What makes us laugh? Why is comedy so important? How does comedy affect our behaviour? The Psychology of Comedy provides a unique insight into the role of laughter and humour in our lives. From the mechanics of comedy and what makes a good joke, to the health benefits of laughter, the book delves into different types of comedy, from slapstick to complex puns, and the physiological response it provokes. The dark side of comedy is also considered, confronting the idea that what is funny to some can be offensive to others, making this universal experience also highly subjective. In a time when comedy continues to be one of the most popular and enduring forms of art, The Psychology of Comedy reminds us that laughter really is good for the soul.
Most of us laugh at something funny multiple times during a typical day. Humor serves multiple purposes, and although there is a sizable and expanding research literature on the subject, the research is spread in a variety of disciplines. The Psychology of Humor, 2e reviews the literature, integrating research from across subdisciplines in psychology, as well as related fields such as anthropology, biology, computer science, linguistics, sociology, and more. This book begins by defining humor and presenting theories of humor. Later chapters cover cognitive processes involved in humor and the effects of humor on cognition. Individual differences in personality and humor are identified as well as the physiology of humor, the social functions of humor, and how humor develops and changes over the lifespan. This book concludes noting the association of humor with physical and mental health, and outlines applications of humor use in psychotherapy, education, and the workplace. In addition to being fully updated with recent research, the second edition includes a variety of new materials. More graphs, tables, and figures now illustrate concepts, processes, and theories. It provides new brief interviews with prominent humor scholars via text boxes. The end of each chapter now includes a list of key concepts, critical thinking questions, and a list of resources for further reading. - Covers research on humor and laughter in every area of psychology - Integrates research findings into a coherent conceptual framework - Includes brain imaging studies, evolutionary models, and animal research - Integrates related information from sociology, linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology - Explores applications of humor in psychotherapy, education, and the workplace - Provides new research, plus key concepts and chapter summaries
This important new book provides a comprehensive analysis of humor from a social-psychological perspective, addressing questions about the use of humor and its effects in daily life. It examines the social psychology of humor on micro-level phenomena, such as attitudes, persuasion, and social perception, as well as exploring its use and effect on macro-level phenomena such as conformity, group processes, cohesion, and intergroup relations. Humor is inherently a social experience, shared among people, essential to nearly every type of interpersonal relationship. In this accessible volume, Strick and Ford review current research and new theoretical advancements to identify pressing open questions and propose new directions for future research in the social psychology of humor. The book explores fascinating topics such as humor in advertising, political satire, and the importance of a sense of humor in maintaining romantic relationships. It also examines how racist or sexist humor can affect personal and intergroup relations, and discusses how to confront inappropriate jokes. Offering new, precise, and operational conceptions of humor in social processes, this book will be essential reading for students and academics in social psychology, media, and communication studies.
Part road-trip comedy and part social science experiment, a scientist and a journalist travel the globe to discover the secret behind what makes things funny, questioning countless experts, including Louis C.K., along the way.
An Introduction to the Psychology of Humor provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of psychologists’ research on humor. Drawing on research from a variety of psychological perspectives, from cognitive and biological to social and developmental, the book explores factors that affect our detection, comprehension, liking, and use of humor. Throughout the book, theories and paradigms of humor are explored, with each chapter dedicated to a distinct field of psychological research. Covering topics including humor development in children and older adults, humor’s effectiveness in advertisements, cross-cultural psychology and humor’s functions in the workplace, the book addresses the challenges psychologists face in defining and studying humor despite it being a universal and often daily experience. Featuring a wealth of student-friendly features, including learning objectives and classroom activities, An Introduction to the Psychology of Humor is an essential read for all students of humor.
This work traces the origins and evolution of the concept of humor in psychology from ancient to modern times with an emphasis on an experimental/empirical approach to the understanding of humor and sense of humor. In addition to more than 3,000 important citations and references pertaining to the history, theories, and definitions of the concept of humor, this reference guide contains more than 380 recent (post-1970) annotated entries on the psychology of humor in its bibliographic section. The book describes various psychological, nonpsychological, and philosophical theories and definitions of humor, and focuses on the methodological concerns of psychologists regarding the scientific investigation of humor. The bibliography is organized under 10 categories, including Bibliographies and Literature Reviews of Humor, Cognition and Humor, Methodology and Measurement of Humor, and Social Aspects of Humor.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor presents the first ever comprehensive, in-depth treatment of all the sub-fields of the linguistics of humor, broadly conceived as the intersection of the study of language and humor. The reader will find a thorough historical, terminological, and theoretical introduction to the field, as well as detailed treatments of the various approaches to language and humor. Deliberately comprehensive and wide-ranging, the handbook includes chapter-long treatments on the traditional topics covered by language and humor (e.g., teasing, laughter, irony, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, the major linguistic theories of humor, translation) but also cutting-edge treatments of internet humor, cognitive linguistics, relevance theoretic, and corpus-assisted models of language and humor. Some chapters, such as the variationist sociolinguistcs, stylistics, and politeness are the first-ever syntheses of that particular subfield. Clusters of related chapters, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis and corpus-assisted analysis allow multiple perspectives on complex trans-disciplinary phenomena. This handbook is an indispensable reference work for all researchers interested in the interplay of language and humor, within linguistics, broadly conceived, but also in neighboring disciplines such as literary studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. The authors are among the most distinguished scholars in their fields.
Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humour and comedy within Western culture—by one of its greatest exponents Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Why do we laugh? What are we to make of the sheer variety of laughter, from braying and cackling to sniggering and chortling? Is humour subversive, or can it defuse dissent? Can we define wit? Packed with illuminating ideas and a good many excellent jokes, the book critically examines various well-known theories of humour, including the idea that it springs from incongruity and the view that it reflects a mildly sadistic form of superiority to others. Drawing on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources, Terry Eagleton moves from Aristotle and Aquinas to Hobbes, Freud, and Bakhtin, looking in particular at the psychoanalytical mechanisms underlying humour and its social and political evolution over the centuries.
