Theories of
Humor
LAUGH TRACK
Questions
 What
is Humor?
 What
makes something funny?
 Where
 Does
 Is
does humor come from?
humor serve some purpose?
humor natural or cultural or personal… or all of
‘em?
Dissection and Destruction
E. B. White:
“Humor can be dissected,
as a frog can,
but the thing dies in
the process and the
innards are discouraging
to any but the pure
scientific mind.”
What Can We Learn?
 How
we work.
 How
we are manipulated.
 How
our ideas and feelings are shaped
by artists, politicians, culture.
 How
culture affects us.
 How
we can produce humor.
So…
Psychological Theories of Humor
Apart from tickling, we laugh because
of thought. Humor then, is a mental
phenomenon. To explain humor or
learn something from it, we want to
understand how it works in our brains.
Let’s start with Freud.
Sigmund Freud – 1856 - 1939
“Father of Psychoanalysis
 Layers of Consciousness




Unconscious
Preconscious
Conscious
Structure of Personality



Id (instinct)
Ego (reason)
Superego (morality)
A Bestiary of Mental Anguish
When layers of personality don’t work well together (the conscious doesn’t want to hear
what the unconscious has to say) or when a personality doesn’t develop normally (gets
stuck in the Id, for example), anxieties and defense mechanisms arise. Examples:
Projection – the ego assigns unacceptable characteristics or thoughts to others rather
than admitting them as one’s own.
Rationalization – unreasonable and unacceptable thoughts and behaviors are made to
sound reasonable after the fact by giving them manufactured explanations.
Identification – when another individual appears to be a threat, the ego may ease this
fear by incorporating the characteristics of that person.
Repression – the ego blocks information from consciousness, either by not allowing it to
rise out of unconscious or by forcing it back into the unconscious. This should not be
confused with suppression, which is a conscious process. It is also to be distinguished from
denial, in which the ego obliterates the potentially anxiety-producing material.
A Bestiary of Mental Anguish 2
Fixation occurs when libidinal energy is inappropriately (either because it is exaggerated
or because it is anachronistic) devoted to a psychosexual stage, and too little or too
much gratification can result in fixation.
The psychosexual stages are:

Oral Stage – roughly the first year of life, when pleasure is mainly derived from the mouth.

Anal Stage – from age 1 to about age 2½, when pleasure is mainly derived from the anus.

Phallic Stage – from around age 2½ to around age 6, when pleasure is obtained from masturbation and
accompanying fantasies.

Genital Stage – post puberty. Self gratification of the three pre-genital stages turn outward.
Displacement – the most useful and widespread mechanism, displacement occurs when
instinctual energy (libido) is directed away from its most immediate satisfaction and given
another outlet.
Okay, so how does psychology help here?
In studying humor through a psychological lens, we hope to gain psychological
insight. So a psychological analysis of something humorous can do one of
several things:
1. It can explain why someone is behaving as they are – in a humorous way. (A
character inappropriately exhibits Id behavior, for example.)
2. It explains why the humor works due to it’s psychological contents.
(Explaining a joke is funny because it exhibits repression, for example.) Or,
3. It explains something about the psychology of the people (or culture) who
find the humor funny. (We’ve all rationalized just like that character.)
For Freud, humor is akin to dreams and parapraxis (Freudian slips), a window into
the unconscious, telling us about our suppressed and repressed desires, our
fixations, our rationalizations, etc.. It is important to remember, however, that
like dreams, jokes are coded, often symbolic messages that we must untangle.
This isn’t straightforward stuff.
Okay, but what makes the humor… humorous?
When hidden things are revealed there is a release of tension
and a feeling of relief, often experienced as laughter.
Technically, humor “…liberate(s) the energy expended by rationality to repress both infantile
nonsense and tendentious feelings.” (Freud, Jokes…)
So if something was funny, it was funny because there was
tension released.
What was that tension; what caused it?
Figure that out and you’ve got yourself a bona fide
psychological insight!
Freud’s “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”
“the comic arises… as an unintended discovery derived from human social relations. It is found in people
– in their movements, forms, actions, and traits of character.”
An important characteristic of humor is that it reveals something that is hidden. This is why surprise is often
a component. More importantly, it means that humor depends on insight. At the heart of something
humorous is something serious.
Of particular interest to Freud:

Caricature “brings about degradation by emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted
object a single trait which is comic in itself but was bound to be overlooked.”

Parody “achieves. the degradation of something exalted… by destroying the unity that exists
between people’s characters as we know them and their speeches and actions.” (Hypocrisy)

Tendentious Jokes and humor express hidden impulses, usually of a sexual or aggressive nature. The
release of tension here is also the recognition that we all have these impulses and repress them.
Newer Psychological Theories

A number of psychological theories of humor have grown out of Freud’s
work. Not all of them announce that they are psychological

HURL & Benign Violations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysSgG5V-R3U
Uses
So what do you do with psychological theories of humor? Well, you use psychology to gain insight into the
humorous situation, then you:

Explain something about the artwork.


Explain something about the artist.


The audience reaction to the parody in this film shows that they recognize the hypocrisy of the president.
Explain something about the culture.


This playwright repeatedly uses anally fixated characters for comic effect.
Explain something about the audience.


This film repeatedly presents characters who regress and act on Id impulses.
The benign violation theory shows that the ethnic humor in this play works because the ethnic stereotypes are no
longer culturally valid.
Explain something about human nature.

The popularity of this film and it’s violent humor is evidence that all humans repress aggressiveness – and know it.