most non-linguistic humor, power and weakness are not invertible, even where desire or the body is a soft spot and humor targets the human as pretension. Whereas, (B) in a pun, adding to its own ambiguity is that either meaning can always be seen as superior to the other, based only on structure, and the weakness is specific, the concept of habit. Second, incongruity theory holds that perceived humor content directly elicits a response, when instead the content is a signifier of the notion of deception. Thus the incongruity theory lacks the two roles it could have--it is not compositional, and not psychological.
A narrow-scope, mentally-caused deception is the only inherently humorous idea, intuitively. Externally imposed deception derives humor by resembling one that is more innate. Both of those types are accidental, however, and accident is a metonym for the responsible, thus self-deception is the essence. A comedian is not self-deceived but they always present or allude to this. Self-deception in humor is about amoral, practical power, not, e.g., morality or status unless the latter are somehow regarded as though pragmatic.
A simpler version of incongruity theory states that humor "violates our expectations." Many violated expectations don't seem humorous, yet surprises that are sudden, and the most incongruous, appear always to directly cause humor unless something overrides them. Such humor is mainly non-linguistic, or a surprise aspect secondary to the linguistic. But these do not support the incongruity theory, since (1) the incongruity is really a lack of power or a challenge to power, and (2) it is not the direct stimulus in humor. Suddenness, however, by definition necessary in a verbal joke, has no universal link to humorous surprise. Mock violence, also not humor's essence, is often sudden. Suddenness has humor by association with awakening, typical of the sudden yet not exclusively.
The horrible or terrible can override humor, yet that does not affect the incongruity theory. Instead, the necessary critique is to indicate that, by breaking deception, surprise is a metonym for that state. Critics of the incongruity theory eagerly point to terrible surprises as counterexamples but these are extraneous and subjective. While a moral topic, this is irrelevant to the incongruity theory's descriptive claims. Philosophers, considering the terrible or horrible as problematic, propose humor is enjoyed violations of expectation. But pleasure in humor comes from inherent objective qualities. An idea being defined is not further clarified by a proviso against its own disruption. And as John Morreall observes, pleasure in surprise includes, e.g., tragedy. Instead of retaining or adding to the "unexpected," one is to critique that idea directly.
But even creatively, humor theory cannot rule out pain. Humor appears in horror, and may be felt by an individual victim of bullying, though this can be immoral--or in the mutual kind. It's most obvious that fear and sadness are irrelevant to humor, where such ideas ruin a happy humorous surprise. Whereas, in self-deprecating humor, or directed at one's own unhappy surprise, one sees oneself as other. Debate has, then, missed the point. Theorists adjust, adding other concepts, e.g., the playful, mentioned in this encyclopedia (p. 384). Yet the way forward for theory is to redefine incongruity and show that, although humor foregrounds surprise, the privilege of surprise does not make it the essence.
It is thus awkward that the author of the Benign Violation Theory uses the status quo critical method. He notes "violations" can be too great or too small, and claims humor is in between. He doesn't clarify the nature of violations, but the theory, not of value for defining humor, has ethical merit. The author seems vaguely aware his theory is not about humor's essence but prescriptive, and about adjusting for potential controversy in humor, a moral problem the benign violation theory addresses. Falsely extending this to description, the theory confuses the level of toleration of insult with its humorous substance; these are not the same. Also, many contrary dual emotions are not humorous, and again, dark humor is incompatible with the theory. Still, adherents are unconcerned even knowing those points--as though satisfied that humor merely partakes of this broad idea. The narrow focus on semi-violent play is very limited. As the theory emphasizes, tickling is unfunny when rejected. But tickling gestures at an autonomous sensory meridian response--known as ASMR. It caricatures that technique, and what is humorous about such things is their association with intoxication or deception. When the receiver rejects, this is extraneous to the humor.
