Linguisitic theories of humor, 1

This series of blog posts will attempt to distill parts of the following articles on humor theory into something interesting and intelligible to someone like me without a degree in English. No joke, it's harder than you might think to abstractly explain humor, from the perspective of a linguist (which I'm not). This part will discuss superiority theory.

Here are the references we'll use:

[A05] A. Abdalian, Why’s that funny? An extension to the semantic theory of humor, Swathmore College, Linguistics Dept thesis, 2005. 32pp.
[H92] C. Holcomb, Nodal humor in comic narrative: a semantic analysis of two stories by Twain and Wodehouse, Humor: International Journal of Humor and Research 5 (1992)233-250.
[K06] A. Krikmann, Contemporary linguistic theories of humour, Folklore 33(2006)27-58.
[C22] L. Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy: with an adaptation of the Poetics and a translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus
Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1922.
[R79] V. Raskin, Semantic mechanics of humor, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 325-335.
(In 1985, Raskin published a book of the same title, which I’ve not read.)


Another good reference for this topic is wikipedia’s Theories of Humor.

At some level, (verbal) humor involves an unusual interpretation of the meaning of a conversational communication. A joke is a non-bona-fide humorous verbal communication, where by bona-fide we mean a communication with usual, information-bearing, serious, sincere meaning. The mental state in which we humans give meaning to something is referred to as propositional attitude. For example, if I claimed "my dog can paint my house," you would know that is false. Not because you are an expert on dogs (and if you are, assume for this example you aren't), nor because you are an expert on painting houses (again, if you are, assume for this example you aren't), but because you have enough of a familiarity with dogs and a familiarity with house painting that you "know" my claim is false. The idea we will take in these posts is that generally get by in our day-to-day lives by using out propositional attitudes towards things, as opposed to insisting on careful scientific, logical reasoning. Careful reasoning takes time and effort, while propositional attitudes are often based on commonly accepted (possibly mistaken) attitudes.

What does John Cleese say?
One of the funniest people ever, John Cleese has given a number of talks on creativity and has emphasized the importance of humor in this regard. He says to be creative you need:

1. Space
   You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures.
   
2. Time
   It's not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.
   
3. More Time
   Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original, and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.
   
4. Confidence
   Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.
   
5. Humor
   The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
   

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

What does Aristotle say?
The known parts of Aristotle’s Poetics discusses a theory of drama, at least of tragedy. (Only tangentially related to the current topic, and worthy of a separate post, is the conjecture that Aristotle wrote a "lost" volume of the Poetics on comedy - see Cooper [C22].) Aristotle introduced the Superiority Theory of humor. Very roughly speaking, the idea is that each joke has a “winner” and a “loser” and we laugh at the loser to feel better about ourselves. This theory of humor explains those (sometimes offensive) jokes pointed against some person or group, typically on political, ethnic or gender grounds [K06].

Example 1:

Woman A: Who was that gentleman I saw you with last night?
Woman B: That was no gentleman, that was my husband.
- old vaudeville routine (with a gender reversal)

In this case, the theory says the husband is the "loser." By laughing at him we experience joy because we feel superior.

Example 2:

Wife: I'd like to go somewhere I've never been before.
Husband: Try the kitchen.
- Henny Youngman

In this case, the wife is the "loser."

Some [A05] believe that Aristotle’s commentary also foreshadowed Incongruity Theory (developed in the 1700s and discussed in a later post) and Release of Tension Theory (developed by Freud in the early 1900s and discussed in section 1.2 of Abdalian [A05]). Related to both Release of Tension Theory and Superiority Theory is Koestler's theory of comedy (for example, Krikmann [K06] discusses this). These three theories can be categorized as "psychological theories". One weakness of the Superiority Theory is that it's too general and vague for predictive purposes [A05]. For example, it doesn’t help to tell us which jokes are funnier than others or why. This is one motivation for exploring other theories of humor.