1. Introduction

Humor is a surprisingly understudied topic in philosophy. Joke-telling customs exist across cultures. Comedies are among the best reviewed and highest grossing films. Comedy shows such as, in the United States, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live play a key role not only in entertaining but shaping citizens’ perceptions of current events.¹ Yet surprisingly, little has been written in philosophy on humor.² This neglect is partly because of the difficulties involved in defining humor. It is surprisingly difficult to pin down a list of necessary or sufficient conditions for humor.³ The neglect of humor may also be a result of the fact that it seems to involve less momentous emotions than art forms such as tragedy or melodrama and less rarified esthetic experiences than the beautiful or the sublime. Elements of this bias can be traced back to Plato’sRepublic, where Socrates urges that the guardians should avoid laughter because it undermines rationality and self-control (Plato 58–9). Subsequent philosophers may have ignored humor because they took it to involve childish emotions that do not merit philosophic reflection.

Recently, however, there has been a flurry of interest in humor. A number of noteworthy articles and books were published in the last decade, such as Ted Cohen’sJokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, in the analytic tradition, and Simon Critchley’sOn Humour, in the continental. The interest in the philosophy of art community in the relation between ethics and esthetics has also led to several publications on the ethics of humor. In short, humor finally seems to be getting the attention it deserves. My aim in this essay, in turn, is twofold. My first aim is to survey the current literature on humor. My second is to propose some directions for further study. My main claim is that the relative lack of publications by philosophers on humor is a concern; it is indicative that humor is not a well understood phenomenon. To fully defend this claim by mounting a comprehensive assessment of the current literature is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I focus on questioning a single, widely accepted assumption – that humor can be detached from laughter. I suggest that reexamining this consensus exposes a widespread bias in the current literature on humor for cognitivist theories of emotion and, more importantly, that what phenomena count as instances of humor becomes unclear when we question this bias.

2. The Three Theories of Humor

It has become customary since the publication of D. H. Monro’sArgument of Laughter to distinguish three main theories of humor: the superiority, incongruity, and relief theories. Each tries to explain what it means for something to be humorous or what occurs when one perceives something to be humorous.⁴ Let me offer a few points of clarification, however, before explaining.

Until fairly recently, philosophers who wrote on humor tended to equate humor with laughter, or, at least, to treat the two as coextensive, with laughter constituting a behavior that expresses one’s perception of humor. However, as John Dewey noted in ‘The Theory of Emotion’, it is unclear that there is any necessary connection between the two. We can laugh from being tickled, from breathing nitrous oxide, and from shock without finding anything in our surroundings humorous, and we can find something funny without laughing at it, such as when we smile inwardly at jokes. More recently, then, philosophers have distinguished humor from laughter (LaFollette and Shanks 329; Carroll, ‘Humour’ 346; Smuts, ‘Humor’). Laughter, the current wisdom runs, is a set of bodily states that culminate in specific vocal patterns (see Provine 55–97). Humor is an amusing cognitive activity that occurs in response to certain stimuli.

There is an ambiguity although as to whether the three theories should be understood as theories of humor, theories of laughter, or theories of both phenomena. Some have held that they should cover both phenomena. For example, Morreall notes that the incongruity theory may be an adequate theory of humor but faults it for not applying to all laughter situations (19). The more common view is that the three theories are best understood as theories of humor – theories that try to shed light on what it means to find something to humorous (LaFollette and Shanks 329; Carroll, ‘Humour’ 346; Smuts, ‘Humor’). For now, I will follow what I take to be the consensus position in presenting these three theories as theories of humor. Later, I will return to whether humor can be detached from laughter.

A second point of clarification: one reason for the recent interest in humor is the more general interest in the relation between art and ethics. There have been several publications over the past decade on what it means for art to be immoral and whether artworks can be immoral yet artistically successful. Many have found humor useful for reflecting on parallel questions. For example, what does it mean for a joke to be immoral? Is it possible for a joke to be saliently immoral yet uproariously funny? Indeed, commentators sometimes invoke cases of morally controversial humor as evidence for positions in the art and morality debate. For example, Daniel Jacobson argues for immoralism with respect to art – the view that moral flaws can contribute to artistic success – by identifying comedies whose moral flaws seem to contribute to their success as comedies.

It is beyond the scope of this article to survey this literature on the ethics of humor. Suffice it to say that much of it has focused on two questions. First, what does it mean for a joke to be unethical? Second, can moral flaws contribute to humor or do they necessarily detract from it? Much of the scholarship on the first question has focused on how jokes require listeners to fill in background assumptions in order to get them. Some have argued that racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive jokes can be unethical in virtue of the attitudes listeners are required to possess in order to get them (Cohen, ‘Jokes’; de Sousa ‘When is it Wrong to Laugh?’).⁵ An alternative view, developed by Matthew Kieran, claims that a joke’s morality is determined by the emotions its teller expresses through it. Kieran’s approach differs from the previous one in that he points out that the same joke can be used to express different emotions in different contexts, and it is these emotions, such as whether a joke’s teller evinces maliciousness in telling it, that determine its morality (Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics’). With respect to the second question, some of the most interesting work has been done by Berys Gaut, who argues that ethical considerations influence but do not determine humorousness (Gaut, ‘Just Joking’). More specifically, Gaut’s ethicism claims that moral flaws necessarily detract from humor. A criticism of this view is that there are cases where a joke’s immorality seems to contribute to its being funny, such as dirty jokes. However, Smuts has recently argued that these arguments for ‘comic immoralism’ are unpersuasive because they do not explain how moral flaws can render a joke more funny than it would otherwise be, whereas proponents of ethicism have a straightforward explanation for how they detract from humor by inhibiting listeners’ amusement (Smuts, ‘Do Moral Flaws Enhance Amusement?’).

While it beyond the scope of this article to survey this literature, it is important to note it as one of the key inspirations for the recent surge in interest in humor, and it is highly recommended as one of the areas in philosophy where some of the most interesting ideas about humor are being developed.

2.1. Superiority Theories

2.2. Incongruity Theories

2.3. Relief Theories

3. Humor Versus Laughter: Or, What Are We Talking About Anyway?

Let me end by suggesting some shortcomings in the current literature. Perhaps, the most surprising feature of the current philosophic scholarship on humor is how little there is. Humor tends to be discussed only in passing in the works typically quoted as canonical examples of the major theories, such as Kant’s brief remarks in the Critique of Judgment. More extensive monographs, such as Bergson’sLaughter, Freud’sJokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, or Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, have been authored by figures whose status as philosophers is debatable. This is not to say that their writings are superficial or are of lesser philosophic significance than those of academic philosophers but merely that the lack of publications by philosophers is surprising given humor’s ubiquity and significance in everyday life. Given that it is difficult to watch television without seeing a sitcom or a commercial for a sitcom, given that studies show that we laugh multiple times each day, and given the penchant of philosophers for finding opportunities to debate over the most hairsplitting distinctions, one would expect to find more publications by them on humor.

This dearth can be seen even in more recent publications. I noted that there has been a surge in publications on humor over the past few decades. Much of this scholarship though has been confined to journal-length articles or to survey articles and encyclopedia entries, which, while insightful, do not seek to elaborate comprehensive philosophies of humor. Recently published monographs, such as Critchley’s On Humour and Cohen’s Jokes, have been fairly short (132 and 99 pp), considerably shorter than, for example, recent monographs on horror, such as Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror or Cynthia Freeland’s The Naked and the Undead (256 and 320 pp). It is far from clear that humor plays any less significant a role in contemporary culture than horror, but it has yet to receive the sustained, rigorous analysis that horror has received in such works.¹²

This dearth is not in itself a problem. After all, little may be written about humor, but it could all be very good. The lack of publications on humor would be significant only if it is symptomatic of a primitive understanding of the subject. Are there signs, then, not simply that there has been little published on humor but not enough?

I believe there are, although I wish to emphasize in making this suggestion that I do not intend to be dismissive of the current scholarship on humor. Recent publications on humor are rich and insightful. Nonetheless, one gets the impression that philosophers have only begun to grapple with some foundational questions about it. First, as I noted earlier, it is not clear that the three theories of humor are full-blown theories as opposed to more informal reflections. Second, a number of puzzles raised by empirical studies of humor have yet to be addressed in much detail by philosophers. Consider studies of gender and humor. Studies show that men are more likely to produce humor in conversation but women are more likely to consume it. When women converse with men, they produce 126% more laughter in response to purported instances of humor than male interlocutors (Provine 28). These studies raise interesting puzzles about the nature of humor. Do men and women experience it differently? Are our current theories biased in favor of men’s experiences? Do women’s experiences suggest the need for an alternative, fourth theory of humor? Also, is the experience of creating humor the same as that of consuming it? Does the term ‘humor’ refer to one phenomenon or to two distinct phenomena? So far, however, such questions have received relatively little attention by philosophers.

I present these observations not as criticisms of the current literature on humor, which is insightful, but as signs that it is incomplete – that more needs to written on the subject. Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this essay to defend this proposal by mounting anything like a comprehensive appraisal of the current literature on humor. I want to confine myself, therefore, to discussing one example where it may be mistaken and where this oversight is symptomatic, I argue, of deeper uncertainties about the nature of humor itself.

I noted earlier that there is widespread consensus that there is no necessary connection between humor and laughter.¹³ Conceptually, the two seem to be distinct, and, empirically, one can find cases where laughter occurs without humor and vice versa. According to the current wisdom, then, laughter is a set of bodily states that can occur in conjunction with humor but need not, whereas humor is an amusing cognitive activity. I suggest, however, that commentators have been too quick to detach the two.

For the purpose of brevity, I will assume that the incongruity theory is widely accepted as the best of the three theories, and I will focus on it in presenting my arguments. My aim although is not to fault this theory as such but to question the more general tendency to equate humor with cognitive activities that are distinguishable from the bodily states that occur when we laugh. It seems to me that our current thinking on humor presumes something like a cognitivist theory of emotion; humor is considered to be an affective state, one characterized by amusement, that expresses one’s appraisal that something is incongruous. However, there are cases where people experience humorous amusements yet do not appear to have engaged in such appraisals. These cases do not necessarily refute either the incongruity theory or a cognitivist account of humor, but they do raise questions about them. More importantly, I suggest that these cases are better explained by a perceptual theory of emotion that associates emotion with internally registering that one is experiencing certain bodily states. Finally, it seems to me that the rivalry between these two explanatory approaches reveals deeper uncertainties about the nature of humor itself. For if I am not mistaken, what theory of emotion one endorses will shape what one accepts as instances of humor and thus one’s intuitions about the range of phenomena a theory of humor should be able to explain.

So, why should we think that laughter and humor are intimately connected? Again, the current consensus is that humor is an amusing cognitive activity that is distinguishable from the bodily states that occur when we laugh. However, it is unclear that humor is best thought of as a cognitive activity, for there seem to be cases where people experience it even though they lack the cognitive abilities needed to make the appraisals that are supposedly essential to it. For example, infants find things in their surroundings funny long before they possess the cognitive abilities needed to appraise them as being incongruous. They laugh at funny sounds, such as squeaky voices, months after being born, and they laugh at physical comedy by age one. Yet it seems counterintuitive to think that they can appraise how funny sounds diverge from normal speech patterns or how physical comedy depicts anomalous social or physical spectacles.

Now, one could deny that infants and young children can experience humor as opposed to mere laughter (LaFollette and Shanks). However, this denial invites Occam’s-razor-type objections. Consider a case where I watch Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. with a young child and find myself laughing at Keaton’s slapstick with her. The incongruity theory would claim that I experience humorous amusement because I appreciate how his slapstick depicts uncommon social and physical spectacles. Yet it would be implausible to apply this explanation to the child’s behavior prior to a certain point in her maturity. Instead, the incongruity theory would liken the child’s laughter to something more like a tickle-response – an involuntary twitching accompanied by pleasurable sensations that are triggered by Keaton’s slapstick. This explanation seems forced, although, given that her behavior is not substantially different from my own. She is not involuntarily writhing in laughter but, like me, observing and reacting to Keaton’s pratfalls. To be sure, I can appreciate subtleties that are lost on her. However, it seems as though we are sharing in roughly the same experience. Denying that the child’s laughter expresses humorous amusement seems to lead, therefore, to a situation where multiple hypotheses are needed to explain the same phenomenon: one story is needed to explain my laughter whereas a second is needed to explain the child’s, despite the fact that the two seem to be instances of the same phenomenon.

Now, one could object that even young children can have expectations that are violated by Keaton’s physical comedy. A 5-year-old viewer may have less sophisticated expectations than me, but she can still appreciate how Keaton’s physical comedy involves uncommon behaviors. This explanation seems less persuasive, however, the less developed the child in question happens to be. It could be the case that 5 years old has been acculturated to the point where he or she can appreciate how Keaton’s physical comedy violates certain expectations, but is it plausible to think that a 1-year old who laughs at me when I perform pratfalls can formulate such expectations? If not, then it seems as though the same Occam’s-razor-type concerns can be raised with respect to infant and child laughter; one hypothesis is needed to explain the infant’s laughter at my pratfalls whereas another is needed to explain the child’s laughter at Keaton’s. A more parsimonious explanation would be that an infant who laughs at my pratfalls, a child who laughs at Keaton’s physical comedy, and myself when I laugh at this same comedy all experience the same thing, humorous amusement, but that humorous amusement need not be as cognitively laden as the incongruity theory claims.

Empirical studies of humor also confirm that one can experience humor in the absence of cognitive appraisals. In Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Provine discusses a study by Gazzaniga and LeDoux on a split-brained neurosurgery patient, PS, who could respond to verbal commands presented to either hemisphere but could only describe left hemisphere stimuli (Provine 53). Gazzaniga and LeDoux report that PS would laugh when his right hemisphere was given the printed command ‘laugh’ but would attribute his laughter to humorousness on the part of his researchers when asked to explain it. In short, he seemed to recognize that what he was feeling was humorous amusement even though he could not identify anything incongruous in his researchers’ conduct.

There seems to be a cognitive bias, then, in our current thinking about humor. The consensus is that humor is an amusing cognitive activity – one that involves our judging the object of humor to be incongruous with some set of expectations. However, the above cases show that one can experience humor in the absence of such appraisals. Moreover, they suggest that undergoing certain internal states that register bodily changes may be more crucial to humor. The subject of Gazzaniga’s and LeDoux’s study recognized that he was feeling humorous amusement even though he did not construe anything in his surrounding to be incongruous. Instead, the researchers’ command led him to undergo certain bodily states that registered in him as humorous amusement. Similarly, my belief that the child and I both experience humorous amusement when we watch Buster Keaton seems to be grounded in the recognition that his slapstick triggers similar bodily states in us rather than in the conviction that we are formulating similar judgments about how his conduct diverges from a specific set of expectations.

Indeed, one could argue that it is only by gauging whether a comedy succeeds in eliciting such states that one can determine if it is humorous. Presumably, one can recognize that something is a form of comedy without laughing at it. Yet can I recognize that a joke is in fact funny without experiencing to some degree the bodily sensations one undergoes when one laughs, albeit perhaps in more etiolated forms than what occurs in full-blown laughter? Suppose you do not find my knock-knock joke about non sequiturs funny. Presumably, you were able to recognize that it is a joke based on its use of the conventions of knock-knock jokes. You could also get its punch line without finding it funny. That is, you could recognize how it toys with these conventions, how it is incongruous with them, yet not find it amusing. What seems to be needed to find it funny is that it trigger certain feelings in you – that it lead you to experience feelings of mirth.

Now, one could argue that I am attacking a straw man. I make it sound as though the incongruity theory claims that humor is purely a cognitive act when it clearly states that there is an affective component as well. To find something humorous, one must undergo a certain emotional response, one of amusement, triggered by one’s apparent detection of an incongruity. The incongruity theory can accept the claim, therefore, that one cannot find a joke funny until it triggers this emotion. It simply states that this response is expressive of one’s construing something to be incongruous. Moreover, why should we think that this emotion necessarily involves the urge to laugh? It may be true that I must experience feelings of mirth to find the knock-knock joke funny, but why conclude that I can only have such feelings if my respiration changes, my facial muscles tighten, my larynx constricts, and my endorphin levels change?

There is a certain legitimacy to these criticisms. Let me clarify, therefore, what I take my earlier examples to show and where I may be making debatable assumptions. My earlier examples expose a flaw in the incongruity theory inasmuch as they show that it is possible to experience humor without detecting an incongruity. More generally, they suggest that there is tendency to overestimate the conceptual prerequisites of humor. Finally, they seem to show that what is essential to humor is experiencing certain feelings or emotions – what I am calling ‘feelings of mirth’ or ‘the emotion of humorous amusement’. If one grants that infants and young children can experience humor, and that brain surgery patients accurately self-report when they claim to experience it, then it seems as though what is essential to humor is not that one make certain appraisals but that one feel certain feelings.

Now, what is meant by ‘feelings of mirth’ or ‘the emotion of humorous amusement’ is, I admit, vague, and I do make the assumption that best way to explain this phenomenon is in terms of one’s internal experience of certain bodily states. I also make the assumption that laughter provides a reasonable starting point for identifying the bodily states that typify humorous amusement. Here, I want to be careful to discourage overly reductive interpretations of this claim. It could be the case that several highly complex sets of bodily states internally register as humorous amusement, and it may not be possible to parse them down into anything like a list of necessary or sufficient conditions. My suggestion is simply that the best way to explain how it is that people can seemingly experience humor in the absence of cognitive appraisals is by associating humorous amusement with certain somatic states, and I propose that laughter provides us with an initial, paradigmatic example of these states. It is in this sense that humor may not be separable from laughter.

