What's So Funny?

Anyone else asking this question might just seemed annoyed. But when Eric asks, he really wants to know why that is considered funny. He wants to understand the mechanics of humor. He wants to fit in this world of ours where everyone else seems to know when to laugh and when not to.

This is very difficult for me to explain to Eric, because I just don’t know why certain things are funny and others not. Why is slipping on a banana peel funny? Why are things only funny when it is in cartoon form? Like a dynamite blowing up in Daffy's mouth. Why do I crack up when Porky Pig is eating bacon and crying because he loves it so much? I mean, I have good guesses as to why, but guesses do not help Eric.

Imagine if you had to program a robot to have a sense of humor. I realize Eric is not a robot, but for you to make this work, you would have be able to describe concisely the steps of funniness. It might go something like this:

Does the joke contain two incongruous elements?
>If no, then not funny.
>If yes, is one element socially normal?
     >If no, then not funny.
     >If yes, does the other element, constitute a violation of the “subjective moral order.”
          >If no, then not funny.
          >If yes, then laugh.*

Let's test it on Groucho Marx:

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

It works! Ok, ok --that was my own “brand” of humor. Even though as individuals we all laugh at different things, there is still a general understanding of what is funny. Otherwise comedians would have a very tough time making a living. 

My ”program” was inspired by the theory of verbal humor by T.C. Veatch (1998) found in this article The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor