Humor as social bargaining
I’d never considered what it is that makes something funny outside of any isolated instance of humor. This post presents an evolutionary account of humor, and while I can agree that humor is probably an evolved rather than a cultural trait, I have a strong intuition that there are different things that can make different situations funny, so I’m deeply suspicious of any theory that tries to find one single source of all humor. The article’s thesis is “the sudden recognition of our own superiority”, but I have a nagging feeling that there is more to humor than that, and not simply because that would be a depressing view of funniness. It just seems like you can’t find an ur-joke from which every other joke derives. Call it a pluralism of humor, if you want academese. In any event, this is a fascinating article, and it’s one of the ever rarer times when an article actually got me considering something that I never thought to consider and that I think it’s actually worthwhile to think about.
(via psychobabble.)