Put another way, my argument does assume the truth of something like a somatic or a perceptual theory of emotion of the type Jesse Prinz elaborates in Gut Reactions. It seems to me that a perceptual theory provides us with the best explanation of my earlier cases – of how infant children and brain surgery patients can experience humor. This is an assumption on my part. The point I would make though is that incongruity theories make a similar assumption in presuming cognitivist theories of emotion. Incongruity theories claim that humor is an affective state of amusement that expresses one’s assessment that the object of humor is incongruous with some set of expectations. This claim seems plausible enough, for it seems to be a ubiquitous feature of comedies that they involve incongruities. Nonetheless, the fact that a cognitivist theory of emotion is being assumed can be seen in the tendency to try to detach humor from laughter and to dismiss potential counterexamples as instances of mere laughter rather than cases where one experiences humorous amusement.

Consider the following case. I am on a road trip with my wife. She is driving. She laughs at something, and I laugh with her, enjoying the moment, even though it is unclear what has inspired her laughter. She then describes a humorous bumper sticker she saw on a car she was passing. We both laugh at the sticker. I take it to be uncontroversial that we both experience humorous amusement the second time we laugh – when we both laugh at the sticker’s witticism. According to the current consensus, though, only my wife experiences it the first time. Instead, I experience mere laughter, which, presumably, is similar to a yawn – a set of bodily states that is contagiously triggered by her laughter. Yet why draw this conclusion? My laughter may be contagiously triggered by my wife’s laughter. Yet it seems inaccurate to liken it too closely to a yawn, for it is not as although I am spontaneously overcome with a fit of laughter without being able to identify its source. I recognize that it is inspired by something in my wife’s field of vision, and I seem to be laughing with her at this stimulus even though I do not yet know what it is.¹⁴ Moreover, what I experience the first time I laugh could feel no different to me than what I experience the second time. It may be the case that I will feel more amusement when my wife describes the sticker, but it could also be the case that I will feel less, that it won’t strike me as being as funny as she found it, or it could be the case that my amusement will remain the same. In those cases, therefore, where it remains the same, why not conclude that in both instances I experience the same emotion, humorous amusement, twice but that the incongruity theory is wrong to think that detecting an incongruity is a necessary condition for experiencing it?

To be clear: I do not mean to claim that this case proves that the incongruity theory is wrong. Rather, I present it to illustrate how this theory, and perhaps our current thinking about humor more generally, assumes a cognitivist account of emotion. If you believe that one can only feel humorous amusement if one has effectively made certain appraisals (that the object of humor is incongruous, that one is superior to the object of humor), then you will feel obliged to dismiss my first round of laughter as mere laughter rather than as expressing humorous amusement. But if you uphold a different theory of emotion, one that associates emotions with one’s internally registering certain bodily states, this move will seem unwarranted, and it will strike you as equally reasonable to think that I could have felt humorous amusement in both cases. This ambivalence suggests to me that foundational questions about the nature of humor lurk behind the question of whether it can be detached from laughter. For if I am not mistaken, what theory of emotion you accept shapes what you consider to be instances of humor – the domain of phenomena a theory of humor is supposed to explain. If you are sympathetic to the cognitivist account of emotion that seems to undergird current thinking about humor, then you will dismiss certain laughter scenarios as irrelevant to reflect on humor. If you favor an alternative theory of emotion, one that denies that humor must have such conceptual prerequisites, you will be less likely draw such distinctions between humor and laughter situations more generally. You will be more likely to see humor in more places, such as in the feelings contagiously triggered in us by laugh tracks, infant laughter, or the polite laughter that peppers our day-to-day conversations.

My suggestion, then, is that re-examining the consensus that humor can be distinguished from laughter exposes some deeper uncertainties about the nature of humor itself. First, the consensus that humor can be detached from laughter may turn upon an uncritical acceptance of a cognitivist account of emotion. More importantly, it becomes increasingly unclear what range of phenomena a theory of humor should explain when one questions this assumption. I do not by any means take the arguments in this essay to have settled these questions. Rather, the joint force of them is to simply suggest that these are questions that merit further reflection.

Short Biography

Joshua Shaw received his PhD in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2004. He is the author of Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First (Cambria, 2008). He has published on topics in philosophy of art in Hypatia, Film-Philosophy, and the Post-Graduate Journal of Aesthetics. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the General Arts and Sciences baccalaureate degree program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aaron Meskin for encouraging me to write this essay. I also want to thank Sherri Irwin and an anonymous reviewer at Philosophy Compass for excellent suggestions they provided on how to improve it.

Works Cited