Here are three ways that comedy can impact poverty. She and the producers wondered if the show might communicate its content better in a less serious form. It is a documentary about global poverty through the lens of comedian Hasan Minhaj as he searches for up-and-coming comedians from the developing world.
Its results showed that both documentaries increased suppor t from U. Comedy can also impact poverty by providing an outlet for people to express themselves. Goliath and Goliath , a comedy and entertainment agency based in South Africa, uses its brand to build the local comedy industry and provide comedians a place to share their experiences.
However, just what is it that makes one laugh? Six elements are required for something to be humorous:. When these criteria have been met, people will laugh. If any one is absent, then the attempt at humor will fail. The first criterion, the appeal to intellect rather than emotion , is obvious when ethnic humor is used.
Polish Irish, whitey, gay, fraternity, sorority, etc. To the group that is being made fun of, jokes at their expense are not funny -- they are insulting and rude. People respond to insults and rudeness subjectively, taking umbrage, or, in more simple terms, get angry, which is an emotion.
To those who have no personal interest in the joke, i. Thus, one can take the old joke, "How many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five: one to hold the bulb and four to turn the ladder. Lenny Bruce counted on the intellectual basis of comedy when, in one of his routines, he identified all the races and ethnic groups in his audience with insulting labels: "I see we have three niggers in the audience.
And over there I see two wogs , and five spics, and four kikes," etc.. As he started the routine there were gasps of incredulity and even anger: the audience couldn't believe that Bruce would be so insulting and insensitive. But as Bruce continued and the list grew longer, and it became clear that he was listing everything he could think of, the words lost their connotative, emotional meaning as insulting terms and turned into just noises. In other words, they lost their emotive content and became an intellectual exercise in how words l ose their meanings outside of context.
At this point, the audience, all of whom had been appalled and angry at exactly the same words, started laughing at them: the audience was reacting intellectually, not emotionally.
The second two criteria for comedy, that it be mechanical and inherently human , are delineated by Henri Bergson in his essay "Laughter".
His theory revolves around a basic axiom, that the laughable element consists of a mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect adaptability and flexibility.
It's humorous when a person acts in a manner that is inappropriate to a stimulus or situation, as in any slapstick comedy routine. It is funny when a chair is pulled out from under someone who is sitting down, because he doesn't adapt to the change in situation and continues to sit in a mechanical fashion.
He followed the lead of Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics Ch. As bodily tiredness is eased by resting the body, so psychological tiredness is eased by resting the soul. As we have explained in discussing the feelings, pleasure is rest for the soul. And therefore the remedy for weariness of soul lies in slackening the tension of mental study and taking some pleasure…. Beyond providing rest for the soul, Aquinas suggests that humor has social benefits.
Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious. It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment.
In the last century an early play theory of humor was developed by Max Eastman , who found parallels to humor in the play of animals, particularly in the laughter of chimps during tickling. In humor and play generally, according to Eastman, we take a disinterested attitude toward something that could instead be treated seriously.
It can serve as a social lubricant, engendering trust and reducing conflict. In communications that tend to evoke negative emotions--announcing bad news, apologizing, complaining, warning, criticizing, commanding, evaluating--humor can provide delight that reduces or even blocks negative emotions.
Consider this paragraph from a debt-collection letter:. We appreciate your business, but, please, give us a break. Your account is overdue ten months. Play activities such as humor are not usually pursued in order to achieve such benefits, of course; they are pursued, as Aquinas said, for pleasure.
A parallel with humor here is music, which we typically play and listen to for pleasure, but which can boost our manual dexterity and even mathematical abilities, reduce stress, and strengthen our social bonds.
Ethologists students of animal, including human, behavior point out that in play activities, young animals learn important skills they will need later on. Young lions, for example, play by going through actions that will be part of hunting.
Humans have hunted with rocks and spears for tens of thousands of years, and so boys often play by throwing projectiles at targets. Marek Spinka observes that in playing, young animals move in exaggerated ways. Young monkeys leap not just from branch to branch, but from trees into rivers. Children not only run, but skip and do cartwheels. Spinka suggests that in play young animals are testing the limits of their speed, balance, and coordination.
In doing so, they learn to cope with unexpected situations such as being chased by a new kind of predator. This account of the value of play in children and young animals does not automatically explain why humor is important to adult humans, but for us as for children and young animals, the play activities that seem the most fun are those in which we exercise our abilities in unusual and extreme ways, yet in a safe setting.
Sports is an example. So is humor. In humor the abilities we exercise in unusual and extreme ways in a safe setting are related to thinking and interacting with other people. What is enjoyed is incongruity, the violation of our mental patterns and expectations. In joking with friends, for example, we break rules of conversation such as these formulated by H. Grice :. Rule 3 is broken to create humor when we reply to an embarrassing question with an obviously vague or confusing answer. We violate Rule 4 in telling most prepared jokes, as Victor Raskin has shown.
