{ "id": "humor", "title": "Humor", "lang": "en", "source_lang": "en", "summary": "Humor is the capacity of events, ideas and utterances to amuse, and the human disposition to find them funny. This entry covers its theories, biology, social functions, forms and cultural variation.", "category": "society", "subcategory": "psychology", "type": "concept", "aliases": [ "humour", "the comic (philosophical usage)" ], "generated_at": "2026-10-15", "model": "pro/claude-haiku-5-5", "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/humor/", "translations": { "zh-Hans": { "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/humor/", "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/humor.json" } }, "sections": [ { "heading": "", "text": "Humor is the capacity of an event, idea or utterance to amuse, and the human disposition to find such things funny and to respond with laughter or smiling. It appears in jokes and wordplay, irony and satire, slapstick and absurdity, and it is documented in every known human society. Its universality makes it one of the most widely shared yet least understood parts of human psychology. Thinkers from Aristotle onward have tried to explain why things are funny. The classic answers are grouped as superiority, relief and incongruity theories, and later work added play-based and benign-violation accounts.\n\nThe article traces the concept from its etymology and early attitudes in ancient Greece and China through these theories. It then examines the physiology of laughter, its evolutionary origins in play, and the neural and cognitive processes behind amusement. Further sections cover social functions, the linguistic mechanics of verbal humor, comic genres and performance, and humor in literature and the arts. The article closes with cultural variation, the relationship between satire and free expression, health applications, computational humor, research methods, and unresolved questions." }, { "heading": "Definition and scope", "text": "The English word humor covers three related but distinct things, and much of the confusion in the literature comes from treating them as one. In its first sense, humor is a property of objects and events: a joke, a cartoon or a situation is described as funny. In its second, it is a trait of a person, a sense of humor, meaning a habitual tendency to notice and produce amusing things. In its third, it is a response: the state of being amused, which typically shows itself as a smile, a chuckle or laughter. Theorists disagree about which of these is basic, and whether an account of the response can be built from an account of the object.\n\nThe concept sits among several neighbors that are often used loosely. Laughter is a bodily and vocal behavior, while humor is a quality of stimuli or a mental state, and the two come apart in both directions. Much laughter is not a reaction to anything funny; Robert Provine's observational work found that most laughter occurs in ordinary social exchanges rather than in response to jokes, and people also laugh from nervousness or in greeting. Conversely, something can be humorous without producing laughter, since a dry remark may earn only a smile or no visible reaction at all. Comedy usually refers to a professionally produced genre or form of performance designed to amuse, so it is a subset of the humorous rather than a synonym for it. Wit traditionally names quick, intellectually elegant humor, and in some periods it meant cleverness more than amusement. Irony is a mode of speaking or writing in which the intended meaning departs from the literal one; it is often humorous but need not be. In aesthetics, the comic is a broader category of the laughable, which can include the absurd, the grotesque and the ludicrous, and which is often discussed as an artistic effect.\n\nThe English word derives from Middle English humour, borrowed through Old French from Latin umor, \"moisture\" or \"fluid,\" itself related to a verb meaning to be moist. Its earliest meanings were medical. In ancient and medieval physiology, the humors were four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) whose relative proportions were believed to fix a person's health and temperament. This doctrine, associated with Hippocratic writings and systematized by Galen, is usually called humorism or humoralism, and it remained a prevalent medical theory for more than a millennium. Because each fluid was linked to a disposition, the word came to denote a temperament and then a passing state of mind or whim. The sense of mood in turn produced verbs meaning to indulge someone's fancy and, through narrowing, the notion of wit. The modern sense of amusing emerged later, and sources differ on the precise chronology, so the exact date should be treated with caution.