Both the BVT and incongruity theory focus on the non-mental in the content of humor. The essence of that content is in fact mental--and some theories have faint insight into this. "Violation of expectation," e.g., despite vagueness, describes conditions relating to self-deception. Critics will say we can find humor in what we expect, removing deception, but humor is the idea of deception, not necessarily our deception. The incongruity theory oversimplifies deception in linguistic humor, calling puzzlement at any phase "incongruity." Rather, in a linguistic joke either of two meanings is the analogue of vulnerable habit, an idea associated with self-deception, the butt of all humor. One or both meanings can be conventional, whether figurative or literal, and either can evoke habit. Thus a meaning in conflict with the other evokes an individual sort of habit if it is unconventional. For instance, in "When is a door not a door?" the punchline "when it's ajar" has some version of this effect. While spontaneity per se is not power, yet it is seen as power in either a standard reply or the improvised. Whereas power difference itself is unequivocal.
There is, however, such fragmentation in "violation of expectation" in non-linguistic humor. The former refers vaguely to (1) power or weakness upsetting deception or (2) contrasts between power and weakness. But "violation of expectation" cannot acknowledge the difference in (1), and is oddly disinterested. It privileges neither violation nor expectation as power, while it doesn't explain that power can be violation and weakness expectation, and vice versa. What violates or expects in humor is power or weakness, whether we occupy those positions or observe neutrally. Our stake in power may be itself humorous when speaking of it ironically. Or it can be irrelevant, in any act of ridicule or the detachment of self-deprecating humor. Yet violation and expectation in humor vary in the foregoing ways. The different viewpoints of expectation also show that incongruity is the contrast between power and non-power. This departs from the incongruity theory, as power difference does not appear directly in all humor.
The theory thus misses the only idea that "humorous incongruity" can denote: difference in power. Power difference does more to self-deception than overturn it. It also reminds us of self-deception. The more direct inherently humorous idea is deception, which elicits mental imitation. While deception is a mental power difference, the response to humor doesn't imitate all power differences, but only deception, that other such differences signify. Power difference--incongruity--is a metonym for deception, but interpreted as self-deception.
Incongruity is a relation rather than an object. But the contrary to the incongruous thing can be a thing, even if only implicitly--instead of the norm the incongruous violates, or affirms. This is one way to clarify that incongruity is not only one side of power difference. The incongruity theory (1) neglects that incongruity may be power or the powerless, and (2) extends incongruity to linguistic humor without sense, relying on the abstraction of appropriate incongruity.
The incongruity theory arose when James Beattie united Francis Hutcheson's object-based "contrasts," which were power differences, with linguistic incongruity. The result cannot be made sense of. It notes those two incongruities, different in perception and compositional area, yet presents them as if identical and as neither composition nor psychology. It is, then, a mirage, dodging all these tasks. Only power difference warrants the term incongruity--not by resemblance to the verbal. And it is an insufficient condition, just as Hutcheson's incongruity was prescriptive. These grounds are more than sufficient for a paradigm shift. One cannot change the status quo autocratically, yet it cannot remain in an epistemic bubble. One philosopher, Roger Scruton, emphasized the counterexample of congruity, while another, Ted Cohen, rejected all universal humor theories. But the methods have a comeback in the present alternative.
Difference in power creates humor, e.g., in events. Humorous surprise, of which the main involves losing or erring, evokes self-deception and is not power-neutral. Conversely, happy surprise can be more than one's own shock or the ridicule of others. Sudden safety suggests presumption of danger, while sudden power--if sufficient--creates humor about unearned success. In the comical death of the other, ridicule shifts to them. Humor in getting a joke is distinct from the joke's humor.
One may argue that power difference is too general, that it can be unfunny, ruling out extraneous emotion. Yet while self-deception is the more direct humor element, such self-deception is epitomized by ignoring others in close confrontation. As Richard Taflinger asserts, humor is human; he mentions how we see animals as if they pretend to be like us. But also, a ridiculous human elevates himself to a petty height. Thus while pettiness is pretension of the great, it is also how, e.g., the comic character acting oblivious to dangers, portrays mere social disregard. In National Lampoon's American Vacation, Clark Griswold crashes through a construction sign in the desert just as he says ironically there is no big sign "like this one." Emasculation explains the humor of mock epic, but many other juxtapositions. These often form a mind-versus-body humor that, unlike that of sexual or vulnerable-body humor, does have invertible power difference. Woody Allen, in his 1975 book Without Feathers, speaks of the mafia's use of office supplies--though he says they "spend very little" on them. In this dichotomy of mind and body as in a wider category that includes it, either side can be taken as the signifier of power--whereas, Gilles Deleuze considered both sides degraded.
