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Humour

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Everyday life; Health and
medicine

   Humour ( also spelled humor) is the ability or quality of people,
   objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people.
   The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication
   which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy.

   The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient
   Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours ( Greek:
   χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavor)
   controlled human health and emotion.

   A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which
   all people share, although the extent to which an individual will
   personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and
   relative variables, including, but not limited to geographical
   location, culture, maturity, level of education, and context. For
   example, young children (of any background) particularly favour
   slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows. Satire may rely more on
   understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to
   more mature audiences.

Styles of humour

   Humans often find the behaviour of other animals amusing or humorous.
   Enlarge
   Humans often find the behaviour of other animals amusing or humorous.

Verbal

     * Black comedy
     * Caustic humour
     * Droll humour
     * Deadpan
     * Non-sequitur
     * Obscenity
     * Parody
     * Mockery, such as the Darwin Awards
     * Sarcasm
     * Satire
     * Self-irony / Self-deprecation
     * Wit, as in many one-liner jokes

Nonverbal

     * Anti-humour
     * Deadpan
     * Form-versus-content humour
     * Slapstick
     * Surreal humour or absurdity
     * Practical joke: luring someone into a humorous position or
       situation and then laughing at their expense

Specific techniques for evoking humour

   Humour is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 tropes that can
   be used to make jokes.

Verbal

     * Figure of speech
          + Humorous triple and paraprosdokian
          + Enthymeme
          + Syllepsis ( zeugma)
          + Hyperbole
          + Understatement
     * Inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in the
       language of delivery
     * Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial
       and a concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
     * Joke
          + Adages, often in the form of paradox " laws" of nature, such
            as Murphy's law
          + Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial
            jokes, viola jokes.
          + Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or
            exceptionally cruel scenarios
     * Riddle
     * Word play
          + Oxymoron
          + Pun

Nonverbal

     * Bathos
          + Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
          + Inflicting pain, such as kick in the groin
     * Character driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in
       specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry
       Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
     * Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water"
     * Comic sounds
     * Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by
       Andy Kaufman
     * Unintentional humour, that is, making people laugh without
       intending to (as with Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space)
     * Funny pictures: Photos or drawings/caricatures that are
       intentionally or unintentionally humorous.
     * Sight gags
     * Visual humour: Similar to the sight gag, but encompassing narrative
       in theatre or comics, or on film or video.

Understanding humour

   Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. B.
   White once said that "Humour can be dissected as a frog can, but the
   thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but
   the pure scientific mind." However, attempts to do just that have been
   made, as follow.

   The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy, referred to the
   interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context,
   humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood
   or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer
   lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to
   mean any type of comedy.

   Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation,
   and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the
   breaking of those expectations leads to laughter (This is true for many
   emotions, and is not limited to laughter). Irony is explicitly this
   form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms
   relating to physicality and plays with them. In other words, comedy is
   a sign of a 'bug' in the symbolic make-up of language, as well as a
   self-correcting mechanism for such bugs. Once the problem in meaning
   has been described through a joke, people immediately begin correcting
   their impressions of the symbols that have been mocked. This is one
   explanation why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.

   Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected,
   often sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object
   of this perspective twist. This, however, does not explain why people
   being humiliated and verbally abused, without it being unexpected or a
   shift in perspective, is considered funny - ref. The Office.

   Another explanation is that the essence of humour lies in two
   ingredients; the relevance factor and the surprise factor. First,
   something familiar (or relevant) to the audience is presented.
   (However, the relevant situation may be so familiar to the audience
   that it doesn't always have to be presented, as occurs in absurd
   humour, for example). From there, they may think they know the natural
   follow-through thoughts or conclusion. The next principal ingredient is
   the presentation of something different from what the audience
   expected, or else the natural result of interpreting the original
   situation in a different, less common way (see twist or surprise
   factor). For example:


   Humour

   A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that
     the surgery is done, will I be able to play the piano?" The doctor
   replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!"


   Humour

   Both explanations can be put under the general heading of "failed
   expectations". In language, or a situation with a relevance factor, or
   even a sublime setting, an audience has a certain expectation. If these
   expectations fail in a way that has some credulity, humour results. It
   has been postulated that the laughter/feel good element of humour is a
   biological function that helps one deal with the new, expanded point of
   view: a lawyer thinks differently than a priest or rabbi (below), a
   banana peel on the floor could be dangerous. This is why some link of
   credulity is important rather than any random line being a punchline.

   For this reason, many jokes work in threes. For instance, a class of
   jokes exists beginning with the formulaic line "A priest, a rabbi, and
   a lawyer are sitting in a bar..." (or close variations on this).
   Typically, the priest will make a remark, the rabbi will continue in
   the same vein, and then the lawyer will make a third point that forms a
   sharp break from the established pattern, but nonetheless forms a
   logical (or at least stereotypical) response. Example of a variation:


   Humour

    A gardener, an architect, and a lawyer are discussing which of their
   vocations is the most ancient. The gardener comments, "My vocation goes
   back to the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam to tend the garden." The
    architect comments, "My vocation goes back to the creation, when God
       created the world itself from primordial chaos." They both look
    curiously at the lawyer, who asks, "And who do you think created the
                             primordial chaos?"


   Humour

   In this vein of thought, knowing a punch line in advance, or some
   situation which would spoil the delivery of the punchline, can destroy
   the surprise factor, and in turn destroy the entertainment value or
   amusement the joke may have otherwise provided. Conversely, a person
   previously holding the same unexpected conclusions or secret
   perspectives as a comedian could derive amusement from hearing those
   same thoughts expressed and elaborated. That there is commonality,
   unity of thought, and an ability to openly analyse and express these
   (where secrecy and inhibited exploration was previously thought
   necessary) can be both the relevance and the surprise factors in these
   situations. This phenomenon explains much of the success of comedians
   who deal with same-gender and same-culture audiences on gender
   conflicts and cultural topics, respectively.

   Notable studies of humour have come from the pens of Aristotle in The
   Poetics (Part V) and of Schopenhauer.

   There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of humour,
   irony, parody and pretence. Prominent theoreticians in this field
   include Raymond Gibbs, Herbert Clark, Michael Billig, Willibald Ruch,
   Victor Raskin, Eliot Oring, and Salvatore Attardo. Although many
   writers have emphasised the positive or cathartic effects of humour
   some, notably Billig, have emphasised the potential of humour for
   cruelty and its involvement with social control and regulation.

   A number of science fiction writers have explored the theory of humour.
   In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein proposes that humour
   comes from pain, and that laughter is a mechanism to keep us from
   crying. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, proposes (in his first
   jokebook, Treasury of Humor) that the essence of humour is anticlimax:
   an abrupt change in point of view, in which trivial matters are
   suddenly elevated in importance above those that would normally be far
   more important.

Humour evolution

   As any form of art, humour techniques evolve through time. Perception
   of humour varies greatly among social demographics and indeed from
   person to person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of
   entertainment all over the world, whether in the courts of the kings or
   the villages of the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain
   intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.
   18th-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that "the more you
   know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness".

Humour formula

   Required components:
     * some surprise/ misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
     * appealing to feelings or to emotions.
     * similar to reality, but not real

   Methods:
     * metaphor
     * hyperbole
     * reframing
     * timing

   Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture Funny Business, that an object
   or a person can become funny in three different ways. They are:
     * By being in an unusual place
     * By behaving in an unusual way
     * By being the wrong size

   Most sight gags fit into one or more of these categories.

   Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life.
   Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A
   famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would
   answer all questions with a laugh.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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