\n\nThe difficulty of settling on a definition follows partly from the way most theories are framed. Many accounts are essentialist: they seek necessary and sufficient conditions, a set of features that every humorous instance must have and whose presence guarantees humor. Some theorists identify a feature present in much humor without claiming it is sufficient, and others confuse a necessary condition for a response to count as humor with an explanation of why one thing is funny and another is not. Laughter itself fails as a test. It is not necessary for humor, because something can amuse without any audible reaction, and it is not sufficient, because nervousness, tickling or drug effects can produce it. Attempts to make suddenness or pleasantness necessary for laughter have met similar counterexamples, since tickling can build gradually. Some scholars, notably John Morreall, have argued that a search for necessary and sufficient conditions is futile and that the better course is to analyze paradigm cases and the ways the terms are actually used. Others hold that an essence may yet be found. The question remains open, and it is further complicated by cultural and historical variation in what counts as funny, and by unsettled boundaries between humor and irony, satire, nonsense and absurdity." }, { "heading": "Classical antiquity and early attitudes", "text": "Greece: laughter as mixed feeling and ethical problem\n\nAncient Greek writers used several words for the field, including gelōs (laughter) and to geloion (the laughable), and they did not treat laughter as simply good or bad. In the Philebus, Plato examines the laughter people feel at their friends' misfortunes and concludes that it mixes pleasure with pain. The pleasure comes from seeing someone else's folly, and the pain comes from envy and ill will. Plato locates the ridiculous in a kind of self-ignorance, in which people believe themselves richer, wiser or more handsome than they are. In the Republic, he also asks that the guardians of the ideal city avoid uncontrolled laughter, because it signals a loss of emotional restraint.\n\nAristotle takes a more analytical approach in the Poetics. He describes the comic as a species of the ugly or base that causes no pain or destruction, and his example is a comic mask, which is distorted but harmless to look at. In the Rhetoric, he treats wit (asteiotes) as closely tied to metaphor. A witty remark works by showing a surprising but apt connection, and it pleases the listener because it reveals the speaker's cleverness and learning. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he presents playfulness as a virtuous mean between buffoonery and boorishness, which links humor to character and social judgment.\n\nRome: joking as an oratorical instrument\n\nRoman rhetoricians treated joking as a practical tool of persuasion. Cicero, in the second book of De oratore, classifies kinds of wit and recommends it to speakers for relaxing audiences, undermining opponents and making a case memorable. He also insists on decorum: a jest must suit the dignity of the speaker and the occasion, and it should not descend into coarse abuse. Roman writers used a pair of contrasting terms for this distinction, urbanitas (polished, urban wit) and scurrilitas (buffoonery). Quintilian, in Book VI of the Institutio oratoria, discusses the sources of laughter and warns against excessive joking. He advises the orator to use humor sparingly, to avoid obscenity and personal malice, and to stay within the needs of the case.\n\nEarly China: jesters, Confucian restraint and Daoist reversal\n\nIn the Records of the Grand Historian, Han historian Sima Qian devoted a chapter to \"Biographies of the Humorists\" (Huaji liezhuan). The term huaji was glossed in the tradition as wit that flows endlessly, like a vessel that pours liquor without running dry, and it was used for speech that remonstrated with rulers indirectly. The chapter describes court performers (you, paiyou) such as Chunyu Kun of Qi, who used a riddle about a bird that neither flies nor sings to persuade King Wei of Qi to attend to government, and Youmeng of Chu, who impersonated a deceased minister to press the king to reward the minister's family. These figures show that comic speech could carry serious political criticism when direct speech was dangerous.\n\nConfucian texts regarded laughter as something to be ritually governed. In the Analects, Confucius smiles at a small-town performance of music, then describes his own remark as a joke when a disciple takes it literally. The Book of Rites advises that one should laugh without displaying the gums, a detail that illustrates the emphasis on bodily control. Daoist texts took a different line. The Daodejing observes that the lowest kind of scholar laughs at the Dao, and that such laughter is a sign of its depth. In the Zhuangzi, the sage drums and sings at his wife's death, shocking a friend, and in another passage a playful exchange about whether fish are happy turns on the limits of knowledge. In both cases, laughter becomes a way of questioning conventional values." }, { "heading": "The superiority theory", "text": "The superiority theory holds that amusement arises when a person perceives himself or herself as higher in standing than someone or something else. Its best-known statement comes from Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), where laughter is defined as a \"sudden glory\" that arises from a sudden perception of one's own eminence, set against the infirmities of others or against one's own former failings. Hobbes treated laughter as a passion, a grimace produced by pride, and he distinguished laughter that mocks a person from laughter at absurdities \"abstracted from persons,\" which he thought could be shared without offence.