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How humans develop a sense of humor
Imagination and humor
Imagination plays a role in incongruity. It helps children to play social roles that they usually wouldn't. Imagination begins to appear in children around 12-18 months, corresponding with the time children start to repeat parent's jokes.
Children start to produce their own jokes around two years of age, with jokes being object-based, such as putting underwear on the head. They often draw inspiration from what they are learning about. This helps them process social rules.
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Key Ideas
Humour in philosophy
- Henri Bergson, a Fresh philosopher of the late 19th century, was also an author of a famous essay that focused on laughter. Before Bergson, few philosophers had given laughter much t...
Humour and respect
Everyone who ever had to explain their own joke knows that comedy cannot survive analysis. Once you take humour apart, it loses its effect and dies in the process.
Henri Bergson published his essay on laughter in 1900. He believed that laughter should be studied as 'a living thing' and treated with 'the respect due to life.'
Conditions for laughter to thrive
Henri Bergson's general observations related to when laughter is most likely to appear and thrive:
- The comic is strictly human. When laughter is directed at non-humans, we may laugh, but only because we have detected some human attitude or expression.
- Laughter has no greater foe than emotion. Emotional states like pity, melancholy, rage, etc. make it difficult for us to find humour in the things we might otherwise have laughed at. But humour also appears to serve as a coping mechanism in the face of tragedy or misfortune.
- Laughter seems to require an echo. It is used in the context of social bonding.
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Sarcasm is like a truth-lie
You say something you don't literally mean, and the hearer only understands if they get that you're insincere. The ability to recognize sarcasm is an essential skill to function in ...
Understanding sarcasm requires brain power
Studies revealed that exposure to sarcasm enhances problem-solving. It appears to stimulate complex thinking.
Sarcasm also requires the brain to work harder, making it sharper. To perceive sarcasm, a person has to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different.
The dual nature of sarcasm
Sarcasm has a two-faced quality: it's funny and mean.
Some language experts suggest sarcasm is a gentler way to criticize with indirectness. "How do you keep this room so neat?" Other researchers have found the mocking nature of sarcasm as more hurtful than plain-spoken criticism.
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Humor at work
Being funny can have both positive and negative consequences, in your personal as well as your professional life. And context is always important: when making a joke, for instance, you should defin...
Humor and its effects on the status
Humor and status have always been tightly linked: good leaders seem to often use humor in order to motivate their team members' actions. As individuals, we tend to prefer, researchers claim, jokes that make us laugh while feeling slightly uncomfortable.
Furthermore, we perceive the joke teller as a self-confident person, who could easily become a leader due to his or her courage to make such a joke. The key point here is that the joke should be appropriate and match the context.
Inside jokes
Making inside jokes usually shows how bounded a team or a group is: their jokes can understood the best by themselves.
However, the moment an outsider integrates the group, it is better to avoid the inside jokes, as this will most probably make him or her feel out of place.