What Makes Jokes Funny
LITERATURE REVIEW
What Makes a Joke Funny?
Over thousands of years from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero, through Hume and Kant to the more recent Bergson and Freud, there has been a large body of articles, treatises and theses about humor and its relatives. However, there has been a lack of consensus on what is meant by "humorâ, and what is the ultimate cause or motivation of humor, across the many disciplines in which it is studied.
Now, in this paper, I will set out to answer the question "what make a joke funnyâ, as joke is a major vehicle of humor. And I will try to approach this problem mainly on linguistic dimension, taking two major attributes of joke -- ambiguity and unexpectedness into consideration.
Humor research has a long history. The ultimate cause or motivation of humor has been the concern of over 200 theories from different disciplines, mainly psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. In this brief literature review, humor theories will be introduced from two aspects: traditional theories of humor, and modern linguistic studies of humor.
There are three traditional theories of humor, which find the essence of humor in three aspects: superiority, relief from restraint and incongruity.
The Superiority Theory, dating back to Aristotle's (384-328BC) view that comedy is based on "an imitation of men worse than the averageâ, of people who are "ridiculousâ, accounts for the pleasure one feels when the less fortunate and less desirable figures are laughed at. What is laughable is defined as merely a subdivision of what is ugly, involving some defect that is not productive of pain or injury to others.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is probably the originator of this theory. "Laughter," he says, "is a kind of sudden glory". He adds that we laugh at the misfortunes or infirmities of others, at our own past follies, provided that we are conscious of having now surmounted them, and also at unexpected successes of our own...
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