Dictionary:

humor

  (hyū'mər)

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1. The quality that makes something laughable or amusing; funniness: could not see the humor of the situation.
2. That which is intended to induce laughter or amusement: a writer skilled at crafting humor.
3. The ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd. See synonyms at wit¹.
4. One of the four fluids of the body, blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile, whose relative proportions were thought in ancient and medieval physiology to determine a person's disposition and general health.
5. Physiology.
   1. A body fluid, such as blood, lymph, or bile.
   2. Aqueous humor.
   3. Vitreous humor.
6. A person's characteristic disposition or temperament: a boy of sullen humor.
7. An often temporary state of mind; a mood: I'm in no humor to argue.
8. 1. A sudden, unanticipated whim. See synonyms at mood¹.
   2. Capricious or peculiar behavior.

1. To comply with the wishes or ideas of; indulge.
2. To adapt or accommodate oneself to. See synonyms at pamper.

out of humor

1. In a bad mood; irritable.

[Middle English, fluid, from Old French umor, from Latin ūmor, hūmor.]

noun

1. The quality of being laughable or comical: comedy, comicality, comicalness, drollery, drollness, farcicality, funniness, humorousness, jocoseness, jocosity, jocularity, ludicrousness, ridiculousness, wit, wittiness, zaniness. See laughter.
2. A person's customary manner of emotional response: complexion, disposition, nature, temper, temperament. See be.
3. A temporary state of mind or feeling: frame of mind, mood, spirit (used in plural), temper, vein. See feelings.
4. An impulsive, often illogical turn of mind: bee, boutade, caprice, conceit, fancy, freak, impulse, megrim, notion, vagary, whim, whimsy. Idioms: bee in one's bonnet. See thoughts.

verb

To comply with the wishes or ideas of (another): cater, gratify, indulge. See resist/yield.

Definition: comedy, funniness
Antonyms: depression, drama, sadness, seriousness, tragedy, unhappiness

Humor is the name given to the psychic process that operates in the field of the preconscious, based on the dynamic interrelation between the agencies of the mind, and akin to a defense mechanism, consisting of an unexpected re-evaluation of the demands of reality that reverses their painful emotional tone and thereby offers to the triumphant ego that yield of pleasure which enables it to demonstrate its invulnerable narcissism.

Freud's first insight into the mechanism of this phenomenon, which was entrenched in the family and community life in which he was deeply involved, came in the last pages of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c). It was, in fact, on the death of his father that he started to collect Jewish jokes (Witze) and, at the insistence of Wilhelm Fliess, developed a theory to explain them, bringing out how their very condition of possibility lay in the activity of this process within the humorist. Although he pointed out (1908c) the kinship between this process and children's games, he did not elucidate it in metapsychological terms until the brief article of 1927 (1927d).

Unlike comedy and wit, or even irony, all of which aim at the satisfaction of erotic or aggressive drives and necessitate, for this purpose, the effective presence of a real third party, humor involves a strictly intrapsychic process of indirection whose purpose is economic, viz., sparing the subject from the painful feelings (pity, irritation, anger, suffering, disgust, tenderness, horror, etc.) that the situation ought to occasion. The energy of these feelings is thus diverted and transformed into the moderate but triumphant pleasure (so different from the explosion of hilarity) that is expressed in the smile of humor. As a result, the humorist reaffirms his narcissistic invulnerability, assuring himself that nothing traumatic can affect him, and that he can in fact find in such things a yield of pleasure.

This being the case, although humor is an autonomous process, it is encountered most often mixed with other forms of the comic, in which it finds a mode of expression, with which it is often confused, and for which it intervenes as a mechanism that inhibits any emotions that would obstruct its development.

Nonetheless, Freud considers humor as a particularly salubrious activity, making of it the rarest and most elaborate form of defense. Yet its benefits turn out in fact to be costly, necessitating a large outlay, since while this economic process, being neither denial nor repression, leads to a reversal of emotional tone, it does not eliminate the painful representation. Freud explained this as the result of a new topographical arrangement: the humorist takes the psychic emphasis off the ego and displaces it onto his superego: "Look! here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children—just worth making a jest about!" (1927d, p. 166).