Power difference explains the comic theory of Henri Bergson. A power-based vitalism underlies his idea of a "mechanical encrusted on the living," a seeming power difference. Yet, ironically, it is closer to linguistic humor and poorly explains all other types. In non-jokes, Bergson's 'living' is the sometime spontaneity of power which he presumes will unite all the "comic." Whereas, Bergson's extension of his schema into linguistic humor exhibits the same prescriptive, compositional fallacy as the incongruity theory. Instead, verbal idiom and convention suggest either habit or the very opposite.
The irrelevance of "incongruity" is not, then, determined by counterexamples of congruity, that are sophisms. Congruity can be incongruity, as a pratfall may be expected or repeated. Coincidence is also a congruity as incongruity. What is humorous in coincidence is surprise meeting or experience, and the sense is that nature represents what would otherwise be the person responsible.
The incongruity theory disregards causation. A universal theory of humor is not for composition but is causal, to explain the response. That requires a proximate stimulus, which happens to be mental. There are counterexamples of the appropriate incongruity alleged to comprise humor. This idea appears in humor where it is not itself the source of humor. There is humor, e.g., in abstract painting in the idea that it is non-technical--but not in its sheer resemblance to randomness. Appropriate incongruity appears as a failed attempt to specify incongruity.
Concerning linguistic humor, the incongruity theory reduces puns to their deciphering. If getting a joke is humor, there is no joke per se, only its comprehension. So the theory treats jokes as an inert heuristic as also other humor. To perceive appropriate incongruity is to forget immediate incongruity. This is a stronger criticism than to say, e.g., that jokes can "have predictable punchlines." But the theory is not saved by variation renewing a joke. Ironically, here the theory is most vulnerable--the audience is directly deceived.
The main sense of puns is in a way like a banana peel that causes a slip, yet with a crucial difference. For again, vulnerable habit can be assigned to either meaning. The pope, asked how many work at the Vatican, quipped, "Oh, no more than half of them." Most pun-based jokes have this sense, as does one from Chris Tucker, "as a kid I had a real obsession with Posh Spice--which cost my mother a fortune in saffron." In one joke, a hunter accidentally kills his friend and is told by EMS, "first make sure he's dead." He misreads this and fires a shot, noted by the punchline.
But the other type of pun evokes cultural exclusion, where the Griswolds visit Germany and France in European Vacation. Here, social alienation exhausts the humor of language, in real-life examples as well as literary. But language substitution is not always a pun, and can be irony, typical of The New Yorker. In a July, 2021 cartoon, two girlfriends meet and one suggests they get together "to cancel plans last minute sometime."
There is a class of jokes in which puns create a bait-and-switch insult as in roasts and sitcoms: "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book" (Groucho Marx). Often such humor is more linguistic; Matthew Broussard's roast opponent says Matthew has more "dead pilots," i.e., cancelled TV productions, than 9/11.
It is, then, misguided to explain jokes as "incongruity resolution"--which really means discovery of appropriate incongruity. The resolution is recognition of ambiguous language which, though not inherently humorous, leads to such a concept. Before that, what appears to be nonsense could be called incongruity, but there is no reason to do so unless it had to do with humor, which it does not. Humorous incongruity has one meaning, rather than both undeciphered and deciphered. In fact, it means neither. But the incongruity theory has it mean both.
Incongruity is misapplied not only in linguistic humor, but again, in all. In non-linguistic, incongruity is difference in power. Thus if an animal is personified, no one says the incongruity is resolved, though they could, reasonably: by the very fact the animal has limbs and a face analogous to a human. But that resemblance is not normally perceived as incongruity resolution. Instead it evokes self-deception--pretending to be a human.