\n\nAncient antecedents\n\nModern accounts often trace the theory to Plato and Aristotle, though scholars disagree about how far either endorsed it as a complete account. In the Philebus, Plato describes the laughter people feel at a friend's misfortune as a mixture of pleasure and pain, bound up with malice and with ignorance of oneself. Aristotle's Poetics defines the ridiculous as a failing or ugliness that causes no pain or destruction, and comedy as the imitation of people worse than average. In the Rhetoric he calls wit \"educated insolence,\" and in the Nicomachean Ethics he describes jokes as a kind of abuse that should be told without causing pain. Sheila Lintott has argued that none of the three philosophers offered the theory as an essentialist definition of comic amusement, since Aristotle also discusses laughter's social virtues and Plato allows for innocent laughter.\n\nHobbes and later critics\n\nThe theory's influence was broad but contested. In 1725 Francis Hutcheson pointed out that people feel superior to dogs, cats and trees without being amused, so superiority alone cannot be sufficient. Charles Baudelaire, in the nineteenth century, combined Hobbesian dominance with a sense of human mortal inferiority, calling laughter \"satanic.\" Later revisions moved the theory away from aggression. Hobbes's own wording, \"formerly,\" was extended by Glen Morreall and others to cover self-deprecating humour, in which a person laughs at a past self from a position of greater maturity. Contemporary defenders recast superiority as a judgment about relative standing, so that amusement registers a comparison of status or competence rather than a hostile feeling. Charles Gruner's game-based account, which treats humour as a contest with winners and losers, is a related development.\n\nExplanatory reach and limits\n\nThe theory explains ridicule, mockery and the pleasure of seeing a pompous person deflated, and it fits a large share of the material that Hobbes and Plato discussed. Its difficulties are equally clear. Puns and wordplay involve no obvious target, and Lintott has argued that superiority cannot account for them. Nonsense and absurd humour, in which nobody is the butt of the joke, also resist the explanation. Self-directed humour is harder still: a self-deprecating joke told by a person facing a serious illness is hard to describe as a feeling of superiority, and critics note that the \"former self\" move strains the concept. Empirical findings also cut against a universal reading. In play fighting, the one who is \"beaten\" often laughs more than the aggressor, and reviews have found no evidence that all humour involves aggression.\n\nReformulations that treat superiority as a social evaluation have responded to some of these objections, but they also raise problems of their own. A theory that takes in self-amusement, play and status judgments can become so broad that it stops distinguishing superiority from other pleasures. Critics such as Lintott have also argued that the theory's focus on malicious pleasure may encourage morally questionable attitudes, which is why the debate has become as much ethical as theoretical." }, { "heading": "The relief theory", "text": "The relief theory explains laughter as the discharge of tension that has built up and has no further use. Where the superiority account locates the cause of amusement in a feeling of triumph, relief accounts place it in the body's energy economy. The model is hydraulic: pressure accumulates, and laughter opens a valve. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy compares it to a pressure-relief valve on a steam boiler, a picture that explains the theory's appeal and also its later embarrassment.\n\nThe theory's earliest form appears in Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose 1709 essay on the freedom of wit and humour was printed in his Characteristicks in 1711. Shaftesbury argued that the lively spirits of clever people, when confined, seek other outlets, and that mockery, mimicry and buffoonery are among them. He used the idea less as physiology than as a programme for manners. Ridicule, in his view, could correct folly and refine conduct, replacing the coarse guffaws of the crowd with a more civil amusement. Ross Carroll's study of eighteenth-century ridicule describes this as a shift from laughter as an instrument of contempt toward laughter as a means of sociability, a distinction that later relief theorists did not always keep.\n\nHerbert Spencer gave the theory its most explicit physiology. In his essay on the physiology of laughter, dated 1860 in some references and 1911 in others, he held that nervous excitation tends to produce muscular movement, and that surplus excitation flows into whatever motor channels are open. In his account, laughter arises when a mind that has been prepared for something elevated suddenly descends to the trivial. The energy mobilised for the lofty expectation is left over and discharges through the muscles of the face, chest and vocal tract. Spencer's \"descending incongruity\" was thus not offered as a rival to incongruity theory but as an explanation of why a particular mental jolt produces purposeless movement. The model has lost its scientific footing, since the hydraulic view of the nervous system is no longer accepted, but the idea that laughter releases a surplus has persisted in modified form, for example in John Dewey's 1894 description of laughter as a sudden relaxation of strain, comparable to a sigh of relief.