george@sysvis (09/30/85)
An original note regarding MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR with several responses was posted recently in net.books, net.jokes, and net.math. This note is in regard to that, and is asking for comment from readers. Below is my original posted response plus another drafted reply as in net.jokes.discussion. I would really like to hear the thoughts of others on this subject. >> BUT does your theory explain why this is "funny" ? i.e why does this >> result in laughter, and the emotion we experience as 'humour' ? >> My own opinion is that it's purely the manipulation of STRUCTURE that >> we find amusing. All jokes alter some sort of structure (social, >> lingustic, sexual) in a clever way. Since a fundamental part of our >> cognitive system is recognition and manipulation of structures ... >> ... that produce the experience of mirth. > Nobody seems to explain WHY structure flipping or context flipping or > philospical point comprehension would result in laughter and the pleasant > feeling that humor provides. For some time now I have been developing a personal theory of laughter that would help me to understand all aspects of humor. First, as a basis, it appears that each of us has developed our own "standard context" world view which makes us feel comfortable (non-stressed) and, in our own opinions, maximizes our personal "life-survival" potential. We hold our standard contexts (dearly sometimes) to be `right' as opposed to `wrong' and most of us feel a need to indoctrinate others into our own contexts so as to develop a sort of general agreement about the `rightness' of them. It is also common for us to accept a context from others that we feel might increase our own chances of success (survival) in life -- vis a vis the way that some people try to dress and act `like' famous personages such as Michael Jackson, John Wayne, Dennis Ritchie, or whomever they feel to be a worthy success image. In any case, LAUGHTER IS REJECTION. This simple definition means that what we `perceive' as `humor' are those things which we consider to be outside of our own standard contexts and, by laughter, we are (mentally) rejecting their inclusion into our own arenas. The actual physical body mechanism of laughter is a stress releasing mechanism which allows us to "unstress" what we have just seen (most of the stress is probably at the subconscious level, hidden from conscious inspection. This is due to the nature of the "sub-conscious mind" itself. i.e. observant, gullible and believing.) I would say that this physiological action is akin to one which is now well known, that of the "shot of adrenaline" during "fight or flight" (potential non-survive) situa- tions. Have you ever wondered why you see some people laughing/smiling under very high stress conditions such as death or disaster? Obviously, the laugh- ter itself is a stress reduction mechanism. They are certainly not finding anything funny or humorous about their current environments. It "feels good" to reduce mental and physical stress in one's self, so we all laugh. When I was younger, I would wonder why laughter felt so good but yet the stereotype of the institutionalized mentally unbalanced patient was often one who was constantly in uncontrollable laughter. Within the above definition, the `mental' patients are unable to cope with life itself and are rejecting the entire physical environment in which they find themselves. This continuous act of (mental and physical) stress relief is all that they can now accomplish within their own standard (aberrated) contexts. Isn't laughter funny? I would be very interested in hearing any current medical research on stress relief which supports or denies this theory. Informally, it has explained to my satisfaction, every aspect of humor/laughter that I have applied it to so far. From an example above, the `funny' aspect of W.C. Fields' remark is the personal rejection of his attempted switch of our own context (from a `generally-agreed context' of YMCA clubs) into his own (`privately-held') context. Our humor would also be a subconscious rejection of the "clubbing of children" (certainly a "problem" (non-survival) action, in so far as it is viewed by the subconscious mind). Someone, with a different personal context, might find no humor in Fields' remark. This difference could have come in the form of having personally observed a child (or a baby seal) clubbed. These personal contexts are formed at the conscious level and are subjected to a continuous review for survival potential. Once included (clubbing) in the conscious context set, the subconscious no longer has to deal with it and the subconscious can go back to its other `background' tasks of regulating body temperature, heart rate, etc. Laughter is the defense/rejection of collapsing a person's conscious standard context set. I have also found that I can now better understand why people "make fun" of other people. The humor is an ill-disguised (in my context) attempt to get the person being made fun of to be rejected by the group as he is considered to be dangerous to the context of the fun-makers -- or -- the attempt is to "lower" the butt of the humor, so that the perpetrators feel "higher" than that. I have noticed that Carson's Tonight show on TV uses this form of humor to a marked degree. It allows an audience of low self-confidence to perceive it- self as "higher" (on a conscious level) than the one being made fun of. i.e. the one being "put-down". The laughter is the subconscious stress rejection of accepting a destructive (non-survival) slur into one's personal context set. My regard for comedians is directly proportional to the amount of con- text shifts they use, rather than their use of "put-downs" of other people. Laughter as a rejection of pain, hostility, grief, stupidity, or whatever is really not as funny as I first thought (moved to conscious context from subconscious "automatic" handling). Comment? Or do you just laugh in the general direction of this hypothesis? