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Papers by Marc Hye-Knudsen
This View of Life, 2024
Darwin’s thoughts on humor presaged our modern scientific understanding of its nature and its cul... more Darwin’s thoughts on humor presaged our modern scientific understanding of its nature and its cultural manifestations.
Evolutionary Psychology, 2024
On the surface, fear and humor seem like polar opposite states of mind, yet throughout our lives ... more On the surface, fear and humor seem like polar opposite states of mind, yet throughout our lives they continually interact. In this paper, we synthesize neurobiological, psychological, and evolutionary research on fear and humor, arguing that the two are deeply connected. The evolutionary origins of humor reside in play, a medium through which animals benignly explore situations and practice strategies, such as fight or flight, which would normally be accompanied by fear. Cognitively, humor retains the structure of play. Adopting a view of humor as requiring two appraisals, a violation appraisal and a benign appraisal, we describe how fearinducing stimuli can be rendered benignly humorous through contextual cues, psychological distance, reframing, and cognitive reappraisal. The antagonistic relationship between humor and fear in terms of their neurochemistry and physiological effects in turn makes humor ideal for managing fear in many circumstances. We review five real-world examples of humor and fear intersecting, presenting new data in support of our account along the way. Finally, we discuss the possible therapeutic relevance of the deep connection between humor and fear.
Style, 2023
The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein th... more The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein the performers deliberately hurt and humiliate themselves, has been considered a unique and peculiar mystery by cultural critics, one that can only be solved by looking at its particular historical and sociocultural context. In contrast, I argue that Jackass constitutes a resurgence of a widespread form of comedy whose roots stretch far back into human history: ritual clowning. Comparing the stunts and gags of Jackass with those of ritual clowns in traditional societies around the world, I argue that both are characterized by four universal comic themes: pain, sex, the foreign, and the sacred. In contrast to previous critical readings that have attributed each of these themes in Jackass to its particular historical and sociocultural context, I argue that they are all ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into.
Orbis Litterarum, 2023
Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if... more Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if so, can it truly account for the success of their novels? We dissect and examine three pieces of writing advice from Stephen King's book On Writing (2000). King counsels writers to (1) write in a simple language to aid readers' narrative immersion; (2) avoid -ly adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution; and (3) avoid the passive voice. We examine these three pieces of advice both theoretically, reviewing them in light of what we know about how literature affects readers from such fields as literary linguistics and evolutionary literary studies, and empirically, using a computational linguistics approach to test whether King follows his own advice and whether it can explain his success as a novelist. We find that King's advice about simple language makes sense if an author's goal is to sell books while his advice against -ly adverbs makes sense if the goal is instead literary recognition. For his advice against using the passive voice, we find no substantial theoretical or empirical basis.
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2022
In 1964, near the height of Cold War nuclear anxiety, millions of Americans flocked to movie thea... more In 1964, near the height of Cold War nuclear anxiety, millions of Americans flocked to movie theatres to see their own nuclear annihilation hilariously enacted for them in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. How did Kubrick transform one of his time's most pressing causes of psychological distress into a source of humorous pleasure? To answer this question, I offer a cognitive account of how comic distance works on film, building on research indicating humor to be an evolved response to benign violations. I show that Kubrick has consistently optimized for psychological distance in Dr. Strangelove, comparing his narrative and stylistic choices to those of Sidney Lumet in Fail Safe, a contemporaneous film that plays the same essential story for drama instead of laughs.
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2021
Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one's children.... more Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one's children. On the surface, dad jokes are puns that are characterized by only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, which makes them lame and unfunny. Only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, however, is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, which makes dad jokes a type of anti-humor. Fathers (i.e., "dads") may in turn seek to embarrass their children by purposively violating the norms of joke-telling in this way, thus weaponizing the lame pun against their children as a type of good-natured teasing. Given their personality profile, it makes sense that fathers should be particularly prone to weaponize dad jokes teasingly against their children like this, with the phenomenon bearing an illuminating resemblance to the rough-and-tumble play that fathers have engaged their children in since before the dawn of our species.
16:9, 2019
What makes some bad films "so-bad-they're-good"? We explain the paradoxical appeal of trash films... more What makes some bad films "so-bad-they're-good"? We explain the paradoxical appeal of trash films with reference to Wiseau's 2003 cult classic The Room and argue, from the perspective of cognitive film theory, that the film's obtrusive violations of Classical Hollywood conventions deny viewers narrative absorption but allows them to derive from those very violations a humorous pleasure that is often social in nature.
Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English, 2018
Cringe comedies differ from traditional embarrassment humour by being explicitly aimed at evoking... more Cringe comedies differ from traditional embarrassment humour by being explicitly aimed at evoking not just the positive emotion of amusement but also the decidedly negative emotion of vicarious embarrassment (i.e. 'cringe') in their audiences. Drawing on Warren and McGraw's benign violation theory of humour and the concept of benign masochism, I offer a biocultural account of how they achieve this effect and why audiences counterintuitively seem to find it enjoyable. I argue that whereas a farce like Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) employs psychological distance in order to render its embarrassing violations thoroughly benign and thus singularly conducive to amusement, cringe comedies like The Office (2001-2003) and The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) comparatively decrease psychological distance in order also to evoke high levels of vicarious embarrassment. Finally, I argue that audiences find benignly masochistic pleasure in such cringe-inducing media because they offer vicarious experiences with social worst-case scenarios.
Book Reviews by Marc Hye-Knudsen
Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2023
Understanding our evolutionary past could well be crucial to successfully navigating the present.... more Understanding our evolutionary past could well be crucial to successfully navigating the present. This, at least, is the premise for two new books in the emerging genre of evolutionary self-help, A Hunter-Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century (2021) by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein and Solving Modern Problems With a Stone-Age Brain (2022) by Douglas T. Kenrick and David E. Lundberg-Kenrick. Despite their surface similarity, the books typify two very different approaches to how we should be conducting evolutionary social science and what kind of lessons we can draw from it. Heying and Weinstein's book is marked by speculation, with their self-help advice often being based on interesting but controversial and untested ideas. Kenrick and Lundberg-Kenrick instead content themselves with doling out mild-mannered advice based on only reasonably wellsupported findings, which they review the evidence for. While perhaps less flashy and exciting, this latter approach is a more responsible model for the genre of evolutionary self-help.
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2022
“[H]umanity didn’t evolve to watch popular movies; instead, popular cinema has evolved to match o... more “[H]umanity didn’t evolve to watch popular movies; instead, popular cinema has evolved to match our cognitive and perceptual proclivities." This is the central thesis of James E. Cutting’s Movies on Our Minds, a book that summarizes the most interesting findings from his more than two decades of research into the cultural evolution of popular movie form. Cutting is a psychologist by training and an empiricist at heart, so he is particularly interested in how the form of popular movies reflects the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional propensities of the human mind, and in how this can be quantified and empirically tested. His book serves as an undeniable testament to the quantitative approach and everything it has to offer biocultural scholars who are interested in understanding how human nature shapes and gives rise to the kinds of cultural products we produce and consume.
This View of Life, 2024
Darwin’s thoughts on humor presaged our modern scientific understanding of its nature and its cul... more Darwin’s thoughts on humor presaged our modern scientific understanding of its nature and its cultural manifestations.
Evolutionary Psychology, 2024
On the surface, fear and humor seem like polar opposite states of mind, yet throughout our lives ... more On the surface, fear and humor seem like polar opposite states of mind, yet throughout our lives they continually interact. In this paper, we synthesize neurobiological, psychological, and evolutionary research on fear and humor, arguing that the two are deeply connected. The evolutionary origins of humor reside in play, a medium through which animals benignly explore situations and practice strategies, such as fight or flight, which would normally be accompanied by fear. Cognitively, humor retains the structure of play. Adopting a view of humor as requiring two appraisals, a violation appraisal and a benign appraisal, we describe how fearinducing stimuli can be rendered benignly humorous through contextual cues, psychological distance, reframing, and cognitive reappraisal. The antagonistic relationship between humor and fear in terms of their neurochemistry and physiological effects in turn makes humor ideal for managing fear in many circumstances. We review five real-world examples of humor and fear intersecting, presenting new data in support of our account along the way. Finally, we discuss the possible therapeutic relevance of the deep connection between humor and fear.
Style, 2023
The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein th... more The appeal of the Jackass television series and film franchise, centered around stunts wherein the performers deliberately hurt and humiliate themselves, has been considered a unique and peculiar mystery by cultural critics, one that can only be solved by looking at its particular historical and sociocultural context. In contrast, I argue that Jackass constitutes a resurgence of a widespread form of comedy whose roots stretch far back into human history: ritual clowning. Comparing the stunts and gags of Jackass with those of ritual clowns in traditional societies around the world, I argue that both are characterized by four universal comic themes: pain, sex, the foreign, and the sacred. In contrast to previous critical readings that have attributed each of these themes in Jackass to its particular historical and sociocultural context, I argue that they are all ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into.