\n\nSigmund Freud's Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905) gave the theory its most detailed psychological form. Freud separated harmless wit, such as nonsense and wordplay pursued for its own sake, from tendentious wit, which serves a purpose: hostile aggression, satire or defence, or obscene exposure. Tendentious jokes, in his account, exploit the fact that social and internal prohibitions restrain certain impulses. The joke offers a permitted route around the prohibition, and the listener's laughter releases the energy that had been spent keeping the impulse in check. Freud also stressed the social structure of the joke, which typically involves a teller, a listener who shares the pleasure, and a target who is either absent or humiliated. The pleasure of the joke, for Freud, is the saving of psychic expenditure that repression would otherwise require.\n\nFreud's emphasis on sexual and scatological material follows from this logic. These are the subjects most heavily policed by social norms and by the individual's own self-control, so jokes that touch them offer the largest reserve of energy to be released. Hostile jokes about authority, out-groups and other people's failings operate on the same principle, since aggression is also restrained. The theory thus accounts for the prominence of taboo content in comic traditions, from bawdy folk humour to political satire on forbidden targets, and for the way audiences laugh harder when they feel a subject is off-limits.\n\nThe theory's limits are considerable. Freud's distinction between harmless and tendentious wit concedes that a large class of jokes, including nonsense verse, puns and clever logical twists, does not obviously involve any repressed impulse. Nothing needs to be restrained for a pun to land. The relief model also struggles to specify how energy could be measured, so its predictions are hard to test, and it cannot easily explain why the same taboo material fails to amuse in some settings, or why an audience can be amused by a joke whose target they have no emotional stake in. Relief accounts therefore tend to survive as descriptions of certain kinds of laughter, especially laughter that follows a release from fear or embarrassment, rather than as general theories of humour." }, { "heading": "The incongruity theory", "text": "The incongruity theory holds that humor arises when a mind meets a mismatch between what it expects and what it actually encounters. Its roots go back to the eighteenth century, when several writers, including Immanuel Kant, began to describe laughter in terms of a disrupted expectation. Kant's formulation in the Critique of Judgment (1790) remains the most cited. He held that laughter is an affect produced when a strained expectation is suddenly reduced to nothing. Kant stressed that the expectation does not reverse into its opposite. It simply dissolves. The understanding gains nothing from this, yet the sudden collapse produces a brief, indirect pleasure that he linked to a physical jostling of the body.\n\nArthur Schopenhauer offered a related account in The World as Will and Representation, placing the source of the comic in a sudden perception of disagreement between an abstract concept and the real object that the concept is supposed to capture. Søren Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), treated the comic as a kind of contradiction that is experienced without the pain that accompanies tragic contradiction. These thinkers differ in vocabulary, but they share the idea that the mind must be briefly thrown off its ordinary course before amusement can occur.\n\nThe cognitive shift model\n\nModern cognitive versions move the emphasis from a feeling of surprise to the mental work of reinterpretation. In his two-stage model, Jerry Suls (1972) proposed that a comprehender first detects an incongruity between an incoming element, often the punchline, and the interpretation that the preceding context most strongly supports. In a second stage, the listener finds a further rule or piece of information that makes the unexpected element fit, and that resolution is what produces the pleasure of getting the joke. Humor is therefore understood as a shift in perception or interpretation: the listener moves from a serious mode of tracking consistent meaning into a playful mode in which an inconsistency is enjoyed rather than resolved in the usual way. Suls's framework has been widely used in psychology and computational work, and some researchers have argued that it does not account for the range of emotions involved in the process.\n\nSetup, misdirection and punchline\n\nComedians describe the structure of a joke as a setup and a punchline. The setup builds an expectation, usually by making one interpretation the most probable one. The punchline then violates that expectation and forces a second reading that is also consistent with the words already heard. A simple example is the line about reading a book on anti-gravity that is impossible to put down. The phrase \"put down\" first invites a physical reading, and the punchline reveals a second, figurative sense. The listener must abandon the first reading and see the whole sentence anew. Misdirection is the mechanism that makes this work: the setup is designed to lead attention down a path that appears correct until the final element disrupts it. This resembles the structure of garden-path sentences in linguistics, although a garden-path sentence is usually meant to be parsed rather than to amuse. If the reinterpretation fails, the listener experiences confusion. If it is too easy, the surprise disappears, so the timing and the choice of misleading cue matter as much as the logical content.