A comment or story starts off with an assumed interpretation for a phrase, but then at the punch line, switches to a second, usually opposed interpretation. They taste a lot like chicken. Humor, like other play, sometimes takes the form of activity that would not be mistaken for serious activity. Wearing a red clown nose and making up nonsense syllables are examples.
More often, however, as in the conversational moves above, humor and play are modeled on serious activities. When in conversation we switch from serious discussion to making funny comments, for example, we keep the same vocabulary and grammar, and our sentences transcribed to paper might look like bona-fide assertions, questions, etc. This similarity between non-serious and serious language and actions calls for ways that participants can distinguish between the two.
The oldest play signals in humans are smiling and laughing. According to ethologists, these evolved from similar play signals in pre-human apes.
The apes that evolved into Homo sapiens split off from the apes that evolved into chimpanzees and gorillas about six million years ago. In chimps and gorillas, as in other mammals, play usually takes the form of mock-aggression such as chasing, wrestling, biting, and tickling.
According to many ethologists, mock-aggression was the earliest form of play, from which all other play developed Aldis , ; Panksepp , In mock-aggressive play, it is critical that all participants are aware that the activity is not real aggression. Without a way to distinguish between being chased or bitten playfully and being attacked in earnest, an animal might respond with deadly force. In the anthropoid apes, play signals are visual and auditory. Jan van Hooff , — and others speculate that the first play signals in humans evolved from two facial displays in an ancestor of both humans and the great apes that are still found in gorillas and chimps.
In the other facial display, the lips are relaxed and the mouth open, and breathing is shallow and staccato, like panting. The relaxed mouth in laughter contrasts with the mouth in real aggression that is tense and prepared to bite hard. As early hominin species began walking upright and the front limbs were no longer used for locomotion, the muscles in the chest no longer had to synchronize breathing with locomotion.
The larynx moved to a lower position in the throat, and the pharynx developed, allowing early humans to modulate their breathing and vocalize in complex ways Harris , In the competition for women to mate with, early men may have engaged in humor to show their intelligence, cleverness, adaptability, and desire to please others. The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter.
It also explains why laughter is overwhelmingly a social experience, as those theories do not. According to one estimate, we are thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than when we are alone Provine , Tracing laughter to a play signal in early humans also accords with the fact that young children today laugh during the same activities—chasing, wrestling, and tickling—in which chimps and gorillas show their play face and laugh-like vocalizations.
The idea that laughter and humor evolved from mock-aggression, furthermore, helps explain why so much humor today, especially in males, is playfully aggressive.
The playful aggression found in much humor has been widely misunderstood by philosophers, especially in discussions of the ethics of humor. Starting with Plato, most philosophers have treated humor that represents people in a negative light as if it were real aggression toward those people. Jokes in which blondes or Poles are extraordinarily stupid, blacks extraordinarily lazy, Italians extraordinarily cowardly, lawyers extraordinarily self-centered, women extraordinarily unmathematical, etc.
Philips classifies Polish jokes as racist, for example, but anyone who understands their popularity in the s, knows that they did not involve hostility toward Polish people, who had long been assimilated into North American society. Consider the joke about the Polish astronaut calling a press conference to announce that he was going to fly a rocket to the sun.
This is a fantasy enjoyed for its clever depiction of unbelievable stupidity. While playing with negative stereotypes in jokes does not require endorsement of those stereotypes, however, it still keeps them in circulation, and that can be harmful in a racist or sexist culture where stereotypes support prejudice and injustice.
Jokes can be morally objectionable for perpetuating stereotypes that need to be eliminated. More generally, humor can be morally objectionable when it treats as a subject for play something that should be taken seriously. Morreall , ch. Here humor often blocks compassion and responsible action. From it they produced the record album Concert for Bangladesh. The album cover featured a photograph of a starving child with a begging bowl.
Having sketched an account of humor as play with words and ideas, we need to go further in order to counter the Irrationality Objection, especially since that play is based on violating mental patterns and expectations. What must be added is an explanation of how playfully violating mental patterns and expectations could foster rationality rather than undermine it.
Or I could think about embarrassing moments like this as experienced by millions of people over the centuries. More abstract still would be to think, as the Buddha did, about how human life is full of problems. In the lower animals, mental processing is not abstract but tied to present experience, needs, and opportunities. It is about nearby predators, food, mates, etc. When something violates their expectations, especially something involving a potential or actual loss, their typical reaction is fear, anger, disgust, or sadness.
These emotions evolved in mammals and were useful for millions of years because they motivate adaptive behavior such as fighting, fleeing, avoiding noxious substances, withdrawing from activity, and avoiding similar situations in the future.
Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are still sometimes adaptive in humans: A snarling dog scares us, for example, and we move away quickly, avoiding a nasty bite.
We scream and poke the eyes of a mugger, and he runs off. What early humans needed was a way to react to the violation of their expectations that transcended their immediate experience and their individual perspective. Humorous amusement provided that. In the humorous frame of mind, we experience, think about, or even create something that violates our understanding of how things are supposed to be.