In fact, humor leads to a set of notions whose origin, nature, history, and development thus all need to be re-examined, as they all indubitably hark back to the genesis of the ideal psychic agencies and their function in establishing a humorous attitude towards reality. All of these dimensions, indeed—whether it be the invulnerable narcissistic kernel of which the humorist is a living testimony, the exercise of the reality principle, the experience of pain, the mechanism of illusion, or the alchemy of the emotions that it produces—invite reflection on the precocious relations that were formed between the humorist and his mother who bequeathed to him this precious gift (Donnet, J.-L., 1997; Kameniak, J.-P., 1998). For example, we need to reflect—as did Freud—on the enigma of the "essence of the Super-ego," a superego that manifests itself in an atypical form of functioning: as a reassuring and consoling agency—even a maternal one—that is barely consistent with the severity usually associated with it, whether in the commands it issues or in its role as representative and guardian of the reality principle.

While humor was initially considered as a variety of the comic genre, in the same way as wit (with which it is often confused), Freud early on endeavored to distinguish it through topographical localization, the kind of gratification it affords, the absence of the need for a third person, and, finally, the specific nature of the process, all of which make it a character disposition or trait rather than a random production. Consequently, over and above the defensive use that has been classically recognized and associated with the process of humor, we might want to ask whether it could have a specific function of working-through, very different from the relaxation which is brought about by the comic effect, thus tempering any excess of emotion; how any real "work of humor" is actually accomplished; and what its nature might be. Whereas, when faced with the hostility of events, the risk of trauma may appear to be significant, humor does allow the subject to maintain the integrity of his psychic functions and their availability while also acknowledging the "disruptive" nature of reality. We can surely envisage the possibility (Bergeret, 1973) that there are hints of a working-through involved in humor, or, at the very least, the establishment of the framework needed for any possible integration of the sufferings inflicted on the subject.

Nevertheless, it cannot escape notice that there has been a general lack of interest and a relative silence on the part of contemporary analysts when it comes to this subject, apparently so frivolous though in fact it raises fundamental questions. Up until now, analytic literature on this theme has scarcely extended beyond a few scattered remarks or occasional articles, and most of them use humor as a generic category succeeding that of "the comic" proposed by Freud. Consequently, they are more likely to discuss the techniques and procedures of the modes of expression to which humor resorts than to examine the process of humor itself.

Bibliography

Bergeret, Jean. (1973). Pour une métapyschologie de l'humour. Revue française de psychanalyse, 37,4.

Donnet, Jean-Luc. (1997). L'humoriste et sa croyance. Revue française de psychanalyse, 61,3.

Gay, Peter. (1990). Reading Freud: Explorations and entertainments. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kamieniak, Jean-Pierre. (1998). Freud, un enfant de l'humour. Lausanne-Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé.

Shentoub, Salem A. et al. (1989). L'Humour dans l'oeuvre de Freud. Paris: Two Cities.

Further Reading

Poland, Warren S. (1990). Gift of laughter: Development of a sense of humor in clinical analysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 59,197-225.

—JEAN-PIERRE KAMENIAK

Aristotle, in De partibus animalium, defined man as a being capable of laughter, but laughter is not, as some optimists have claimed, a universal language. Its function and importance differed so widely, even during our historical period, depending on national, social, and other variables, that it is far easier to ask questions than to answer them. Why did (and do) some Christians, like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), strongly disapprove of laughter? Is there any common element uniting the hearty, even crude, laughter provoked by carnival merrymaking and slapstick comedy (French farces and sotties, Spanish pasos, the Italian commedia dell'arte) and the urbane wit called festivitas by Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) and Thomas More (1478–1535) and exemplified by the noble speakers in Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528)? Can we clearly separate "popular" from "refined" or "learned" humor? And why is the terminology of humor not easily translated from one language to another?

Laughter was often considered more important in the Renaissance than it has been since. Several Renaissance princes, including Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492) and Louis XII of France (ruled 1498–1515), were reputed to enjoy jokes, even those directed against themselves, whereas France's Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) is said to have made only one joke in his life. Unfortunately, even today no explanation of why we laugh is universally endorsed. Sixteenth-century theorists about humor were mainly medical authorities (Laurent Joubert [1529–1582], Ambroise Paré [1510–1590]) interested in physiology; in the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), following Aristotle, articulated the first of the three commonest modern explanations of laughter: superiority, incongruity, and release from restraint. If we can usually see why satire provokes laughter, we are at a loss when we try to compare the humor of Molière (1622–1673) and Shakespeare (1564–1616), or of Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) and Laurence Sterne (1713–1768).