\n\nThe limits of incongruity\n\nMost theorists now treat incongruity as a necessary but not a sufficient condition of humor. A mismatch can also produce shock, disgust, disappointment or the sense of having discovered something. A riddle presents a deliberate contradiction whose solution is a task for the intellect, and a puzzle can be solved without any amusement at all. A typographical error, a misread sign or a broken machine also produce incongruity, and none of them is ordinarily funny. Incongruity alone therefore does not distinguish a joke from a puzzle or an error.\n\nThis limitation has pushed theorists to add conditions. One widely shared addition is that the incongruity must be perceived as non-serious, so that the listener does not treat it as a real problem to be fixed. Another is that the incongruity must be benign rather than threatening or harmful. Kant's formulation also contains a tension that later accounts have not fully settled: his expectation dissolves into nothing without being reconstructed, whereas the two-stage model requires a resolution. Whether humor depends on reconstruction, on dissolution, or on both remains an open question in the theory." }, { "heading": "Other theories and classification debates", "text": "Play theory and the play frame\n\nPlay theory treats humor as a special case of playful activity. Its most influential formulation comes from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose 1955 essay \"A Theory of Play and Fantasy\" began with an observation at a zoo of two monkeys wrestling in a way that resembled combat without being combat. Bateson argued that such play requires metacommunication, a layer of signals that tells the receiver how to read the actions that follow. The message \"this is play\" makes a playful nip mean something other than the bite it resembles. Erving Goffman later developed the related concepts of framing and keying in Frame Analysis (1974), describing a frame as the boundary that sets behavioral expectations within a social setting.\n\nApplied to humor, the play frame explains why a joke's content, however absurd, hostile or improbable, is not taken as a sincere assertion. The listener has been cued that the utterance is non-serious. This accounts for the continuity between jokes, teasing, mock threats and fantasy, and it links verbal humor with the play behavior of other mammals. Its limitation is that a frame signals that something is not meant seriously but says little about what makes the framed content amusing. Play theory therefore tends to supplement, rather than replace, accounts of content.\n\nBenign violation theory\n\nPeter McGraw and Caleb Warren proposed the benign violation theory, which draws on an idea associated with the linguist Tom Veatch. On this account, humor occurs when a situation is appraised as a violation of some norm, expectation or sense of how things should be, and at the same time is appraised as benign, meaning safe, harmless or acceptable. Tickling and play-fighting are standard illustrations, since both are physically threatening yet harmless. The authors identified three conditions that make a violation benign: an alternative norm that makes the situation seem acceptable, weak commitment to the violated norm, and psychological distance from the event. Their 2010 experiments on moral violations found that benign transgressions elicited laughter and amusement alongside disgust.\n\nThe theory also predicts that humor is not a simple function of how much norm-breaking occurs. A violation that is too trivial or too severe is not funny, so funniness follows an inverted-U curve. This explains why a tragedy can seem comic at a distance yet unbearable up close. Proponents argue that the framework covers puns, sarcasm, slapstick and tickling within one account. Critics point out that the benign appraisal is often inferred after the fact, that the theory addresses affect more than the cognitive resolution of a punchline, and that most tests rely on Western, student or online samples.\n\nCleverness theory\n\nCleverness theories locate the source of amusement in the ingenuity of the joke and the listener's recognition of it. A joke is treated as a small intellectual achievement, a puzzle neatly solved or a deception elegantly executed. Charles Gruner's work on humor as a game of wits (The Game of Humor, 1997) is a prominent example, framing a joke as a contest in which the teller gets the better of the audience. The approach explains why laughter depends on audience competence and why an over-explained joke falls flat. Its weakness is that cleverness is neither necessary nor sufficient. Slapstick, tickling and many simple puns require little ingenuity, while some elaborate puzzles are admired without being funny.