There is a difference between prescriptive and non-prescriptive theories. A theory of humor must be either descriptive by explaining stimulus and response, or prescriptive as though for composition, or both. The incongruity theory is not descriptive but cannot be prescriptive, either. Incongruity and resolution describe humor, ostensibly both in a functional way, and formally. The incongruity theory is, therefore, not descriptive or prescriptive.
A universal theory of humor is explanatory-causal, not composition-based. Even power difference cannot explain humor's response, because the proximate cause is not a form or object, nor an act of comprehension. It is a mental quality, self-deception, alluded to directly or indirectly. Whereas, the perceivable content is a more ultimate cause, leading us to think of self-deception, vaguely. A theory explaining these issues deals with stimulus and response in a way prescriptive theory cannot. The universal theory can aid composition somewhat. But mainly it gives the necessary and sufficient cognitive condition, as a particular mental quality.
The most important theory of humor is that it signifies self-deception in all cases, e.g., by power difference. Relief and superiority theories, first intended as theories of why humor is funny, are actually theories of secondary uses of humor--as is well known in this field today.
To take a playful attitude toward any incongruity is not thereby to experience humor. One may rule out the "abusive parent" counterexample of Alexander Bain (1818-1903), in that something extraneous ruins it, but in fact the abusive parent is comedy. As in Archie Bunker of All In The Family, it is invoked in the biography of Balzac by Stefan Zweig in Balzac's mother, and by Franz-Josef Murau's mother in Thomas Bernhard's novel, Extinction. These two are cold and hateful, yet the effect is comedy. There are also fallacies in Bain's other counterexamples, including "decrepit man under a heavy burden," and "an instrument out of tune."
The prime example of misplaced prescriptive schemas is the incongruity theory. It is an extremely influential idea involving both triviality and falsehood, and is an era that must end. It misdefines incongruity in humor and ignores many differences. In the dominant model, often called appropriate incongruity, a sign or thing fits and does not fit a context as in a pun. Seeming too specific, this describes all humor, even non-verbal in an implicit way not normally noticed. Yet it is so broad as to be not unique to humor, matching a general idea called bisociation, so it has counterexamples and is not a sufficient condition for humor.
While the incongruity theory is falsely held together by the above inert structural concept, yet there are further reasons the view lacks a connection between linguistic and non-linguistic. First, the theory scants this difference. (A) In most non-linguistic humor, power and weakness are not invertible, even where desire or the body is a soft spot and humor targets the human as pretension. Whereas, (B) in a pun, adding to its own ambiguity is that either meaning can always be seen as superior to the other, based only on structure, and the weakness is specific, the concept of habit. Second, incongruity theory holds that perceived humor content directly elicits a response, when instead the content is a signifier of the notion of deception. Thus the incongruity theory lacks the two roles it could have--it is not compositional, and not psychological.
A narrow-scope, mentally-caused deception is the only inherently humorous idea, intuitively. Externally imposed deception derives humor by resembling one that is more innate. Both of those types are accidental, however, and accident is a metonym for the responsible, thus self-deception is the essence. A comedian is not self-deceived but they always present or allude to this. Self-deception in humor is about amoral, practical power, not, e.g., morality or status unless the latter are somehow regarded as though pragmatic.
A simpler version of incongruity theory states that humor "violates our expectations." Many violated expectations don't seem humorous, yet surprises that are sudden, and the most incongruous, appear always to directly cause humor unless something overrides them. Such humor is mainly non-linguistic, or a surprise aspect secondary to the linguistic. But these do not support the incongruity theory, since (1) the incongruity is really a lack of power or a challenge to power, and (2) it is not the direct stimulus in humor. Suddenness, however, by definition necessary in a verbal joke, has no universal link to humorous surprise. Mock violence, also not humor's essence, is often sudden. Suddenness has humor by association with awakening, typical of the sudden yet not exclusively.