The Sixteenth Century

The Renaissance and the Reformation inspired a remarkable variety of verbal and visual humor. The great humanist Erasmus, in his Colloquies (1518), produced both biting anti-church satire ("The Funeral"), and sly and charming wit ("The Abbot and the Learned Lady"). Reformation and anti-Reformation satirists created an explosion of comic caricature in broadsheets attacking either Luther and his cohorts or the venal priests and hypocritical monks of the Roman Catholic Church. Humanist polemic did not shrink from scatological invective that would horrify most readers today (the Eccius Dedolatus), and French farce characters could urinate on stage. Much humanist wit, like the Epistles of Obscure Men, is incomprehensible to readers with no knowledge of Latin.

The century apparently reveled in jokes (facetiae in Latin) and in comic short stories, as numerous anthologies in England, France, Italy, and Germany attest. The most influential were those of Poggio Bracciolini in Italy (1438–1452) and Heinrich Bebel in Germany (1508–1512), both written in Latin. Later collections became larger and more inclusive; there are 981 facezie in the 1574 edition of Ludovico Domenichi, written in Italian. An Erasmian love of humor inspired both François Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532–1564), who used wit and hyperbole to convey his humanist message, and Shakespeare, whose comedies radiate a smiling acceptance of human frailty. Comic theater came to life again in most European countries in the sixteenth century, stimulated by the rediscovery of Aristotle's dramatic principles and of Plautus and Terence. National differences in comic outlook are strikingly illustrated by the German adaptation of Rabelais (1575–1590) by Johann Fischart, which is much cruder than its model and much less humanistically inclined. Comic visual art includes not only a wealth of satirical engravings, but the compelling visual grotesques of Pieter Bruegel (1525?–1569) and Hieronymus Bosch (1450?–1516) and the whimsical portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1530–1593), which are created exclusively of fruit, flowers, or fish.

The Seventeenth Century

Whereas much literature of the previous century was still written in Latin, this one saw the flowering of vernacular literatures; it is Spain's Golden Age, and France's Age of Classicism. Cervantes's Don Quixote (1615), generally recognized as the first novel, has comic moments, but its prevailing tone is ironic rather than frankly humorous. Comic theater flourished, with some common elements; for instance, the classical clownish slave lived on as the Spanish gracioso, as Molière's soubrette, as the zanni (crafty servant) of the commedia dell'arte, and as numerous characters in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (1573–1637).

The century's great comic dramatists were not primarily satirists. Shakespeare's dramatic worlds are more imaginary than real. Molière's minor comedies owe more to literary sources than to real life (Les Fourberies de Scapin, 1671), and his best plays only occasionally reveal his scorn for stupid minor nobles, or for dangerous religious hypocrites (Le Tartuffe, 1667). Their genius, like Shakespeare's, lies in revealing character through comedy, though Shakespeare was freer to include farce in his plays. England's Restoration drama (after 1660) was much more satirical; William Wycherley (1640–1716), John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), John Farquhar (1678–1707), and William Congreve (1670–1729) delighted in skewering stupidity and pretentiousness, as Jonson had before them. Critics continued to discuss the form and function of stage comedy, and comic opera became a popular genre.

The Eighteenth Century

The Age of Enlightenment specialized in satire, though less in the theater than in other genres. Carlo Goldoni's (1707–1793) comedies continue the tradition of comedy of intrigue, while those of Pierre de Marivaux (1688–1763) are more interested in human emotions than in social mores. In Russia, Denis Fonvizin (1745–1792) showed members of the nobility in a comic light (The Brigadier, 1769).

England produced some satirical giants: Henry Fielding (1707–1754), whose sprawling novel Tom Jones (1749) has comic moments; Richard Sheridan (1751–1816), whose Mrs. Malaprop in The School for Scandal (1777) is a comic type to rival Shakespeare's Falstaff; William Hogarth, whose moralizing series (Marriage à la mode, 1745) prefigured the modern cartoon; the verse satires of John Dryden (1631–1700) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744), and above all, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Compared to his mentors, Erasmus and Rabelais, Swift is sometimes too ferocious to be comic, as when he recommends relieving the famine in Ireland by eating babies (A Modest Proposal, 1729), but Gulliver's Travels (1726) remains a humorous and readable indictment of the society of his time.