\n\nCombinative proposals\n\nMany theorists have tried to merge the traditional families rather than choose among them. Arthur Koestler's concept of bisociation (The Act of Creation, 1964) describes humor as the collision of two mutually incompatible frames of reference, linking incongruity with a release of emotional tension. Peter Suls's two-stage model (1972) proposes that a listener first detects an incongruity and then resolves it, so that the pleasure of resolution combines with the perception of mismatch and, in some formulations, with a sense of having seen through a deception. Such hybrids can explain a wider range of cases, but they carry costs. When components are combined freely, it becomes unclear which element is essential, and predictions can become difficult to test.\n\nMonro's three-way classification and its problems\n\nD. H. Monro's The Argument of Laughter (1951) sorted historical accounts into superiority, incongruity and relief theories, and this scheme has become the standard map of the field. Monro identified Hobbes as the probable originator of superiority theory and grouped Bergson with it, while incongruity theory was associated with Kant and Schopenhauer. The map is useful for teaching, but it simplifies the historical debate in several ways.\n\nFirst, it presents the families as rival answers to a single question. Most of the historical thinkers did not offer necessary and sufficient conditions for humor, and many did not regard themselves as competing with one another. Second, the categories overlap. Bergson's view that we laugh at human beings behaving like machines combines a correctional, quasi-superiority element with incongruity, and Freud's relief account contains substantial incongruity. Third, the scheme treats the families as theories of the same thing, whereas they often address different objects: the stimulus, the mental operation, or the affective response. Scholars have suggested that the families are better understood as theory families, each capturing one aspect of a complex phenomenon. Recognizing this reduces the sense of contest among positions and directs attention to which aspect each theory explains best." }, { "heading": "Physiology and expression of laughter", "text": "Respiratory and laryngeal mechanics\n\nLaughter is built from a rapid series of expiratory pulses. Most basically, laughter is a nonverbal vocalization characterized by a specific coordination of rhythmic respiratory and laryngeal activity. Electromyographic recordings show that the laryngeal adductors, including the thyroarytenoid and lateral cricoarytenoid, fire in brief, high-amplitude bursts at about 5 Hz, and these bursts usually match the audible \"ha\" syllables one to one . Tracheal pressure rises in pulses that line up with many of these bursts and appear to precisely determine when, and whether, phonation is produced during the laugh. The energy comes from rhythmic pulsing of abdominal and intercostal muscles, forcing air through the glottis, situated in the larynx.\n\nA typical bout is short. A bout of laughter usually contains two to 10 bursts of vocalization. Researchers have modeled the pattern as a damped oscillation: the intensity of successive bursts tends to decrease with lung volume depletion, while the first burst and the number of bursts to follow tend to be set by the overall energy of the laugh. A milder form, the giggle, appears to be characterized by less rhythmic involvement of the respiratory system and, hence, less intensity in the initial burst.\n\nThe acoustic identity of laughter rests mainly on its notes. Provine found that simulating a \"ha-ho-ha-ho\" laugh feels quite unnatural, and that removing the sounds between the notes leaves a laugh that still sounds normal, whereas removing the notes leaves a long, breathy sigh. Pitch and voice quality appear to vary far less in a controlled way than they do in speech, a tentative reading of the limited data.\n\nThe punctuation effect\n\nLaughter is not scattered randomly through conversation. In Provine's analysis of 1,200 laughter episodes, laughter of both speaker and audience occurred during pauses at the end of phrases or sentences in over 99% of the sample. Speakers rarely laugh in the middle of a phrase; of 1,200 laughs there were only eight interruptions of speech by laughter, all of them by the speaker. Provine reads this as evidence that speech has priority access to the vocal channel, so that a lawful and probably neurological process controls where laughter falls. The effect extends to signed languages: in a study of deaf signers, laughter occurred 2.7 times more often during pauses and at phrase boundaries than simultaneously with a signed utterance. Provine concluded that laughter placement depends on higher-order cognitive or linguistic processes rather than on low-level competition for a single motor channel. The effect is the origin of the term punctuation effect, and it also appears in online text, where emoticons cluster at the same points where punctuation would fall.\n\nDuchenne and non-Duchenne expression\n\nFacial expression of positive affect is commonly divided into two types. The Duchenne smile combines zygomaticus major activation, which lifts the mouth corners, with orbicularis oculi activation, which narrows the eyes and produces the crinkling known as crow's feet. The name honors the neuroanatomist Duchenne de Boulogne who isolated the orbicularis oculi action and first posited its coherence with enjoyment. Duchenne also argued that the muscle around the eye did not obey the will the way the muscles around the mouth did. A smile without eye involvement is called a non-Duchenne smile, and these smiles may partly serve social functions.