humour

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Most popular dictionaries when defining 'humour' include the psychologist's three usages — stimulus, response, and disposition. Hence, for example, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English refers to 'comicality', the 'faculty of perceiving', and 'state of mind'. It is extraordinary, therefore, that Drever's Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (the best-known specialist dictionary for psychologists) provides a much narrower definition of humour and a provocative definition of laughter. Humour is defined as the 'character of a complex situation exciting joyful, and in the main quiet, laughter, either directly, through sympathy, or through empathy'; and laughter is said to be an 'emotional response, expressive normally of joy, in the child and the unsophisticated adult'. Drever's dictionary was published by Penguin in 1952, and it was revised in 1964. Today few psychologists, and perhaps no one currently researching humour and laughter, would endorse his definitions without substantial qualification. The psychological literature has burgeoned since the early 1970s, and we now know considerably more about humour, that ubiquitous phenomenon which most of us cherish so dearly.

Drever's reference to the 'unsophisticated adult' might startle many of us. Some would find it quaint, even amusing. It reflects a long period of history, finishing not so far back, when laughing was not so universally prized. In the 18th century, Lord Chesterfield, writing to his son, said, 'there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter'; and others have said of laughter that it is 'the mind sneezing' (Wyndham Lewis), 'the hiccup of a fool' (John Ray), and that it '[speaks] the vacant mind' (Oliver Goldsmith). In the 1930s Ludovici argued that humour was a principal cause of the decadence of the times, and, for him, laughter was a sinister behaviour. More recently a number of writers have inferred from systematic analysis that it is only in contemporary times that humour and laughter have been regarded as important; and they point, for example, to the Bible, where there is scant mention of laughter, and such laughter as there is tends to be of a scornful kind.

Surveys indicate that these days nearly all of us believe that we have an above-average sense of humour. That statistical impossibility might merely illustrate that 'sense of humour' has many shades of meaning, but in part at least it stems from the high value that society now places on humour. The possession of a good 'sense of humour', or the capacity to laugh frequently at pleasurable and amusing events, is regarded as thoroughly desirable by almost all of us. Far from being base and degenerate, fit solely for the trivial and ignorant, the appreciation of humour is now taken as a sign of health and well-being. Humour is valued as a way of preserving order, changing group esteem and cohesion, expressing allegiances and revealing attitudes with relative impunity, testing the standing of a relationship, maintaining or undermining a status hierarchy, and so forth. The quality of our exchanges with other people can be greatly enhanced by the use of humour, whether or not it is injected as a deliberate ploy. Across a wide variety of everyday encounters, humour can be a crucial tool in our social armoury, conscripted for attack and defence. Humour can be used by protagonists to precipitate an absorbing and pacifying digression: with little danger of rebuke, they can use it to defuse the threats of others by engendering a debilitating discomfort, and through it they can easily make light, or pretend to make light, of their own misfortunes and predicaments.

Beginning with Plato's Philebus in 355 bc, philosophers, essayists, and others have provided a broad array of earnest and challenging statements concerning the nature of humour and laughter. Plato saw the weak as a justifiably prime target for humour. For Aristotle (in Poetics) the ludicrous was based in deformities, defects, and ugliness which are neither destructive nor painful. Notions such as these were revived in Hobbes's superiority theory: in Leviathan and Human Nature Hobbes presented laughter as a self-glorifying, triumphant gesture emanating from comparisons made with inferiors. The origins of incongruity theories can be traced back through Schopenhauer (1819) and beyond to Kant (1790), who talked of 'an affection arising from the sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing'. According to Schopenhauer, laughter is the expression of our recognizing an incongruity, and Spencer (1860) limited it to descending incongruity: laughter naturally occurs when 'the conscious is unawares transferred from great things to small'.