The horrible or terrible can override humor, yet that does not affect the incongruity theory. Instead, the necessary critique is to indicate that, by breaking deception, surprise is a metonym for that state. Critics of the incongruity theory eagerly point to terrible surprises as counterexamples but these are extraneous and subjective. While a moral topic, this is irrelevant to the incongruity theory's descriptive claims. Philosophers, considering the terrible or horrible as problematic, propose humor is enjoyed violations of expectation. But pleasure in humor comes from inherent objective qualities. An idea being defined is not further clarified by a proviso against its own disruption. And as John Morreall observes, pleasure in surprise includes, e.g., tragedy. Instead of retaining or adding to the "unexpected," one is to critique that idea directly.
But even creatively, humor theory cannot rule out pain. Humor appears in horror, and may be felt by an individual victim of bullying, though this can be immoral--or in the mutual kind. It's most obvious that fear and sadness are irrelevant to humor, where such ideas ruin a happy humorous surprise. Whereas, in self-deprecating humor, or directed at one's own unhappy surprise, one sees oneself as other. Debate has, then, missed the point. Theorists adjust, adding other concepts, e.g., the playful, mentioned in this encyclopedia (p. 384). Yet the way forward for theory is to redefine incongruity and show that, although humor foregrounds surprise, the privilege of surprise does not make it the essence.
It is thus awkward that the author of the Benign Violation Theory uses the status quo critical method. He notes "violations" can be too great or too small, and claims humor is in between. He doesn't clarify the nature of violations, but the theory, not of value for defining humor, has ethical merit. The author seems vaguely aware his theory is not about humor's essence but prescriptive, and about adjusting for potential controversy in humor, a moral problem the benign violation theory addresses. Falsely extending this to description, the theory confuses the level of toleration of insult with its humorous substance; these are not the same. Also, many contrary dual emotions are not humorous, and again, dark humor is incompatible with the theory. Still, adherents are unconcerned even knowing those points--as though satisfied that humor merely partakes of this broad idea. The narrow focus on semi-violent play is very limited. As the theory emphasizes, tickling is unfunny when rejected. But tickling gestures at an autonomous sensory meridian response--known as ASMR. It caricatures that technique, and what is humorous about such things is their association with intoxication or deception. When the receiver rejects, this is extraneous to the humor.
Both the BVT and incongruity theory focus on the non-mental in the content of humor. The essence of that content is in fact mental--and some theories have faint insight into this. "Violation of expectation," e.g., despite vagueness, describes conditions relating to self-deception. Critics will say we can find humor in what we expect, removing deception, but humor is the idea of deception, not necessarily our deception. The incongruity theory oversimplifies deception in linguistic humor, calling puzzlement at any phase "incongruity." Rather, in a linguistic joke either of two meanings is the analogue of vulnerable habit, an idea associated with self-deception, the butt of all humor. One or both meanings can be conventional, whether figurative or literal, and either can evoke habit. Thus a meaning in conflict with the other evokes an individual sort of habit if it is unconventional. For instance, in "When is a door not a door?" the punchline "when it's ajar" has some version of this effect. While spontaneity per se is not power, yet it is seen as power in either a standard reply or the improvised. Whereas power difference itself is unequivocal.
There is, however, such fragmentation in "violation of expectation" in non-linguistic humor. The former refers vaguely to (1) power or weakness upsetting deception or (2) contrasts between power and weakness. But "violation of expectation" cannot acknowledge the difference in (1), and is oddly disinterested. It privileges neither violation nor expectation as power, while it doesn't explain that power can be violation and weakness expectation, and vice versa. What violates or expects in humor is power or weakness, whether we occupy those positions or observe neutrally. Our stake in power may be itself humorous when speaking of it ironically. Or it can be irrelevant, in any act of ridicule or the detachment of self-deprecating humor. Yet violation and expectation in humor vary in the foregoing ways. The different viewpoints of expectation also show that incongruity is the contrast between power and non-power. This departs from the incongruity theory, as power difference does not appear directly in all humor.
The theory thus misses the only idea that "humorous incongruity" can denote: difference in power. Power difference does more to self-deception than overturn it. It also reminds us of self-deception. The more direct inherently humorous idea is deception, which elicits mental imitation. While deception is a mental power difference, the response to humor doesn't imitate all power differences, but only deception, that other such differences signify. Power difference--incongruity--is a metonym for deception, but interpreted as self-deception.
