Incongruity and Provisional Safety: Thinking Through Humor

The aim of this paper is to reconceive safety as a form of relation embedded in particular ways of speaking, listening and thinking. Moving away from safety as a relation that is achieved once and for all and afterwards remains safe avoids some of the disappointments of discourses of safety that seem to promise once a risk is taken or a gap is bridged that thereafter relations among people will be easier and calmer. This bumpier version of safety suggests that humor creates the kind of instabilities in discourse that act, perhaps ironically, as an invitation to enjoy the difficulties of communicating complex and challenging ideas. Humor, then, creates a kind of safe space, not devoid of dramatic shifts or emotional response, but organized around those shifts as experiences that are moments apart from conflict. I explore the use of humor as a form of serious play in social justice classrooms, examining the strategies of indirect teaching, contradictory lessons, and jolting pleasure that more traditional pedagogical approaches are less able to create. I see in humor a complex form of address and interaction that plays on the multiple possibilities within an utterance or concept and by reminding classroom communities of those possibilities. Humor can erupt from shared moments and disjunctive understandings and can as easily be mobilized by teachers as by students. By reopening the possibilities of concepts and relations, humor shatters simplistic readings by literally playing out what might be said and what could be tried but often manages to combine a sense of safety via shared laughter with its disruptions.     

Humor and the Limits of Incongruity

ABSTRACT

Humor often plays an important role in creativity and, contrary to the widely held belief that groups interfere with creativity, groups often facilitate humor. This article argues that the Incongruity Theory (IT) of humor comprehension is unable to account for a broad range of humorous events. This argument is supported by detailing the inability of IT to successfully explain a case involving a lack of humor response to a purported incongruity. The notion of the joke-transaction is used as a starting point for an investigation into the psychology and biology of laughter and humor. The findings offer an accurate definition of portions of the joke-transaction concept and contribute to our understanding of creativity in groups.     

幽默加工中不一致探测与解决的脑机制分离

本fMRI研究使用“文字背景—漫画图片”实验范式,设计了三种实验条件（可笑、不可笑和无关）,试图对幽默加工中不一致探测与解决的脑机制进行分离。可笑与不可笑条件对比的结果与前人研究一致,证明了新实验范式的有效性。其次,无关与不可笑条件比较,右侧脑岛激活,说明脑岛可能与不一致探测有关。综合分析发现,脑岛与杏仁核可能共同参与了不一致探测加工。此外,结果还第一次区分了幽默加工中不一致解决与一般问题解决的脑区。     

Comedy as Correction: Humor as Perspective by Incongruity on Will & Grace and Queer as Folk

This essay examines the television programs Will & Grace and Queer as Folk through the lens of a comic frame to argue for each show’s potential to change our social culture. Because television culture is oriented to heterosexual and Christian perfection (i.e. heterosexuality and Christianity as normative identities), gays, lesbians and Jews are rendered Other and thereby tragically framed. By reading Queer as Folk and Will & Grace together and employing the Burkean notion of perspective by incongruity, this article argues that neither show’s characters exist within the tragic binary of victim/villain. Rather, the use of humor offers the necessary perspective by incongruity to comically correct the tragic frame of heterosexual and Christian perfection.     

The Influence of Creativity on Incongruity-Resolution and Nonsense Humor Comprehension

Both creativity and humor are high-level cognitive functions and complex concepts. Although creativity and humor are generally deemed positively correlated, it has been difficult to explicitly identify their relationship with each other. The cognitive process of creativity includes divergent thinking, insight, and remote association, whereas humor comprehension includes incongruity resolution and nonsense humor. The difference between the 2 types of humor is in whether individuals can understand the content of jokes through logical deduction. This study explored the relationship of the different dimensions of cognitive creativity and incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor comprehension. Furthermore, we examined the influence of divergent thinking, insight, and remote association on incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor comprehension. The scores from 103 participants on a divergent thinking questionnaire, an insight problem-solving task, and the Chinese compound remote associate problems test were used to analyze their comprehension of incongruity resolution and nonsense humor. The results showed a positive correlation between remote association and incongruity-resolution humor comprehension, as well as a positive correlation between insight and nonsense humor comprehension. These findings indicate that each dimension of cognitive creativity has a particular way of connecting to various types of humor comprehension.     

The Incongruity of Congruence

SUMMARY

This paper examines Satires concept of congruence and the possibility of a “Tao of communication” in historical, social, and cultural context. The author then suggests alternative strategies for facilitating mutual understanding among couples     

Incongruity versus tension relief

Three experiments employing weight-judgment tasks with the method of constant stimuli were conducted to test between incongruity and tension relief hypotheses of humor. In the first two experiments, the difficulty of the initial judgments and the heaviness of the final comparison weight were varied in order to manipulate tension and incongruity, respectively. Incongruity but not tension manipulations affected both facial expressions and ratings of humor. A third experiment varied the subjects' expectations about the heaviness of the final comparison weight, which was assumed to affect incongruity but not tension. The expectancy manipulations affected facial expressions and ratings of humor. The results of all three experiments supported the incongruity hypothesis but not the relief hypothesis of humor.     

Semantic Processing in Children and Adults: Incongruity and the N400

Semantic processing in 10-year-old children and adults was examined using event related potentials (ERPs). The N400 component, an index of semantic processing, was studied in relation to sentences that ended with congruent, moderately incongruent, or strongly incongruent words. N400 amplitude in adults corresponded to levels of semantic incongruity with the greatest amplitude occurring to strongly incongruent sentences at all midline electrodes. In contrast, children’s N400s were greater for both moderately and strongly incongruent sentences but did not differ between these levels of incongruity. This finding suggests that semantic processing may differ in adults and children.     

Humor as an Optics: Bergson and the Ethics of Humor

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind.     

Religion and Humor: Estranged Bedfellows

In an earlier article (Capps, 2006), I presented evidence that humor has important psychological benefits. It would seem, therefore, that religion and humor would be allies, for religion is also considered compatible with psychological well-being (Capps, 1985). In fact, however, while religion and humor are not enemies, neither are they, for the most part, allies. I review theoretical works that reflect religion's mistrust of humor, then focus on the empirical studies by Vassilis Saroglou that confirm this mistrust. Building on Saroglou's own theoretical analysis of this mistrust, I suggest that some grounds for this mistrust are legitimate, but most are not. I conclude that religion and humor should overcome their current estrangement.     

Mapping Creativity: Creativity Measurements Network Analysis

This article borrowed network analysis tools to discover how the construct formed by the set of all measures of creativity configures itself. To this end, using a variant of the meta-analytical method, a database was compiled simulating 42,381 responses to 974 variables centered on 64 creativity measures. Results, although preliminary, indicate the existence of a core dimension filled with variables that indicate novelty, which is surrounded by the paired dimensions of negative affect and social leadership, and high cognitive performance and positive affect. As for the measurement instruments, it was found that, although tests of divergent thinking, self-reported biographies, and composite scores are the most appropriate tools to gauge creativity itself, both attitude and personality inventories are best for diagnosing the different kinds of creators.