Comedy

[Taem]

I was not expecting to come here and see any meaningful discussions taking place, as this site had died off years ago once FIT stopped posting his inflammatory (and yet fun to respond to) remarks. But even before that, it was slowly on it's way out with Doc passing, Ochi gone, then Pete passing, the heavy hitter debtors had left the arena. There has been many more that have left. What a pleasure it is to see someone dredge an old memory up from the bygone era.

Ten years may not be long enough, but here goes...

Maybe your views have changed, and no longer view all humor as based on misfortune of others,

I will have to ponder this. I had not given it any thought in the time since. Off the cuff, I find it to be a logical fallacy to not accept this as true when you can merely look up any joke ever invented and see how the humor is always the result of some negative aspect within us.

"What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Time to get a new fence." The humor is in both the misdirection, and the fact the fence is broken by an elephant, both being aspects of misfortune at either a direct lack of understanding due to ignorance, or the idiocy of an elephant sitting on a fence which now has to be repaired. Most jokes can be summed up in this fashion, exploiting the listeners ignorance of the context to provoke humor.... humor in their ignorance mind you.

"Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7, 8, 9!" So, seven has to 'eat' nine for the joke to be funny, combined with the obvious word-play misdirect makes for a classic joke.

"Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side." Another classic misdirect glaringly obvious pointing to the listeners inability to get the joke upon first hearing it due to expectations of something else, which again makes the joke funny because why? Because our expectations were failed proving only a simple ineptitude... and once the joke is heard and understood, it fails to deliver thereafter because the listener can no longer be fooled. We revel in moments of self-realization (of stupidity) because this allows us intellectually to grow. So not a bad thing in my book, and yet still obviously based on a negative aspect of human nature. There is no humor that is not, since this is what we find funny to begin with. Ever seen "Fail Army"? How about the old "Jack Ass" show?

From your link: (a fascinating article btw, thank you)

There are several reasons to suppose humor and laughter could be evolutionarily adaptive. As previously mentioned, the complexity of humor implicates an established genetic substrate that in turn could suggest evolutionary adaptiveness. Given that even a simple joke can utilize language skills, theory-of-mind, symbolism, abstract thinking, and social perception, humor may arguably be humankind’s most complex cognitive attribute. Despite its ostensible complexity, humor is also paradoxically reflexive – people typically laugh without consciously appreciating all the causal factors.

Yes, most knee-jerk laugh-out-loud moments are when someone falls. It's even funnier when they stand up showing they weren't hurt. I think looking at humor from an evolutionary standpoint, it's fairly obvious it came about as a need to recognize failures and grow from them in a positive way. All of your quotes below only seem to verify this.

Anyway, the idea that humor is always "at someone's expense" is contrary to the ideas presented in the article.

You are thinking in terms of the misfortune being directed towards the actor in the joke, but by discounting the audience as the actual target of the joke. In the children's joke example I gave above, I attempted to show how even these jokes affect us on a primal level by stoking our misunderstanding, and we laugh at this because it helps us to grow! If anything, you accidentally proved my original point with the help of evolution.

But I didn't spend more than 30-minutes on this write-up, so I really haven't given it too much deep thought. Like I said in my opening, this answer is off-the-cuff. If my thought intrigue you, let me know and maybe I can take a day to fashion up a proper response.

One thing I did not respond to very well last time was your "I believe this is because of our nature as humans to like, enjoy, or even want to see others fail in some way". After 10 years, do you still consider this to be human nature?

No, not in that context. I do not believe every one of us revels in the failure of others, I really do not. However, upon reading your article, I am convinced what I originally wrote is correct, just poorly worded, and now with the evolutionary theory of humor you linked to back it up, I feel confident my original point still stands and that what it should have said was, "I believe this is because of our nature as humans to grow and adapt through adversity, and humor is what helps us see and define these negative faults within us and become cognitively more astute due to challenging us to think in different or unusual ways than we would have normally"