\n\nThe distinction is weaker in practice than the classical account implies. A study of patients who had botulinum toxin injected into the eye muscle found that smiles in which the orbicularis muscle was active were rated as more felt, spontaneous, intense, and happier. Yet in a database of posed smiles, 67% of them were accompanied by the orbicularis oculi activation, so deliberate performance can recruit the eye muscle too. Eye involvement is therefore a signal of felt positive affect that is more often present in genuine smiles, not a reliable lie detector.\n\nSmiling, laughing and contagion\n\nSmiling and laughing are related but not identical. A smile can be produced by the mouth muscles alone, while laughter depends on the rhythmic respiratory and laryngeal bursts described above. Provine characterizes laughter as an instinctive, largely unconscious social vocalization that is rarely produced when people are alone. Speakers often laugh more often than their audience, which fits the idea that laughter functions in interaction rather than as a private reaction. Provine's work on contagious laughter reports that laughter is a sufficient stimulus for laughs and smiles. In group settings, then, one person's laugh can prompt others to laugh or smile, which accounts for the rapid spread of laughter through a conversation and its tendency to cluster at the same points in speech." }, { "heading": "Evolutionary origins", "text": "Theories of laughter's origin start from its resemblance to behavior in other primates. Four main proposals have been developed: a play signal, a false alarm signal, a respiratory account of speech, and comparative work on other species. Each rests on different evidence, and their empirical support varies.\n\nThe play-signal hypothesis\n\nMatthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson's 2005 synthesis proposes that Duchenne laughter became fully ritualized in early hominids, a process they date to between roughly 4 and 2 million years ago, and that it served as a medium for playful emotional contagion. On this account, the breathy panting emitted by primates during play fighting was turned into a signal that probably appeared before language did. Gervais and Wilson argued that laughter functions as a medium for mirthful emotional contagion that recruits partners into resource-building social play. The same authors separate spontaneous Duchenne laughter from the non-Duchenne sort, the kind that isn't dependent on something being funny. In their model, the non-Duchenne form is a later development, and it came to occur in aggressive, nervous, or hierarchical contexts. They describe this as co-option: an older signal acquired new functions as social life grew more complex.\n\nThe false alarm theory\n\nV. S. Ramachandran's 1998 proposal in Medical Hypotheses starts from the idea that alarm calls came first. According to Ramachandran, the main purpose of laughter evolved out of alerting others in the social group to danger by a warning cry. If you have a warning cry, you also need another signal to 'cancel that cry' when the animal realizes there is no real threat to the social group after all. Laughter evolved out of that second signal. His example is an ancestral human who comes across what you think is a dangerous snake but actually turns out to be a stick, you're relieved and you laugh. The theory also accounts for the form of laughter. Ramachandran argued that the \"false alarm\" signaling purpose of laughter explains its loud sound and explosive quality. It fits contagion too, because a signal that spreads through a group is more useful to the group.\n\nThe theory has to explain why some apparent threats are funny and others are not. Ramachandran's slapstick example is that if a man slips on a banana peel and hits his head and starts bleeding to death, you're not going to laugh. But if he [only] falls down and wipes it off his face, you start laughing. The theory's supporters have also acknowledged its status. One account says the theory admittedly involves a lot of conjecture but it is compelling in the number of bits and pieces that begin to add up. A 2016 comparative analysis reports that chimpanzee play faces and laughter convey a 'false alarm' message highly similar to that suggested for the evolution of laughter in humans.\n\nThe bipedal theory of vocal evolution\n\nRobert Provine's bipedal theory addresses speech as well as laughter. The constraint is breathing during locomotion. Quadrupeds, including our primate ancestors, have a 1:1 relation between breathing and stride because their thorax must absorb forelimb impacts during running. Consequently, the direct link between breathing and locomotion limits vocalizations to short, simple utterances, such as the characteristic panting chimpanzee laugh (one sound per inward or outward breath). Provine argued that the evolution of bipedal locomotion freed the respiration system of its support function during running, permitting greater breath control and the selection for human-type laughter (a parsed exhalation), and subsequently the virtuosic, sustained, expiratory vocalization of speech. On this view, laughter is the visible trace of a breathing change that later made speech possible. The theory has been challenged on biomechanical grounds. Research on running indicates that even though the evolution of bipedal gait has reduced the mechanical constraints on respiration in man, thereby permitting greater flexibility in breathing pattern, it has seemingly not eliminated the need for the synchronization of respiration and body motion during sustained running. The link between walking, breath and speech therefore remains a hypothesis rather than an established result.