On Morreall: The Distinction Between Humor and Play (original) (raw)

LAUGHTER AND LITERATURE: A PLAY THEORY OF HUMOR

Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 1–22, 2004

Humor seems uniquely human, but it has deep biological roots. Laughter, the best evidence suggests, derives from the ritualized breathing and open-mouth display common in animal play. Play evolved as training for the unexpected, as creatures put themselves at risk of losing balance or dominance so that they learn to recover. Humor in turn involves play with the expectations we share—whether innate or acquired—in order to catch one another off guard in ways that simulate risk and stimulate recovery. An evolutionary approach to three great literary humorists, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Beckett, shows that a species-wide explanation not only digs deeper but in no way diminishes individual difference.

Young Children’s Play and Humor Development: A Close Theoretical Partnership

Educating the Young Child, 2019

Play and humor have strong theoretical and conceptual links, in that both are enjoyable, reality bending, cognitively rich, internally motivated and controlled, and facilitated by social interaction. There is a small body of work describing how early play and early humor develop from similar sources and how they are connected and differentiated at various ages. Although some theorists have described possible connections between play development and humor development and hypothesized that they arise from similar sources, most play researchers have not focused on how this linkage is manifested in young children. Children’s humor is closely connected not only to their play, of course, but also their emotional, communicative, and metacommunicative competence. Humor development is particularly related to their increasing ability to recognize conceptual incongruity, and examples of such ability is often manifested during their play experiences. This chapter reviews the theoretical backgro...

Humor, play, and neurosis: the paradoxical power of confinement

Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 1990

There is perceptual paradox common to humor, play, and neurosis: the strong hold of these patterns on human behavior, whether voluntary or involuntary, stemsfrom a confinement they impose on theperson's scope of awareness. Related to this is a paradoxical entanglement of pleasure and displeasure: humor and play are usually viewed äs pleasant and neurosis äs unpleasant, yet closer analysis reveals that the first two also involve an implicit unpleasant element, while the latter contains a hidden pleasure. In thispaper (and in a subsequent one) Idiscuss these mechanisms. Ipropose a dialectic framework that integrales and reconciles different theories in behavioral sciences. The insights derivedfrom it are applied in detail to the study of humor and the biological and psychological dynamics oflaughter.

Philosophy of Humour and Laughter – a critical analysis

2020

I will focus on the 'playful attitude' factor Morreall briefly landed on and integrate it with a deeper explanation of how play and humour are intertwined with Morreall's' own theory on humour, which I do agree with. So, basically, this thesis will try to deepen Morreall's theory with the works of his critics. Superiority Theory Superiority theory by Plato The term 'superiority theory' of humour was coined in the 20 th century but it has been around since Plato and Aristotle were walking the earth. The general idea of this theory is that humour, and its subsequent laughter, express a feeling of superiority over others or over a former state of ourselves. 1 This view does not seem so nice, and some would argue that this theory of humour caused a bad reputation of laughter and humour in general. 2 The superiority theory was the leading theory of humour from Ancient Greece up until the 18 th century. 3 Though this theory seems outdated, I would argue it can still be seen today. Most evidently in so-called 'cringe' or embarrassment humour. This type of comedy employs jokes to make the audience feel embarrassed, or even cringe, at what the characters are doing to elicit laughter. 4 Plato does not appear to have been a humorous kind of man. He looked around the agora and reached the conclusion that people laugh at the vices of other ignorant, relatively powerless people. This type of humour is still very effective and popular, the successes of television shows such as Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) and more recently the American version of The Office (2005-2013) attest to the idea that the superiority theory might plausibly explain contemporary examples of humour and laughter as well. Superiority Theory by Thomas Hobbes Considering that laughter and humour persisted over the ages, it seems safe to assume that not everyone held this view. This is difficult to assess, because not a lot has been written about humour by philosophers in the past. One old philosopher who had, however, was Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes largely agreed with Plato, and even strengthened this position in his own political-philosophical ways. Hobbes' view of laughter was that it was an expression of

Playing with Expectations: A Contextual View of Humor Development

In the developmental literature, the idea has been proposed that young children do not understand the specificity of non-literal communicative acts. In this article, I focus on young children's ability to produce and understand different forms of humor. I explore the acquisition of the communicative contexts that enable children to engage in humorous interactions before they possess the capacity to analyze them in the terms afforded by a full-fledged theory of mind. I suggest that different forms of humor share several basic features and that we can construct a continuum from simple to sophisticated forms. In particular, I focus on teasing, a form of humor already present in preverbal infants that is also considered a typical feature of irony. I argue that all forms of humor can be regarded as a type of interaction that I propose to call " playing with expectations. "

The Phenomenological Function of Humor

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.

Synopsis of the workshop on humor and cognition

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.

El mecanismo de humor desde la perspectiva de la teoría de la relevancia

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.