Incongruity is a relation rather than an object. But the contrary to the incongruous thing can be a thing, even if only implicitly--instead of the norm the incongruous violates, or affirms. This is one way to clarify that incongruity is not only one side of power difference. The incongruity theory (1) neglects that incongruity may be power or the powerless, and (2) extends incongruity to linguistic humor without sense, relying on the abstraction of appropriate incongruity.
The incongruity theory arose when James Beattie united Francis Hutcheson's object-based "contrasts," which were power differences, with linguistic incongruity. The result cannot be made sense of. It notes those two incongruities, different in perception and compositional area, yet presents them as if identical and as neither composition nor psychology. It is, then, a mirage, dodging all these tasks. Only power difference warrants the term incongruity--not by resemblance to the verbal. And it is an insufficient condition, just as Hutcheson's incongruity was prescriptive. These grounds are more than sufficient for a paradigm shift. One cannot change the status quo autocratically, yet it cannot remain in an epistemic bubble. One philosopher, Roger Scruton, emphasized the counterexample of congruity, while another, Ted Cohen, rejected all universal humor theories. But the methods have a comeback in the present alternative.
Difference in power creates humor, e.g., in events. Humorous surprise, of which the main involves losing or erring, evokes self-deception and is not power-neutral. Conversely, happy surprise can be more than one's own shock or the ridicule of others. Sudden safety suggests presumption of danger, while sudden power--if sufficient--creates humor about unearned success. In the comical death of the other, ridicule shifts to them. Humor in getting a joke is distinct from the joke's humor.
One may argue that power difference is too general, that it can be unfunny, ruling out extraneous emotion. Yet while self-deception is the more direct humor element, such self-deception is epitomized by ignoring others in close confrontation. As Richard Taflinger asserts, humor is human; he mentions how we see animals as if they pretend to be like us. But also, a ridiculous human elevates himself to a petty height. Thus while pettiness is pretension of the great, it is also how, e.g., the comic character acting oblivious to dangers, portrays mere social disregard. In National Lampoon's American Vacation, Clark Griswold crashes through a construction sign in the desert just as he says ironically there is no big sign "like this one." Emasculation explains the humor of mock epic, but many other juxtapositions. These often form a mind-versus-body humor that, unlike that of sexual or vulnerable-body humor, does have invertible power difference. Woody Allen, in his 1975 book Without Feathers, speaks of the mafia's use of office supplies--though he says they "spend very little" on them. In this dichotomy of mind and body as in a wider category that includes it, either side can be taken as the signifier of power--whereas, Gilles Deleuze considered both sides degraded.
Power difference explains the comic theory of Henri Bergson. A power-based vitalism underlies his idea of a "mechanical encrusted on the living," a seeming power difference. Yet, ironically, it is closer to linguistic humor and poorly explains all other types. In non-jokes, Bergson's 'living' is the sometime spontaneity of power which he presumes will unite all the "comic." Whereas, Bergson's extension of his schema into linguistic humor exhibits the same prescriptive, compositional fallacy as the incongruity theory. Instead, verbal idiom and convention suggest either habit or the very opposite.
The irrelevance of "incongruity" is not, then, determined by counterexamples of congruity, that are sophisms. Congruity can be incongruity, as a pratfall may be expected or repeated. Coincidence is also a congruity as incongruity. What is humorous in coincidence is surprise meeting or experience, and the sense is that nature represents what would otherwise be the person responsible.
The incongruity theory disregards causation. A universal theory of humor is not for composition but is causal, to explain the response. That requires a proximate stimulus, which happens to be mental. There are counterexamples of the appropriate incongruity alleged to comprise humor. This idea appears in humor where it is not itself the source of humor. There is humor, e.g., in abstract painting in the idea that it is non-technical--but not in its sheer resemblance to randomness. Appropriate incongruity appears as a failed attempt to specify incongruity.