France's Voltaire (1694–1778) is often both subtler and funnier than Swift, especially in his masterpiece, Candide (1759), a comprehensive attack on the aristocracy, religion, and general prejudices of his time (a battle is a "heroic butchery"; a Spanish grandee demonstrates "pride suitable in a man with so many names"). A new element in this century is the connection between laughter and eroticism, in works by Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689–1755), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803) (Les liaisons dangereuses, 1782).

Bibliography

Primary Source

Bowen, Barbara C. ed. One Hundred Renaissance Jokes: An Anthology. Birmingham, Ala., 1988. Latin jokes with English translations.

Secondary Sources

Bremmer, Jan, and Herman Roodenburg, eds. A Cultural History of Humor: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Malden, Mass., 1997.

Ménager, Daniel. La Renaissance et le rire. Paris, 1995.

—BARBARA C. BOWEN

An archaic term for any fluid substance in the body, such as blood, lymph, or bile.

Pl. humores, humors [L.] any fluid or semifluid in the body.

• aqueous h. — see aqueous humor.
• ocular h. — either of the humors of the eye—aqueous or vitreous.
• vitreous h. — see vitreous humor.

Mentions of the humors refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person's health and personality were determined by the balance of four basic fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A dominance of any fluid would cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive, and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience, anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness, gluttony, and lack of motivation. Literary treatment of the humors is exemplified by several characters in Ben Jonson's plays Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour. Also spelled Humours.

Quotes:

"Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors." - Johann Georg Zimmermann

"Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Get well cards have become so humorous that if you don't get sick you're missing half the fun." - Flip Wilson

"If you can make a woman laugh you can do anything with her." - Nicol Williamson

"Where ever you find humor, you find pathos close by it side." - Edwin P. Whipple

"It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean." - Mae West

See more famous quotes about Humor

For other uses, see Humour (disambiguation).

Humour or humor (see spelling differences) is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy. The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavour) controlled human health and emotion.

A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, and context. For example, young children (of any background) may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons e.g. Tom and Jerry. Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences.^{[citation needed]} Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery".^[1][2]

Smiling often reflects a sense of humour and amusement. Shown here is a picture of Eduard von Grützner.

Techniques for composing humour

Humour is a branch of rhetoric, there are hundreds of tropes that can be used to make jokes.

Verbal

• Figure of speech
  • Humorous triple and paraprosdokian
  • Enthymeme
  • Syllepsis (zeugma)
  • Hyperbole
  • Understatement
  • Bathos, widely used to describe the technique of ending a list of profound items with an extremely trivial one
• Inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in the language of delivery
• Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial and a concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
• Joke
  • Adages, often in the form of paradox "laws" of nature, such as Murphy's law or lemon law
  • Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, viola jokes.
  • Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally cruel scenarios. Soldiers in the field of battle often use 'trench humour' to keep morale up in appalling circumstances.
• Riddle
• Word play
  • Oxymoron
  • Pun

Non-verbal

• Bathos
  • Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
• Character driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
• Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water"
• Comic sounds
• Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by Andy Kaufman
• Unintentional humour, that is, making people laugh without intending to (as with Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space)
• Sight gags

Understanding humour

Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. B. White once said that "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." However, attempts to do just that have been made.

The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy, referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.

Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the breaking of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter.^{[citation needed]}. Irony is explicitly this form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms relating to physicality and plays with them^{[citation needed]}. In other words, comedy is a sign of a 'bug' in the symbolic make-up of language, as well as a self-correcting mechanism for such bugs^{[citation needed]}. Once the problem in meaning has been described through a joke, people immediately begin correcting their impressions of the symbols that have been mocked. This is one explanation why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.

Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist. This, however, does not explain why people being humiliated and verbally abused, without it being unexpected or a shift in perspective, is considered funny - ref. "The Office".

