from stop me if you heard this by jim holt

Schmulowitz: "Liberty, Laughter, and the Law" he spoke ringingly of how jokes have "detected and exposed the imposter and have saved man from the impression of false leaders."

Voltaire: "Those who know why this kind of joy that kindles laughter should draw the zygo-matic muscle back toward the ears are knowing indeed."

Alfred North Whitehead: "The total absence of humor from the bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."


"Of the three theories of humor, it is the incongruity theory that is taken most seriously by philosophers today. It too, however, is open to objections. Why should incongruity be a source of pleasure? Shouldn't the asymmetrical, the disorderly, and the absurd cause bewilderment and anxiety in rational creatures like ourselves, not merriment? The nineteenth-century philosopher Alexander Bain observed:

There are many incongruities that may produce anything but a laugh. A decrepit man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege, and all discordant things; a wolf in sheep's clothing, a breach of bargain, and falsehood in general; the multitude taking the law into their own hands, and everything of the nature of disorder; a corpse at a feast, parental cruelty, filial ingratitude, and whatever is unnatural; the enitre catalogue of vanities given by Solomon-are all incongruous, but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing, rather than mirth.

(Bain was a dour Victorian Scotsman, with little capacity for the darker forms of humor; but one sees what he is getting at.) Some forms of incongruity, moreover, have aesthetic value without being the least bit funny: the ironies of Oedipus Rex, for example, or the dissonances in Mozart's String Quartet in C major.

Even if not all incongruities are funny, nearly everything that is funny does seem to contain an incongruity of one sort or another. For Kant the incongruity in a joke was between the "something" of the setup and the anticlimatic "nothing" of the punch line; the ludicrous effect arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." (In the Critique of Judgment, Kant illustrates the point with a story: An Indian who is dining with an Englishman looks astonished when a bottle of ale is opened and the contents come gushing out in a wave of froth. "Well, what is so wonderful in that?" asks the Englishman. "Oh, I'm not suprised at its getting out," replies the Indian, "but at how you ever managed to get it all in.") Schopenhauer thought that at the core of every joke was a sophistical syllogism. But some jokes simply defy syllogistic analysis. (Lily Tomlin: "When I was young I always wanted to be somebody. Now I wish I had been more specific.")"