Why Are Some Things Funny In Some Situations?
Why are some things funny? Philosophers have asked that for millenia but two marketing people think they’ve come up with the formula: humor comes from a violation or threat to the way the world ought to be that is, at the same time, benign. Most theories of humor are missing something, says A. Peter McGraw, assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who co-authored the study with Caleb Warren, a Ph.D. candidate in marketing. Freud thought humor came from a release of tension, another theory holds that humor comes from a sense of superiority, and still another from incongruity. The two note that all of these could happen if you accidentally killed your spouse—but that wouldn’t be funny. They believed that a situation might be funny only if it also seems benign. To test their hypothesis, they presented various situations to volunteers they rewarded with candy bars. In one experiment, the volunteers read pairs of situations—for example, one wher