But we suspend the personal, practical concerns that lead to negative emotions, and enjoy the oddness of what is occurring. If the incongruous situation is our own failure or mistake, we view it in the way we view the failures and mistakes of other people.
This perspective is more abstract, objective, and rational than an emotional perspective. In laughter, as Wallace Chafe said in The Importance of Not Being Earnest , not only do we not do anything, but we are disabled as we lose muscle control in our torsos, arms, and legs. In extremely heavy laughter, we fall on the floor and wet our pants.
The nonpractical attitude in humor would not be beneficial, of course, if I were in imminent danger. When immediate action is called for, humor is no substitute. But in many situations where our expectations are violated, no action would help.
One of us has to go. In fear and anger, chemicals such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol are released into the blood, causing an increase in muscle tension, heart rate, and blood pressure, and a suppression of the immune system. Those physiological changes evolved in earlier mammals as a way to energize them to fight or flee, and in early humans, they were usually responses to physical dangers such as predators or enemies.
Today, however, our bodies and brains react in the same way to problems that are not physically threatening, such as overbearing bosses and work deadlines.
The increased muscle tension, the spike in blood pressure, and other changes in stress not only do not help us with such problems, but cause new ones such as headaches, heart attacks, and cancer. When in potentially stressful situations we shift to the play mode of humor, our heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension decrease, as do levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol.
Laughter also increases pain tolerance and boosts the activity of the immune system, which stress suppresses Morreall , ch. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.
While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early humans, we know that by the late 6 th century BCE the Greeks had institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy.
Both were based on the violation of mental patterns and expectations, and in both the world is a tangle of conflicting systems where humans live in the shadow of failure, folly, and death. Like tragedy, comedy represents life as full of tension, danger, and struggle, with success or failure often depending on chance factors. Identifying with these characters, audiences at comedies and tragedies have contrasting responses to events in the dramas. And because these responses carry over to similar situations in life, comedy and tragedy embody contrasting responses to the incongruities in life.
Along with epic, it is part of the Western heroic tradition that extols ideals, the willingness to fight for them, and honor. The tragic ethos is linked to patriarchy and militarism—many of its heroes are kings and conquerors—and it valorizes what Conrad Hyers calls Warrior Virtues—blind obedience, the willingness to kill or die on command, unquestioning loyalty, single-mindedness, resoluteness of purpose, and pride.
Its own methods of handling conflict include deal-making, trickery, getting an enemy drunk, and running away. In place of Warrior Virtues, it extols critical thinking, cleverness, adaptability, and an appreciation of physical pleasures like eating, drinking, and sex. Along with the idealism of tragedy goes elitism.
The people who matter are kings, queens, and generals. In comedy there are more characters and more kinds of characters, women are more prominent, and many protagonists come from lower classes. Everybody counts for one. That shows in the language of comedy, which, unlike the elevated language of tragedy, is common speech. The basic unit in tragedy is the individual, in comedy it is the family, group of friends, or bunch of co-workers.
While tragic heroes are emotionally engaged with their problems, comic protagonists show emotional disengagement. Like Amos, Carr, who is also an actor and writer, says that to regard comedy merely as something frivolous would constitute a failure to comprehend its place in the world.
With a career spanning radio, television she currently stars in the hit drama Silent Witness , stand-up and sketch comedy, Carr was one of the pioneers in the flourishing arena of comics with disabilities. It is, she says, another example of how humour can be trained on even the most sombre of topics and prod people towards rethinking preconceived notions.
Social scientist Sharon Lockyer has been studying the connection between comedy and disability. Lockyer thinks that this shift and other changes, such as disparaging jokes becoming less tolerated, are indicative of wider changes in society.
Psychologists are now increasingly interested in exploring the relationship between the comedian and the audience Credit: Getty Images. Our appetite for comedy is growing. Hugely successful performers such as Louis CK and shows like Broad City have distributed their comedy over the internet, and there is a profusion of funny Vines and YouTube clips. But he suggests that because we are likely to experience humour much more often than emotions like fear or regret, studying it has as much academic merit as supposedly more worthy topics.
Another thing I think is an important puzzle — is that when you try to be funny and you fail… you can create conflict. You can upset people. You can anger people. It could also shed light on the nature of people who choose comedy as a career. For example, research presented in suggested that, despite their work, comedians had less activity in brain regions associated with the pleasure and enjoyment of humour compared to everyone else.
Some cognitive scientists think that humour is now the best way to study the human condition Credit: Getty Images. He recounts seeing people arrive at comedy clubs looking utterly miserable, but then leaving with a smile on their face, visibly transformed — married couples that turned up barely speaking leaving holding hands.
For many comics there are profound mechanisms at play in their work, especially when the humour veers towards political and wider social issues. This is an edited version of an article originally published by Mosaic , and is reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.
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