Three Theories Walk Into a Bar

Philosophers have been trying to explain humor for about 2,400 years, and if you find that funny, you've already illustrated part of the point. The history of humor philosophy is itself a kind of dark comedy: brilliant minds constructing elegant theories that can be immediately demolished by a single counterexample, a pratfall, or a well-timed pause.

There are three major theoretical traditions, each capturing something real.

1. The Superiority Theory

This is the oldest account, associated with Plato and Aristotle, and stated with characteristic bluntness by Thomas Hobbes: laughter is "sudden glory", a flash of self-congratulatory superiority over someone else's deficiency, failure, or misfortune. We laugh at the man who slips on a banana peel because we are, for one delicious moment, not the one who slipped. We laugh at buffoons, simpletons, the pompous brought low.

This explains a lot. Slapstick comedy, schadenfreude, comedy roasts, the entire genre of "hold my beer" videos, all superiority. Aristotle noted that comedy depicts people as worse than they actually are, while tragedy depicts them as better. There's something real here about the social function of mockery: it maintains group norms by ridiculing those who violate them.

But the superiority theory cannot be the whole story. Why do we laugh at genuinely clever wordplay with no victim? Why is an absurdist non-sequitur funny? Why does the joke "I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places. She told me to stop going to those places" provoke amusement when no one is being degraded? The superiority theory has to stretch uncomfortably to cover these cases.

2. The Relief Theory

Associated with Herbert Spencer and most famously Sigmund Freud, the relief theory says laughter is the release of pent-up nervous energy or psychological tension. We build tension, around taboo topics, social anxieties, repressed desires, and humor provides a socially acceptable discharge valve. The joke gives permission to laugh at what normally must be suppressed.

This explains dark humor, dirty jokes, gallows humor, and the comedy of the forbidden. It explains why people laugh at funerals (inappropriate; tension releases). It explains why jokes about things we're anxious about are funnier when we're anxious about them. There's a reason hospital staff famously have dark senses of humor.

But relief theory explains why laughter feels good more than it explains what makes something funny in the first place. Not every release of tension is humorous. Crying also releases tension. Sex also releases tension. There's something it misses about the cognitive structure of humor.

3. The Incongruity Theory

The dominant contemporary account, associated with Kant, Kierkegaard, and most of modern humor research: humor occurs in response to an incongruity, a mismatch between expectation and reality, between two incompatible conceptual frames, between what should be and what is.

A joke sets up an expectation and then violates it in a way that surprises us. "I asked my dog what two minus two is. He said nothing." You expect either a punchline about dog intelligence or a math answer; you get both at once, in a collision of frames (literal nothing / the number zero / the dog's silence). The incongruity is the joke.

This is more structurally powerful than the other theories. It explains wordplay (puns exploit lexical ambiguity, two meanings collide), absurdist humor (radically unexpected conceptual collisions), satire (reality vs. pretension), and situational comedy (what should happen vs. what does).

Humor theories can be classified into three neatly identifiable groups: incongruity, superiority, and relief theories. Incongruity theory is the leading approach and includes historical figures such as Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard.

— IEP 'Humor'

But pure incongruity isn't quite enough either. Some incongruities are just confusing. Some are frightening. Not every mismatch between expectation and reality makes you laugh, sometimes it just makes you anxious, or sad, or baffled. There's something additional required: the incongruity must be, in some sense, okay.