There are various other forms of theory, the most influential of which has been Freud's (1905, 1928). His was a synthesis of incongruity, relief, and conflict theories. A sharp distinction was drawn between 'the comic', 'wit', and 'humour'; and humour was said to grant relief through diverting energy from unpleasant emotion. In 'joke-work' (i.e. making jokes) there is said to be a number of techniques each of which is also to be found in 'dream work', and the principal two of which are 'condensation' and 'displacement'. Both of these techniques require deviations from normal thought and representation, and both entail an economy of thought and expression. It was Freud's contention that the ludicrous always results in a saving in the expenditure of psychic energy: not only is the joke expressed with brevity, but amusement is taken to be the most economical response to the joke. Freud also maintained that both forms of economy could be false: energy can be liberated unnecessarily and then dissipated in expressing amusement. However, through techniques analogous to those of dreaming, humour can lift repressions, and in Freudian theory humour is among the most important defences.

The pervasive view of the classic Greek and Roman scholars that humour and laughter are rooted in shabbiness and deformity persisted in various guises for many centuries, but it has been largely discarded in recent years as empirical researchers, particularly psychologists, have begun to contribute significantly to knowledge. There has been a genesis and development of substantial strands of experimentation, and at the same time the quest for a grand theory has been generally abandoned. No one seems sanguine about there ever being a grand theory of humour which is capable of embracing adequately all aspects of creation, imitation, and reaction. Instead the new literature abounds with 'mini-theories' which, typically, address stimulus issues (e.g. content, structure, complexity), or individual differences (e.g. personality, cognitions, physiology), or overt expression (e.g. verbal and non-verbal reactions), or social influences (e.g. effects of companions and audiences), etc.

The mini-theories differ from the older, global theories in a number of salient respects (cf. Keith-Spiegel 1972). For example, the older accounts, with few exceptions, were in effect statements of function or properties; they were little more than taxonomies of laughter-provoking stimuli, or descriptions of conditions under which laughter is sometimes evoked. The modern-day accounts draw more on general principles in psychology, and most of them tacitly or explicitly acknowledge that laughter can find expression when there is a total absence of humour. They recognize that it may not be possible to delineate any set of circumstances under which laughter is never to be found. It can prosper under conditions of deprivation, pain, and oppression: seemingly it can be observed in persons experiencing any of mankind's diverse emotional states. In his book The Sense of Humour (1954) the English humorist Stephen Potter summed up laughter's ubiquity as follows:

• We laugh when the sea touches our navel. ... We laugh at something because it is familiar and something else because it is unfamiliar. ... We laugh at misfortunes if they do not incur danger. ... We laugh because other people are laughing. ... Then there is the laugh which fills up a blank in the conversation. ... The laugh of the older man talking to a girl, which can suggest: 'You are charming, but I am charming too.' The laugh to attract attention. ... The laugh ... which we hear in the hall from the new arrival not sure of himself, who wishes to appear sure of himself, and it makes us sure we are not sure of him. The laugh of the lone man at the theatre, who wishes to show that he understands the play or understands the foreign language which is being spoken, or gets the point of the joke quickest, or has seen the play. The laugh of creative pleasure. ... The laugh of relief from physical danger. ... We laugh at funny hats ... we laugh at sex jokes. We do not laugh at sex jokes if they are not funny unless other people are present.

While it is important to be aware that any particular instance of laughter need not have been triggered by humour, it is disturbing to find that the vast majority of humour researchers opt to exclude laughter and other behavioural measures from their indices of humour appreciation. It seems that humour loses much of its splendour, infectiousness, and power under laboratory scrutiny, to such an extent that exuberant laughter is rarely elicited from experimental subjects. There is a need for more trenchant empirical work, and particularly research in 'the field', rather than for any continuation in the escalation of asocial, laboratory studies. As far as theoretical progress is concerned, no one has made noticeable headway in answering questions of the sort, 'Why does humour produce laughter, rather than, say, a more quiescent form of behaviour?' and 'Why should the enjoyment of humour climax in any overt response whatsoever?'. Then there are other questions, barely more tractable, to do with the conditions necessary for laughter to feature in the repertoire of behavioural responses. The label 'humorous laughter' is to some extent a misnomer because research indicates that the quality and quantity of laughter which, temporally, follows a joke are primarily governed by social aspects of the prevailing situation in which the joke is presented.

