A Philosophical Analysis of Humor

Applications of Fuzzy Sets Theory, 2007

Organon F, 2007

The article critically reviews the Incongruity Theory of Humor reaching the conclusion that it has to be essentially restructured. Leaving aside the question of scope, it is shown that the theory is inadequate even for those cases for which it is thought to be especially well suited-that it cannot account either for the pleasurable effect of jokes or for aesthetic pleasure. I argue that it is the resolution of the incongruity rather than its mere apprehension, which is that source of the amusement or aesthetic delight. Once the theory is thus restructured, the Superiority Theory of Humor and the Relief Theory can be seen as supplementary to it.

Language, 1996

This is a research into the concept of humor as it manifests itself in linguistic activities^that more often than not also appear in writing (such as puns and jokes). The author starts off with a discussion of the unsuccessful attempts at definitions of humor and ends up with an analysis of certain humorous texts (mainly jokes, with the exception of chapter 8), i.e. of their semantic structure and their functions in a wider situational context. Attardo distinguishes 3 different approaches to the concept of humor, viz. an essentialist that would enumerate the necessary and sufficient conditions of a text or action to be humorous, a teleological^ that investigates the aims of humor, and a substantialist that deals with the contents of humorous actions. Chapter 1 gives a survey of the literature on the subject, ranging from Plato down to Freud and-of course-Raskin. Among others the author touches on the work of such illustruous personalities as Theophrast,

2016

BACKGROUND: When we experience humor, we focus mostly on positive affects, though, apparently in a paradoxical manner, laugh and humor often occur in the presence of pain. Humor can emerge where adversity is substantial, in most traumatic situations that sometimes help in the individual‟s growth and in his development. PURPOSE OF STUDY: The objective of this paper is to explore and analyze the relationship between humor and pain, insisting on the importance of pain for understanding humor. We challenge different approaches related to humor and pain with the aim to advance new directions of study. SOURCES OF EVIDENCE: Although there are various studies to argue the relationship between humor and pain, attempts to theorizing humor through pain are minimal to our knowledge (Veatch, 1998). The main theories of humor (psychoanalytic, superiority, arousal, incongruity and reversal theories), but also cultural and physiological factors underlying humor experimentation, add valuable explana...

arXiv (Cornell University), 1989

Linguagem em (Dis)curso, 2014

In this paper, I present a model to explain the mechanism of humour, combining the concept of bisociation as proposed by Koestler (1964) with the cognitive and the communicative principles of relevance as proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). I suggest that the development of humour occurs by recourse to bisociation, which, in turn, is reflected by the junction of an enthymeme and a paradox. In order to interpret the result of the fusion of these logical procedures in some jokes, I develop an analysis based on the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. I finally propose the concept of paradoxical implicated conclusion, a phenomenon that only occurs in humorous genre.

Idealistic Studies, 2016

In this paper, I seek to explore the increasing popular claim that the performance of philosophy and the performance of humor share similar features.

In this paper we summarize the proceedings of the Workshop on Humor and Cognition held at Indiana University's Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition on February 18 and 19, 1989. The principal type of humor considered, slippage humor, is first defined and contrasted with aggression-based humor. Next, a particularly clear variety of slippage humor, based on Douglas Hofstadter's notion of a frame blend, is presented. Given that a frame is a small coherent cluster of concepts pertaining to a single topic (similar to Victor Raskin's notion of a script), a frame blend is what results when elements are extracted from two distinct frames and spliced together to yield a new hybrid frame. Diverse ways of blending two given frames can produce varying amounts and types of humor, and some studies of this phenomenon are presented. A close connection between frame blends and analogies is pointed out. To make this connection more explicit, the Copycat domain -an idealized microworld in which-analogy-making can be studied and modeled on computer -is presented, and it is shown how jokes can be mapped into that domain, giving rise to a kind of abstract "microworld humor". The reduction of these phenomena to the Copycat domain helps to bring out the tight relationships among good jokes, defective analogies, and frame blends quite clearly. As a result, these relationships appear clearer in the real world as well. The notion that many jokes can share the same abstract structure is suggested, and the name ur-joke is suggested for the most abstract level of a joke. Several specific ur-jokes are presented, each one with a set of fully fleshed-out jokes based on it. We recount the group's collective efforts at translating two jokes from one subject matter to another, in an attempt to determine whether a joke's funniness is due more to its underlying-ur-joke or to its subject matter. This important question is, however, left open. There follows some discussion of Victor Raskin's overlapping-script theory of humor, which has many points of contact with Hofstadter's frame-blend theory, and then a summary of Salvatore Attardo's theory of a multiple-level analysis of jokes (closely related to Hofstadter "ur-joke hypothesis") is presented. Finally, a speculative theory by Gray Clossman about the adaptive value of humor is briefly addressed.

Linguistically speaking, the concept of humor, which seems to be vast for people, has specific dimensions by which it is generated including: puns, irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and contrastive utterances in relation to the speakers of those utterances. It is about how the extra linguistics elements dominate the situation and the delivery of humor. The researchers of the present paper intend to show how the selected literary extract can be subjected to a linguistic pragmatic analysis and then be explained by applying the incongruity theory of humor by Kant (1790) in order to show the ways or the mechanisms that lead to the flouting, infringing and the violation of Gricean maxims can consequently lead to the creation of humor. Despite the fact that the present paper is qualitative in nature, some tables are provided by the researchers in order to reach into a better, deeper and more understandable analysis. Investigating the ways Gricean maxims are flouted, infringed and violated to create humor, and showing how the imperfect use of language sometimes create unintentional humor are the researchers' aims of this paper.