Another explanation is that the essence of humour lies in two ingredients; the relevance factor and the surprise factor. First, something familiar (or relevant) to the audience is presented. (However, the relevant situation may be so familiar to the audience that it doesn't always have to be presented, as occurs in absurd humour, for example). From there, they may think they know the natural follow-through thoughts or conclusion. The next principal ingredient is the presentation of something different from the audience's expectations, or else the natural result of interpreting the original situation in a different, less common way (see twist or surprise factor). For example:

“

A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to play the piano?" The doctor replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!"

”

The Simpsons is noted for using this technique many times to evoke humour. Former show runner David Mirkin often refers to it as the “screw-you-audience” joke. A prime example is in the episode "And Maggie Makes Three", wherein Patty and Selma are about to expose the secret of Marge's pregnancy:

Selma: (Looking at the very beginning of the phonebook) "Hi Mr. Aaronson, I'd like to inform you that Marge Simpson is pregnant."

Selma: (Looking exhausted at the very end of the phonebook) "Just thought you'd like to know, Mr. Zackowski. There! Aaronson and Zackowski are the town's biggest gossips. Within an hour, everyone will know.

Both explanations can be put under the general heading of "failed expectations". In language, or a situation with a relevance factor, or even a sublime setting, an audience has a certain expectation. If these expectations fail in a way that has some credulity, humour results. It has been postulated that the laughter/feel good element of humour is a biological function that helps one deal with the new, expanded point of view: a lawyer thinks differently than a priest or rabbi (below), a banana peel on the floor could be dangerous. This is why some link of credulity is important rather than any random line being a punchline.

For this reason, many jokes work in threes. For instance, a class of jokes exists beginning with the formulaic line "A priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer are sitting in a bar..." (or close variations on this). Typically, the priest will make a remark, the rabbi will continue in the same vein, and then the lawyer will make a third point that forms a sharp break from the established pattern, but nonetheless forms a logical (or at least stereotypical) response. Example of a variation:

“

A gardener, an architect, and a lawyer are discussing which of their vocations is the most ancient. The gardener comments, "My vocation goes back to the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam to tend the garden." The architect comments, "My vocation goes back to the creation, when God created the world itself from primordial chaos." They both look curiously at the lawyer, who asks, "And who do you think created the primordial chaos?"

”

Knowing a punch line in advance, or some situation which would spoil the delivery of the punchline, can destroy the surprise factor, and in turn destroy the entertainment value or amusement the joke may have otherwise provided. Conversely, a person previously holding the same unexpected conclusions or secret perspectives as a comedian could derive amusement from hearing those same thoughts expressed and elaborated. That there is commonality, unity of thought, and an ability to openly analyse and express these (where secrecy and inhibited exploration was previously thought necessary) can be both the relevance and the surprise factors in these situations. This phenomenon explains much of the success of comedians who deal with same-gender and same-culture audiences on gender conflicts and cultural topics, respectively.

Notable studies of humour have come from the pens of Aristotle in The Poetics (Part V) and of Schopenhauer.

There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of humour, irony, parody and pretence. Prominent theoreticians in this field include Raymond Gibbs, Herbert Clark, Michael Billig, Willibald Ruch, Victor Raskin, Eliot Oring, and Salvatore Attardo. Although many writers have emphasised the positive or cathartic effects of humour some, notably Billig, have emphasised the potential of humour for cruelty and its involvement with social control and regulation.

A number of science fiction writers have explored the theory of humour. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein proposes that humour comes from pain, and that laughter is a mechanism to keep us from crying. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, proposes (in his first jokebook, Treasury of Humor) that the essence of humour is anticlimax: an abrupt change in point of view, in which trivial matters are suddenly elevated in importance above those that would normally be far more important.

Approaches to a general theory of humour have generally referred to analogy or some kind of analogical process of mapping structure from one domain of experience onto another. A notable example of this approach was Arthur Koestler, who identified humour as one of three areas of human creativity (science and art being the other two) that use structure mapping (then termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings^[3]. He argues that humour results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.

Tony Veale, who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did, has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour^[4][5][6], using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual blending.

Evolution of humour

As any form of art, humour techniques evolve through time. Perception of humour varies greatly among social demographics and indeed from person to person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of entertainment all over the world, whether in the courts of the kings or the villages of the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.18th-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that "the more you know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness."

