What's So Funny About That?

People say you shouldn’t try to explain comedy. To paraphrase E. B. White: analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog; no-one laughs, and the frog dies.¹

Let’s analyze that.

To begin with: if you’re in middle school, about to dissect a frog, and the frog is still alive, something has gone badly wrong. Who’s teaching this class, in which tweens are mandated to murder an amphibian? What you’ve got here is not a dissection. It’s an Evil Dead spin-off in which a zombie frog hops frantically away from 20 scalpel-wielding kids.

I think, if you walked past a classroom, looked in, and saw that, you might laugh. I’m not sure the frog dies—maybe the frog kills?

So much for E. B. White. Humor can be analyzed, and it doesn’t always expire in the process. It’s an important fact about jokes that they can be logically explained: we can give reasons why something is funny. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this fact casts comic light on the human condition. But does it mean we can explain the nature of humour itself? Can philosophers identify the essence of the funny?

Those who’ve tried have tended to converge on a criterion: the exhibition or resolution of incongruity. It’s a theory that goes back to Francis Hutcheson, whose 1725 Reflections Upon Laughter cite as its cause “the bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance to the principal idea”—though the first explicit use of “incongruity” as a test of humour may belong to James Beattie’s 1776 essay On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition.

The obvious problem with the incongruity theory, understood as giving necessary and sufficient conditions for being funny, is that there are countless forms of incongruity—even aesthetically pleasing incongruity—that are not funny at all: the grotesque, tragic, and bizarre.

In Wisecracks, the philosopher David Shoemaker rejects the search for objective criteria for being funny in favour of what he calls the “human theory of humour”: the funny is what “a functional, developed, refined, and unobstructed human sense of humor would respond to with amusement.” There’s something right about this sentimentalism—though a lot depends on what counts as development, refinement, or obstruction in a sense of humour.

Shoemaker devotes ten pages of his book to problems of cognitive empathy or perspective-taking in some diagnosed with autism, and to deficits of emotional empathy or concern for others in narcissists and psychopaths. In each case, he contends, an impediment to empathy interferes with humour. This gives the distorting impression that being neurotypical is necessary or sufficient for a good sense of humour—when in fact, it’s neither. It may be a cliché that comedians are often neurodivergent, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely false. And neurotypicals can be comically imperceptive.

The sentimentalist faces a further challenge: can we explain what amusement is without a circular appeal to finding something funny? One strategy is to lean on the distinctive pleasure expressed in real as opposed to fake smiles, distinguished by the neurologist Guillaume Duchenne in 1862. Another is to point to the evolution of laughter from the “social grimaces” and “play faces” of earlier primates. Either way, humour is essentially embodied: an account of the funny in terms of amusement is an account in terms of our specific physical form.

Still, the intellectualism of the incongruity theory is attractive. Shoemaker argues boldly that there are no objective conditions for being funny—incongruity is not necessary. But it’s hard to find a convincing case of humour that is not in some way incongruous or discrepant. Shoemaker writes that “there seems no incongruity in a spot-on impersonation of Christopher Walken.” But in Taking Laughter Seriously, John Morreall gives, as a paradigm of incongruity “one thing seeming to be another [as in] the humor of mimicry.”

Inspired by the “superiority theory,” we might think of mockery as humour that is not incongruous. But there is incongruity in breaking social norms. Even mocking those who fully deserve it—as when the comedian Mark Thomas called Lord Weir, the man behind the destructive Ilisu Dam project, “a ball of gout with a mouth”—can be found incongruous. According to Morreall,

the simplest kind of incongruity in things, and the one that most often makes us laugh, is some deficiency in an object or person, which renders it or him inferior as the kind of thing it is supposed to be.

What about sit-com characters who get laughs by playing to form, acting just as we expect? This, too, is incongruous, because human beings are not, in reality, so predictable. Hence Bergson’s “mechanical encrusted on the living.”

To clinch his case against objective criteria for being funny, Shoemaker gives an example that is meant to elude them all:

I was recently doing some winter hiking, and while the trail was decently marked, I had greater confidence in keeping on the trail by following in the boot prints of two people who had obviously preceded me through the deep snow that day. About halfway through, however, one of the prints disappeared, while the other, larger set of prints kept going. I thought to myself, “Perhaps this the point at which Jesus started carrying the other hiker.” I thought this was decently funny, riffing as it did on the famous “Footprints in the Sand” religious poem that was all the rage a few decades ago. But it wasn’t funny in virtue of any of the [standard] properties: It didn’t appeal to an incongruity or its resolution, it wasn’t particularly playful, and it had nothing to do with superiority or inferiority.

I’m not convinced. Shoemaker’s joke deflates the pretension of an allegedly profound religious allegory by juxtaposing it with a pedestrian counterpart: it’s the comedy of bathos, which is a form of incongruity.

At this point, one begins to suspect that incongruity is everywhere. Consider Steve Martin’s experiment, described in Born Standing Up:

What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension?

What is incongruous here is the failure to fulfill the expectation of incongruity.

I don’t think the fact that incongruity is cheap—that we locate it so readily, even in its seeming absence—undermines the point or plausibility of treating it as a condition of humour. What we’re exposing is the inner working of the sense of humour, which exploits the capacity to find incongruity, and to find it, appropriately, funny.

This is not to say that one’s sense of humour is always better the more one is capable of finding, and being amused by, incongruity. Someone who found everything incongruous and laughed at it, no matter how trivial or mundane, would be clinically insane. The amusement must be apt.

But the analytical task of explaining why something is funny is not merely compatible, but continuous, with the operation of humour itself. Here theory and practice converge. One of the most common ways a joke can fail—I say this from bitter experience—is through lack of clarity: not managing to convey what one finds comically incongruous or direct the pleasurable attention of one’s audience towards it.

To tell a joke is to elucidate an incongruity so as to share the laughter it deserves: every joke is, in this way, a tacit explanation of itself.

1. Verbatim quote, from E. B. White and Katharine S. White, “The Preaching Humorist,” Saturday Review of Literature (October 18, 1941): “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”