Concerning linguistic humor, the incongruity theory reduces puns to their deciphering. If getting a joke is humor, there is no joke per se, only its comprehension. So the theory treats jokes as an inert heuristic as also other humor. To perceive appropriate incongruity is to forget immediate incongruity. This is a stronger criticism than to say, e.g., that jokes can "have predictable punchlines." But the theory is not saved by variation renewing a joke. Ironically, here the theory is most vulnerable--the audience is directly deceived.
The main sense of puns is in a way like a banana peel that causes a slip, yet with a crucial difference. For again, vulnerable habit can be assigned to either meaning. The pope, asked how many work at the Vatican, quipped, "Oh, no more than half of them." Most pun-based jokes have this sense, as does one from Chris Tucker, "as a kid I had a real obsession with Posh Spice--which cost my mother a fortune in saffron." In one joke, a hunter accidentally kills his friend and is told by EMS, "first make sure he's dead." He misreads this and fires a shot, noted by the punchline.
But the other type of pun evokes cultural exclusion, where the Griswolds visit Germany and France in European Vacation. Here, social alienation exhausts the humor of language, in real-life examples as well as literary. But language substitution is not always a pun, and can be irony, typical of The New Yorker. In a July, 2021 cartoon, two girlfriends meet and one suggests they get together "to cancel plans last minute sometime."
There is a class of jokes in which puns create a bait-and-switch insult as in roasts and sitcoms: "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book" (Groucho Marx). Often such humor is more linguistic; Matthew Broussard's roast opponent says Matthew has more "dead pilots," i.e., cancelled TV productions, than 9/11.
It is, then, misguided to explain jokes as "incongruity resolution"--which really means discovery of appropriate incongruity. The resolution is recognition of ambiguous language which, though not inherently humorous, leads to such a concept. Before that, what appears to be nonsense could be called incongruity, but there is no reason to do so unless it had to do with humor, which it does not. Humorous incongruity has one meaning, rather than both undeciphered and deciphered. In fact, it means neither. But the incongruity theory has it mean both.
Incongruity is misapplied not only in linguistic humor, but again, in all. In non-linguistic, incongruity is difference in power. Thus if an animal is personified, no one says the incongruity is resolved, though they could, reasonably: by the very fact the animal has limbs and a face analogous to a human. But that resemblance is not normally perceived as incongruity resolution. Instead it evokes self-deception--pretending to be a human.
There is a difference between prescriptive and non-prescriptive theories. A theory of humor must be either descriptive by explaining stimulus and response, or prescriptive as though for composition, or both. The incongruity theory is not descriptive but cannot be prescriptive, either. Incongruity and resolution describe humor, ostensibly both in a functional way, and formally. The incongruity theory is, therefore, not descriptive or prescriptive.
A universal theory of humor is explanatory-causal, not composition-based. Even power difference cannot explain humor's response, because the proximate cause is not a form or object, nor an act of comprehension. It is a mental quality, self-deception, alluded to directly or indirectly. Whereas, the perceivable content is a more ultimate cause, leading us to think of self-deception, vaguely. A theory explaining these issues deals with stimulus and response in a way prescriptive theory cannot. The universal theory can aid composition somewhat. But mainly it gives the necessary and sufficient cognitive condition, as a particular mental quality.
The most important theory of humor is that it signifies self-deception in all cases, e.g., by power difference. Relief and superiority theories, first intended as theories of why humor is funny, are actually theories of secondary uses of humor--as is well known in this field today.
To take a playful attitude toward any incongruity is not thereby to experience humor. One may rule out the "abusive parent" counterexample of Alexander Bain (1818-1903), in that something extraneous ruins it, but in fact the abusive parent is comedy. As in Archie Bunker of All In The Family, it is invoked in the biography of Balzac by Stefan Zweig in Balzac's mother, and by Franz-Josef Murau's mother in Thomas Bernhard's novel, Extinction. These two are cold and hateful, yet the effect is comedy. There are also fallacies in Bain's other counterexamples, including "decrepit man under a heavy burden," and "an instrument out of tune."
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March 26, 2016Winner of the 2015 Outstanding Reference Sources Award.
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