Evolution and humor

Sight gags and language-based humour activate the two regions in the human brain known to have von Economo neurons, a specialization in neuron form that has evolved in the last 15 million years. This suggests that humour may have coevolved with the ability of great apes and humans to navigate through a shifting and complex social space.^[7]

Humour formulae

Root components:

• some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
• appealing to feelings or to emotions.
• similar to reality, but not real

Methods:

• metaphor
• hyperbole
• reframing
• timing

Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture in the documentary Funny Business".^[8], that an object or a person can become funny in three different ways. They are:

• By being in an unusual place
• By behaving in an unusual way
• By being the wrong size

Most sight gags fit into one or more of these categories.

Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life. Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing. Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all questions with a laugh^{[citation needed]}.

See also

Anecdote Clowns Comedy and Comedians Comedy film Comics (also known as funnies) Feghoot Gloating Internet humour Irony Jokes, including Anti-jokes, In-jokes, and Meta-jokes List of publications in humor research Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Mathematical joke Open mike Political satire Practical jokes and Pranks

Professional humour, for example, lawyer jokes Ribaldry Satire Surreal humour Toilet humour

References

1. ^ Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT 2003 p.13
2. ^ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World [1941, 1965]. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press p.12
3. ^ Koestler, Arthur (1964): "The Act of Creation".
4. ^ Veale, Tony (2003): "Metaphor and Metonymy: The Cognitive Trump-Cards of Linguistic Humor"[1]
5. ^ Veale, Tony (2006): "The Cognitive Mechanisms of Adversarial Humor"[2]
6. ^ Veale, Tony (2004): "Incongruity in Humour: Root Cause of Epiphenomonon?"[3]
7. ^ Watson KK, Matthews BJ, Allman JM (2007). "Brain activation during sight gags and language-dependent humor". Cereb Cortex 17 (2): 314–24. DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhj149. PMID 16514105. 
8. ^ Rowan Atkinson/David Hinton, Funny Business (tv series), Episode 1 - aired 22 November 1992, UK, Tiger Television Productions

Further reading

• Basu, S (December 1999), "Dialogic ethics and the virtue of humor", Journal of Political Philosophy (Blackwell Publishing Ltd) Vol. 7 (No. 4): 378-403, DOI:10.1111/1467-9760.00082, <http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14>. Retrieved on 2007-07-06 (Abstract)
• Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and ridicule: Towards a social critique of humour. London: Sage. ISBN: 1412911435
• Bricker, Victoria Reifler (Winter, 1980) The Function of Humor in Zinacantan Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 411-418
• Buijzen, Moniek & Valkenburg, Patti M. (2004), "Developing a Typology of Humor in Audiovisual Media", Media Psychology Vol. 6 (No. 2): 147-167, DOI:10.1207/s1532785xmep0602_2, <http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s1532785xmep0602_2?prevSearch=allfield%3A(buijzen)>(Abstract)
• Carrell, Amy (2000), Historical views of humour, University of Central Oklahoma. Retrieved on 2007-07-06.
• García-Barriocanal, Elena; Sicilia, Miguel-Angel & Palomar, David (2005), A Graphical Humor Ontology for Contemporary Cultural Heritage Access, Ctra. Barcelona, km.33.6, 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain,: University of Alcalá, <http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20050064.pdf>. Retrieved on 2007-07-06
• Goldstein, Jeffrey H., et al. (1976) "Humour, Laughter, and Comedy: A Bibliography of Empirical and Nonempirical Analyses in the English Language." It's a Funny Thing, Humour. Ed. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1976. 469-504.
• Holland, Norman. (1982) "Bibliography of Theories of Humor." Laughing; A Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 209-223.
• Luttazzi, Daniele (2004) Introduction to his Italian translation of Woody Allen's trilogy Side Effects, Without Feathers and Getting Even (Bompiani, 2004, ISBN 88-452-3304-9 (57-65).
• Martin, Rod A. (2007). The Psychology Of Humour: An Integrative Approach. London, UK: Elsevier Academic Press. ISBN 13: 978-0-12-372564-6
• McGhee, Paul E. (1984) "Current American Psychological Research on Humor." Jahrbuche fur Internationale Germanistik 16.2: 37-57.
• Mintz, Lawrence E., ed. (1988) Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. ISBN: 0313245517; OCLC: 16085479.
• Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D.; Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. (2003) "Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers". Neuron, 40, 1041-1048.
• Nilsen, Don L. F. (1992) "Satire in American Literature." Humor in American Literature: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992. 543-48.
• Pogel, Nancy, and Paul P. Somers Jr. (1988) "Literary Humor." Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Ed. Lawrence E. Mintz. London: Greenwood, 1988. 1-34.
• Roth, G., Yap, R, & Short, D. (2006). "Examining humour in HRD from theoretical and practical perspectives". Human Resource Development International, 9(1), 121-127.
• Smuts, Aaron. "Humor". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Wogan, Peter (Spring 2006), "Laughing At First Contact", Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 22 (No. 1): 14-34, online December 12, 2006, DOI:10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14, <http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14>. Retrieved on 2007-07-06 (Abstract)

