Humor as a threat-coding mechanism

• Authors: Edward Greenberg
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The integration of humour’s classical theories such as relief, superiority, and incongruity suggest that the differences and patterns in what we find funny are largely dependent on attaching an “explicably safe” meaning to novel entities. It is argued that humour is a substantial organising influence in human socialisation and personal threat perception. Built on such work as Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw’s notion of humour in explicated ambiguity, Tom Veatch’s paradox of humour as a “normal” violation, and V.S. Ramachandran’s False Alarm Theory of humour, an integrational theory is developed and tested against a variety of hypotheses associated with the core findings of classical humour research.

Keywords

EN

humour; evolution; safety; ambiguity; appraisal

• Publisher: Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies
• Journal: The European Journal of Humour Research
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 1

Dates

published

2020

online

2020-04-23

Contributors

author

Edward Greenberg

Identifiers

DOI

10.7592/EJHR2020.8.1.greenberg