It is generally thought that in the early stages of an individual's development a 'safe' or 'playful' mood has to be generated for the infant to engage in 'humorous laughter'. Laughter maturationally precedes humour appreciation and first appears at about 4 months of age. An inevitable consequence of definitional disagreements is that distinguished scientific scholars dispute when humour is first experienced. Those who say that symbolism is an essential ingredient in humour (e.g. McGhee 1979) report that humour does not occur until the second year of the child's life: only then does the child have sufficient capacity for fantasy and pretend activities. Others report that humour is experienced by children as young as 4 months (e.g. Pien and Rothbart 1980). At that age they laugh when incongruous events are presented in safe situations, but then the cognitive resolution does not entail symbolic capacities. Rothbart (1976) observes that, for children this young, incongruity is limited as an explanatory principle: while the perception of an unexpected event may lead to laughter, it may instead lead to curiosity, fear, problem solving, or concept learning. For laughter, the incongruous event must be safe or playful, and resolution, or partial resolution, of the incongruity must be feasible.

Incongruity is defined in terms of a disparity between what was perceived and what was expected, and such a disparity is usually taken to be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for humour. Resolution refers to the rendering of the disparity as meaningful or appropriate, or to the discovery of a rule which renders the incongruity explicable within the context of the joke. We still have no model that satisfactorily embraces both the perception and resolution aspects of incongruities. However, we do know from empirical work as well as from everyday experiences that incongruities can be too trivial or they can be too complex for humour to be experienced, and, independent of complexity, some themes (e.g. sex and aggression) are generally more comic than others.

A notable exception to the modern-day brand of mini-theory is that propounded by D. E. Berlyne. His was an 'arousal' theory which enjoyed considerable support in the 1970s. Like Freudian theory, however, it has been gradually discarded by empirical researchers as they have increasingly dedicated their investigations to cognitive dimensions of humour. Berlyne's analysis was founded upon the view that moderate levels of arousal ('non-specific drive') and changes in arousal are pleasurable, whereas high and low levels of arousal are not pleasurable. Humour was said to boost the individual's arousal to an unusual level until resolution of incongruity caused a sharp decline. Hence pleasure can result from the change per se and from the raising of arousal from an uncomfortably low level. It is not clear from Berlyne's writings whether arousal changes and humour appreciation are related in a linear, inverted U, or U-shaped fashion. Since it is possible to argue for any of these three possibilities, the theory is inherently untestable.

The superiority theories of yesterday were precursors of contemporary disposition theory (Zillmann 1983), and that theory posits that humour emanating from disparagement depends upon a balance of affective dispositions towards the disparaged and non-disparaged parties. The theory predicts that humour appreciation will be strong when one is negatively disposed towards the disparaged party, and it will also be strong when one is positively disposed to the person purveying the disparagement. A principal difference between disposition theory and superiority theories (e.g. La Fave 1977) is that the latter highlight both the debasement of an inferior and the enhancement of a superior, whereas in disposition theory the enhancement of the superior is a by-product and is not essential to humour appreciation. Disposition theory is especially useful when accounting for the success of jokes aimed at minority groups, such as the physically handicapped and psychiatrically disturbed. It is similarly useful when accounting for the pervasiveness of jokes aimed at demographic, political, and ethnic minorities.

It has been claimed that women find jokes funnier when heard by the left ear, with the suggestion that this ear routes to the right hemisphere of the brain, which processes information more holistically than the left hemisphere, which is analytical. Could this be the basis for a biological explanation of sex differences in humour appreciation? Unfortunately, each ear is represented in both hemispheres (though with some contralateral preference) so this is hardly a serious suggestion. Clinical studies of patients with damage to the right hemisphere have identified correlated deficits in humour comprehension and appreciation. However, it cannot be assumed that a cerebral 'centre for humour' is located in the right hemisphere. The operation of the left hemisphere is crucial in providing and organizing relevant information necessary to resolve perceived incongruity.

The bias of psychological theory and investigation has been towards a characterization of responses to humour. We know little about factors bearing on the creation and initiation of humour. Also, researchers tend to neglect fundamental conceptual and measurement questions, and they are too often insular in their approaches and objectives. None the less there is now much evidence to the effect that humour reflects basic underlying trends in emotional, social, and cognitive development.

(Published 1987)

— Anthony J. Chapman/Noel P. Sheehy

Bibliography
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