External links

• Humor at the Open Directory Project
• International Society for Humor Studies
• No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality and Ethnicity International Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College

funny pictures

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - humor, humør, sindstilstand, humoristisk sans
v. tr. - føje, rette sig efter, gå ind på

idioms:

• out of humour    i dårligt humør, uoplagt
• sense of humour    humoristisk sans

Nederlands (Dutch)
humor, humeur, gril, luim, een van de vier lichaamsvochten, toegeven, tegemoet komen, paaien

Français (French)
n. - humour, humeur, (Méd) humeur (arch)
v. tr. - amadouer (qn), se plier à (une demande)

idioms:

• out of humour    être en froid avec qn
• sense of humour    sens de l'humour

Deutsch (German)
n. - Laune, Humor, Körpersaft
v. - jmdm. seinen Willen lassen

idioms:

• out of humour    schlecht gelaunt
• sense of humour    Sinn für Humor

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - χιούμορ, πνεύμα, αίσθηση του χιούμορ, (μτφ.) (ψυχική) διάθεση, κέφι
v. - κάνω το κέφι ή το χατίρι, πάω με τα νερά του, καλοπιάνω, εξευμενίζω

idioms:

• out of humour    άκεφος, δύσθυμος
• sense of humour    αίσθηση του χιούμορ

Italiano (Italian)
indulgere, assecondare, lusingare, rappacificare, umore, umorismo, accesso

idioms:

• out of humour    scontento
• sense of humour    senso dell'umorismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - humor (m), disposição (f) mental ou temperamento (m)
v. - manter alguém em bom humor

idioms:

• out of humour    de mau humor
• sense of humour    senso (m) de humor

Русский (Russian)
юмор, темперамент, настроение, склонность, поткать, ублажать, приспосабливаться

idioms:

• out of humour    не в настроении
• sense of humour    чувство юмора

Español (Spanish)
n. - humor, humorismo, arranque, arrebato, comicidad, capricho
v. tr. - complacer, seguir el humor a, congraciarse con, acomodarse, adaptarse

idioms:

• out of humour    de mal humor
• sense of humour    sentido del humor

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - humor, humör, temperament, vätska (fysiol.)
v. - blidka, göra ngn till viljes

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
幽默, 诙谐, 使满足, 迁就

idioms:

• out of humour    不悦, 生气心情不好
• sense of humour    幽默感

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 幽默, 詼諧
v. tr. - 使滿足, 遷就

idioms:

• out of humour    不悅, 生氣心情不好
• sense of humour    幽默感

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 유머, 기질, 기분, 변덕스러운 행동
v. tr. - 만족시키다, 남의 비위를 맞추다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - おかしみ, ユーモア, 気質, 気性, 気分, 気まぐれ

idioms:

• out of humour    不機嫌である

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) رطوبه أو بخار, عادة أو مزاج, حاله ذهنيه مؤقته, نزوة, الدعابه أو الفكاهه أو الظرف, حس الدعابه أو الفكاهه أو النكته أو روحها ملكه عقليه تمكن المرء من اكتشاف المضحكات, أو تقديرها أو التعبير انها, كلام منطو على دعابه أو فكاهه (فعل) يلاطف, يداري, يساير, يكيف نفسه وفقا ل‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮הומור, היתול, חוש הומור, מצב-רוח, נטייה‬
v. tr. - ‮נכנע לנטיית-לב, מילא את רצון-, פינק, הפריז בחנופה, השלים עם‬

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