Orbis Litterarum, 2023
Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if... more Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if so, can it truly account for the success of their novels? We dissect and examine three pieces of writing advice from Stephen King's book On Writing (2000). King counsels writers to (1) write in a simple language to aid readers' narrative immersion; (2) avoid -ly adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution; and (3) avoid the passive voice. We examine these three pieces of advice both theoretically, reviewing them in light of what we know about how literature affects readers from such fields as literary linguistics and evolutionary literary studies, and empirically, using a computational linguistics approach to test whether King follows his own advice and whether it can explain his success as a novelist. We find that King's advice about simple language makes sense if an author's goal is to sell books while his advice against -ly adverbs makes sense if the goal is instead literary recognition. For his advice against using the passive voice, we find no substantial theoretical or empirical basis.
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2022
In 1964, near the height of Cold War nuclear anxiety, millions of Americans flocked to movie thea... more In 1964, near the height of Cold War nuclear anxiety, millions of Americans flocked to movie theatres to see their own nuclear annihilation hilariously enacted for them in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. How did Kubrick transform one of his time's most pressing causes of psychological distress into a source of humorous pleasure? To answer this question, I offer a cognitive account of how comic distance works on film, building on research indicating humor to be an evolved response to benign violations. I show that Kubrick has consistently optimized for psychological distance in Dr. Strangelove, comparing his narrative and stylistic choices to those of Sidney Lumet in Fail Safe, a contemporaneous film that plays the same essential story for drama instead of laughs.
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2021
Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one's children.... more Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one's children. On the surface, dad jokes are puns that are characterized by only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, which makes them lame and unfunny. Only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, however, is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, which makes dad jokes a type of anti-humor. Fathers (i.e., "dads") may in turn seek to embarrass their children by purposively violating the norms of joke-telling in this way, thus weaponizing the lame pun against their children as a type of good-natured teasing. Given their personality profile, it makes sense that fathers should be particularly prone to weaponize dad jokes teasingly against their children like this, with the phenomenon bearing an illuminating resemblance to the rough-and-tumble play that fathers have engaged their children in since before the dawn of our species.
16:9, 2019
What makes some bad films "so-bad-they're-good"? We explain the paradoxical appeal of trash films... more What makes some bad films "so-bad-they're-good"? We explain the paradoxical appeal of trash films with reference to Wiseau's 2003 cult classic The Room and argue, from the perspective of cognitive film theory, that the film's obtrusive violations of Classical Hollywood conventions deny viewers narrative absorption but allows them to derive from those very violations a humorous pleasure that is often social in nature.
Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English, 2018
Cringe comedies differ from traditional embarrassment humour by being explicitly aimed at evoking... more Cringe comedies differ from traditional embarrassment humour by being explicitly aimed at evoking not just the positive emotion of amusement but also the decidedly negative emotion of vicarious embarrassment (i.e. 'cringe') in their audiences. Drawing on Warren and McGraw's benign violation theory of humour and the concept of benign masochism, I offer a biocultural account of how they achieve this effect and why audiences counterintuitively seem to find it enjoyable. I argue that whereas a farce like Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) employs psychological distance in order to render its embarrassing violations thoroughly benign and thus singularly conducive to amusement, cringe comedies like The Office (2001-2003) and The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) comparatively decrease psychological distance in order also to evoke high levels of vicarious embarrassment. Finally, I argue that audiences find benignly masochistic pleasure in such cringe-inducing media because they offer vicarious experiences with social worst-case scenarios.
Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2023
Understanding our evolutionary past could well be crucial to successfully navigating the present.... more Understanding our evolutionary past could well be crucial to successfully navigating the present. This, at least, is the premise for two new books in the emerging genre of evolutionary self-help, A Hunter-Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century (2021) by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein and Solving Modern Problems With a Stone-Age Brain (2022) by Douglas T. Kenrick and David E. Lundberg-Kenrick. Despite their surface similarity, the books typify two very different approaches to how we should be conducting evolutionary social science and what kind of lessons we can draw from it. Heying and Weinstein's book is marked by speculation, with their self-help advice often being based on interesting but controversial and untested ideas. Kenrick and Lundberg-Kenrick instead content themselves with doling out mild-mannered advice based on only reasonably wellsupported findings, which they review the evidence for. While perhaps less flashy and exciting, this latter approach is a more responsible model for the genre of evolutionary self-help.
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2022
“[H]umanity didn’t evolve to watch popular movies; instead, popular cinema has evolved to match o... more “[H]umanity didn’t evolve to watch popular movies; instead, popular cinema has evolved to match our cognitive and perceptual proclivities." This is the central thesis of James E. Cutting’s Movies on Our Minds, a book that summarizes the most interesting findings from his more than two decades of research into the cultural evolution of popular movie form. Cutting is a psychologist by training and an empiricist at heart, so he is particularly interested in how the form of popular movies reflects the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional propensities of the human mind, and in how this can be quantified and empirically tested. His book serves as an undeniable testament to the quantitative approach and everything it has to offer biocultural scholars who are interested in understanding how human nature shapes and gives rise to the kinds of cultural products we produce and consume.