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Brad Templeton. > Everybody's advocating their ideas about what humour is and what makes us > laugh, but all of these theories can't be complete because while they claim > to have discovered a necessary condition for laughter, they haven't come > anywhere near a sufficient one. I guess that my abbreviated discourse on laughter was not filled with enough data and examples to make it clear to all just what my point was. I attempted to show that `fear/stress' was not only a necessary but a sufficient condition to evoke "laugh responses." In my proposed schema, laughter is a stress relief syndrome (common to primates). It is a rejection of a feared or imagined (what would happen if...) [survival context] shift. Accidentally, I saw an interview with Johnny Carson last evening in which he stated: "When times are tougher, the audiences feel a greater NEED to laugh." This certainly would tend to sup- port a stress relief schema of laughter. If you would like to point out which part of this theory is incomplete, I would be very interested in seeing it explained to me. > If humour is a subtle philosophical point, why don't I chortle at Descartes? > In general there are lots of examples of the kind of thing noted in this book > that aren't funny. Descartes is not generally regarded as "funny" by most readers because there is no survival context threat contained in his points, to them. It would be possible for some person to laugh at Descartes (or ANY author) who found that there was some fearful idea in the context of what is being said. Don't read "horror film scream/fear" for every use of the word fear in my proposal. FEAR HAS MANY SUBTLE LEVELS of experience, as well as overtly stupid movie stereotypical reactions. i.e. There is "fear" associated with crossing the street. That is why we look before sauntering out into the traffic. It would threaten our own learned survival contexts to do less. Children have sometimes not yet learned this survival context fear, so they will dash out into a busy street without looking at the traffic. The old movie comedies have used this exact mechanism to evoke audience laughter. A man reading a newspaper will walk into a street without looking. This evokes a slight smile in the audience. The man is struck by a car. A larger laugh in the audience at the idea of bodily injury. Another man doing the same thing will suddenly fall into a manhole in the street, avoiding the car but getting a laugh out of the fear of falling into a black hole in the ground. Another man will avoid falling into the manhole but will step on (injury again) another's head. And so on etc. ad infinitum. The fear-triggering ideas do not necessarily have to be so overt as to be externally noticeable. The subconscious mind has the genetically determined survival contexts stored within itself. The things such as breathing, avoid- ance of bodily injury, or heart beats. Things of this nature, when threatened lightly or in idea form only, will evoke a subconscious stress relief in the form of a smile or facial expression changes. Drugs, such as alcohol, can inhibit the performance of the conscious mind's check against survival context. The depressant effect of the alcohol will inhibit the mind's relay of some- times very clear anti-survival perceptions. In doing so the drug allows the individual to be placed in VERY DANGEROUS situations with maybe no more than a smile or laugh as personal relief. Drunks are used for humor value also. > The same is true for changes in structure, viewing danger while safe, > viewing something bad, status switch and every other theory I have > heard. I am not totally sure what "the same" means in your sentence. I was under the impression that I had made a clear distinction that each of the stress produc- ing ideas, as PERCEIVED by the observer in his own context, will cause laughter or some of its subtler forms (smiling, change of expression, etc.) as soon as the viewer/hearer has analyzed what was perceived for personal survival con- text. NO TWO PEOPLE will have developed the same survival context, as based on their own life experiences and so, will not laugh at the same things. > After all, if you really had a solid theory, you would be headlining in Vegas. I do not have a psychological need for attention, for stressing others to the point of laughter, nor do I see performing in Las Vegas as a desirable behavior or setting for myself. The material benefit does not inveigh a desire to be a comedian, in my own context. There was an interesting study done on comedians recently attempting to show the personality traits which were most necessary for, or predictive of, success. This study (I'm very sorry that I do not have a reference right now) found that comedians were mostly misfits in their younger childhood years, their being incessantly derided by their peers. This seemed to be the only real thread of commonality for comedians in general. In my own mind, having been "stress-ees" for so long a time, they have developed a keen insight into what things are stressful to other individuals. A rather nice training ground for comedy talent, in my own way of thinking. > There are many questions to answer. Why do we laugh most at extreme clever- > ness? Please cite an example of this whose boundary is outside of the schema that I proposed. I do not totally understand what it is that you are saying. > What about puns? I was under the impression that puns, if very good, elicited a groan, not a laugh. A smile would indicate that the pun was stressful to the individual in word context physical setting, not its word-play value. ("Grenadier syrup" might be funny at the bar because of the bodily injury possibilities of those who use grenades as weapons.) Puns which elicit different responses in dif- ferent individuals mean solely that the different individuals have developed different survival contexts in their own life experiences. What is stressful to one person might be readily acceptable to another, and vice versa. > Why do different cultures have different preferences? Different cultures are subject to different life experiences, so they develop different survival contexts within themseves. There is also room for indivi- dual variation of the members of such groups, if I use my own schema. > Some of the posted theories cover these points, but none cover them all. > They all have merit, but they can't all be right, or can they? I don't know, that's why I'm asking for discussion. I feel that the schema that I wrote covers all of these bases. Are there others? I feel that I can tell what a person is afraid of by his smile and laughter responses. ...!ihnp4!sys1!sysvis!george :-) "Never let 'em see you sweat."
baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) (10/05/85)
The theory of laughter as a rejection mechanism for fear has some supporting evidence from developmental psychology, I believe. I distinctly recall reading about some work on the way infants learn laughter which seemed to indicate that it first arises out of allayed fear. One example given was that a infant being gently tossed or otherwise swung about by a parent will feel fear of falling, but that at a certain stage of development, the fear will begin to be contradicted by an understanding of the parent's ability to control the situation, and the child will laugh. Baba