Theories of humour

From the Economist courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

THE true story of how your wife's stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn't supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband's help.

So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny.

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I remember reading years ago something by Larry Niven set in his "Known Space" universe. One of his aliens, a "Pierson's Puppeteer," offhandedly remarked that human laughter is the result of an "interrupted defense mechansim," or something to that effect. I'm still not quite sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds like it's along these lines. At any rate, I've always thought, myself, that a joke isn't really funny unless someone gets hurt in some way, usually their feelings, but bones and organs work just as well, which also seems to be along these lines. In other words, real humor needs to have danger in some way. It's just not funny unless disaster is lurking nearby.

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