An Exploration of Humor

This is not a joke book but a textbook covering many aspects of humor. I have analyzed humor and am presenting here some humor terms, in alphabetical order, and definitions with examples. There is a task for students for each term. My examples are drawn from memories of jokes and stories from a great many sources over the decades. If the examples make the reader laugh that’s fine but their main purpose is to clarify and define the various approaches to humor.

Humor is such a big topic that it is difficult for one book to completely cover the subject. It was my dissatisfaction with the small number of analytical works on humor that encourages me to write this book.

Humor is the quality of being laughable. It is found in all human societies but in varied forms. Humor presents a difficult challenge for the creative writer. It is relatively easy to write something that will make people angry, fearful or sad, but to make them laugh takes considerable talent and luck.

A knowledge of psychology is necessary to understand what makes for a low or high receptivity to any particular funny story or joke by any particular person or group. If you are the victim of a story or joke, it’s probably not as funny to you as it is to the joke teller. Your culture, age, ethnic and racial identity, gender, occupation, physical appearance and condition, religious views, philosophical positions, political views, your personality and your current personal mood make up a unique mental map against which you judge the humor in a situation, story or joke. This helps to account for why some people laugh at a comedian’s jokes while others don’t.

We don’t know precisely why people laugh but we know that they do. One theory of humor is the idea that we like to feel superior to others. Another theory holds that we laugh out of shock or surprise at the disparity between what we see or hear and what we expect to see or hear. The element of surprise is present in most humor. Laughter is a good way to release tension, as is crying. It’s undoubtedly good to have a sense of humor in order to handle the stresses of life.

I have written this textbook with three objectives in mind. First, I wanted to explore various approaches to humor. Second, I wanted to provide high school and college students with some key vocabulary items associated with humor. My hope is that any student with an interest in creative writing will get some helpful ideas for his or her literary works. Third, I wanted to provide informative material on the subject of humor to the general reader e.g., jokes, stories and illustrations.

The reader should note that any given example could contain two or more types of humor. For instance, a pun, hyperbole or synecdoche might be used to illustrate sarcasm. A limerick might be used to illustrate irony or personification. This being said, I tried to fit the examples as closely as I could to the terms.