\n\nCross-species comparisons and their limits\n\nComparisons with other animals supply much of the evidence for these theories, but they carry interpretive limits. The clearest contrast is that humans can produce multiple vocalizations per breath (\"ha ha ha\") whereas apes typically only produce one vocalization per breath, resulting in the in-out panting in the videos. Research on rats has also reported ultrasonic vocalizations during tickling and rough play, which are often cited as evidence for shared affective systems. Such findings show that play-related vocal behavior occurs across mammals, but they do not show that rat calls are homologous to human laughter. Resemblance in behavior or acoustics can arise from convergent function rather than common descent, and sounds that look similar may serve different roles. The false alarm and play-signal accounts both depend on inference from observed behavior to past function, and that inference is hard to test directly. Fossil evidence cannot record vocal behavior, so the reconstruction of when and why laughter emerged rests largely on comparative and theoretical reasoning." }, { "heading": "Neural basis", "text": "（见上文正文）" }, { "heading": "Cognitive processing and individual differences", "text": "Psychologists often treat humor comprehension as a sequence of mental operations rather than a single reaction. The most cited early model, Jerry Suls's two-stage account of 1972, holds that a listener first notices an incongruity and then finds a rule that makes the incongruous parts fit together Suls (1972) refined this theory into a two-stage model of humor comprehension, whose first stage is incongruity detection and whose second is incongruity resolution. The setup builds an expectation about where the story is heading, and when the punchline contradicts it, the mismatch pushes the audience to look for an interpretive principle under which the punchline makes sense. Suls treated this search as a form of problem solving humor understanding is similar to the process of problem solving. Some empirical work supports an extended version that adds a final evaluative step, appreciation a three-stage model of humor processing (humor detection, incongruity resolution, and humor appreciation). Suls later argued that two models may be needed: verbal jokes largely follow the two-stage pattern, while much visual humor and humor aimed at children consists of incongruity alone Suls concluded \"Probably we need two\": one model based on incongruity perception and resolution, and another based on incongruity alone. Verbal humor is mainly based on the two-stage process, whereas much of visual, and children, humor is made up of pure incongruities. Whether resolution is required, or incongruity is enough, remains contested debate between Shultz (1972), Suls (1972), Rothbart and Pien (1977) and Ruch (1992) concerning incongruity as a sufficient (i.e., nonsense) or merely a necessary (i.e., incongruity resolution) stimulus structure for humor.\n\nPrediction is central to these accounts. In one neuroimaging study, incongruity is framed as the moment a listener's forecast about a story fails to hold Incongruity is generated when a prediction is not confirmed in the final part of a story. Predictive-processing approaches go further and locate the reward partly in the speed of comprehension rather than in the content alone. On this view, the brain appears to reward unexpectedly rapid error correction humor emerges not merely from resolving incongruity but from the efficiency of resolution. Van de Cruys et al. (2017) argue that pleasure depends on the speed of understanding—the brain rewards itself for unexpectedly rapid error correction. Computational work turns unexpectedness into a number. Information-theoretic measures such as surprisal estimate how improbable a word is given the preceding text, typically in bits:\n\n\\[S(w_t) = -\\log_2 P(w_t \\mid w_{ Charlie Hebdo Cartoons> - King's College London", "url": "https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/religious-satire-moral-restraint-and-thei-charlie-hebdo-cartoonsi/" }, { "title": "European Court of Human Rights and Blasphemy (Part IV) - Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression", "url": "https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/blasphemy-and-freedom-of-expression/european-court-of-human-rights-and-blasphemy/28E78DCF4DA07353E6DEDBC655184895" }, { "title": "Deckmyn v Vandersteen", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deckmyn_v_Vandersteen" }, { "title": "CJEU defines works of parody and rules that rights holders' interests must be considered", "url": "https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/cjeu-defines-works-of-parody-and-rules-that-rights-holders-interests-must-be-considered" }, { "title": "The German Bundesgerichtshof changes its concept of parody following CJEU Deckmyn v. 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