I’m Joking/Just Kidding
A topic on my list of things to cover in this blog are statements of “just kidding” and “I’m joking.” I started on this in my ana...
Category: Humor Theories
This is the parent group of the main theories.
Tragedy Plus Time
In my analysis of Mike Birbiglia’s Thank God for Jokes, I included this blurb about how, in an off-hand way, Birbiglia mentions that “Comedy equals ...
Carnival II: Real Action
In a previous post, I discussed a common, simple model of carnivalesque that was based off the idea of a Roman Catholic celebration of Carnival prior to Lent wr...
Carnival I: Simple Inversion
It’s fairly common, when talking about humor, to use the word carnivalesque (see for instance Fiske; Gilbert; Miller). The concept was most famously used...
Mike Birbiglia on Jokes
I’ve been a fan of Mike Birbiglia for a long time now, bought his merchandise, watched all his specials and both his movies (Sleepwalk with Me, 2012 and D...
Victor Raskin’s Script Theory
Presuppositions, “common sense,” and scripts In proposing Script Theory, a major model seen to support Incongruity theory, Linguist Victor Raskin no...
Comic Intent II: Getting it
My problem with a number of different theories is that they assume certain elements of intentionality, which I’ve discussed before as assuming the comic&#...
Conscious Laughter: Fake Laughs and Guffaws
As I’ve noted, John C. Meyer draws a useful distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when...
Laughing With Victims At Butts
Apologies for reposting, but in trying to organize the site I think it will be more useful to break the theory out from the cases. This enables me to just link ...
John C. Meyer’s Four Functions of Humor
John C. Meyer was interested in how people use humor – what their purpose is. Meyer’s first conception is that people can use humor to unite us or t...