Social Psychology Archives

Every Theory of Laughter Explained—and Superseded

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

I’ve been searching for years for a unified theory of laughter. I still haven’t found one. Ha, ha.

Philosophers and psychologists have proposed any number of explanations for why we laugh. We laugh because we feel superior, because tension has been released, because something is incongruous… Each theory explains something. None explains everything.

And that may be because laughter is more complicated than we think.

Is Laughter Good or Bad?

When looking for romance on dating sites and apps, people often ask for, or promise to offer, a good sense of humour (GSOH).

Today, we tend to think of laughter as a good thing, but historically, this has not always been the case. Laughter seldom features in Plato’s dialogues, and, when it does, it is usually in the mouths of sophists and fools. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that, to set a good example, heroes in myths and stories should never be portrayed as being overcome with laughter.

The Stoics, too, frowned upon laughter, as did, for many centuries, the monasteries. Even the mild Rule of St Benedict condemns laughter in the strongest terms, for example, in Chapter VI, Of Silence: ‘Coarse jests, and idle words or speech provoking laughter, we condemn everywhere to eternal exclusion.’

Nowadays, most people associate laughter with happiness, health, and a virtuous attitude. But if laughter were that innocent, it wouldn’t be so fun.

The Superiority Theory

The notion that laughter can overcome reason or corrupt moral character finds an echo in the superiority theory of laughter, according to which laughter is a way of raising oneself by putting others down.

The superiority theory is most closely associated with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who conceived of laughter as ‘a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly’.

When we think of mediaeval mobs jeering at people in stocks, or, closer to our time, Candid Camera, we can see that Hobbes had at least half a point. But the superiority theory is unable to account for all cases of laughter, such as laughter arising from joy, surprise, or relief.

The Relief Theory

According to the relief theory of laughter, most often associated with Sigmund Freud, laughter represents a release of pent-up nervous energy.

Like dreams, jokes are able to bypass our inner censor, enabling a repressed emotion such as xenophobia (or, at least, the nervous energy associated with the repression) to surface—explaining why, at times, we can be embarrassed by our own laughter. By the same token, a comedian might raise a laugh by conjuring some costly emotion, such as admiration or indignation, and then suddenly puncturing it.

More flexible than the superiority theory, the relief theory is able to account for how we might use laughter as a form of release, or to tell or reveal some uncomfortable truth. Upon awakening on her deathbed to see her entire family around her, Nancy Astor quipped, ‘Am I dying, or is this my birthday?’ But not all laughter arises from a release of pent-up energy—not, for example, laughter at a pun or word play—and those who laugh the hardest at offensive jokes are not generally the most decorous or repressed of people.

The Incongruity Theory

Much more popular today is a third theory, the incongruity theory of laughter, associated with the likes of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, according to which the comedian raises a laugh, not by conjuring an emotion and then killing it, but by creating an expectation and then contradicting it.

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant shares a few jokes to illustrate his theory of laughter, for example:

A merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey the same night!

In the Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘the ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others…’ Leaning on Aristotle, Kierkegaard highlights that the violation of an expectation is the core not only of comedy but also of tragedy—the difference being that, in tragedy, the violation leads to pain or harm.

Possibly, it is not the incongruity itself that we enjoy, but the light that it sheds, in particular, on the difference between what lies inside and outside our heads. Kant compares the pleasure of laughter, the free play of thought, to the pleasure of music, the free play of sound, and to the pleasure of gambling, the free play of fortune.

Perhaps the only difference between the comedian, the psychologist, and the philosopher is that you can’t pretend to be a comedian.

The incongruity theory is arguably more basic than the relief and superiority theories. When someone laughs, our inclination is to search for an incongruity; and though we may laugh for superiority or relief, even then, it helps if we can pin our laughter on some real or imagined incongruity.

But although the incongruity theory takes us closer to a general theory, it struggles to explain why incongruity should produce laughter rather than, say, surprise, confusion, or mere indifference.

The Social Corrective Theory

In Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, the monk Jorge de Burgos commits a string of murders to prevent the sole surviving copy of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy (the lost second book of the Poetics), hidden in the abbey’s labyrinthine library, from ever coming to light. For Jorge, the book is dangerous, because laughter, once understood, could undermine the very foundations of religion and society.

After Aristotle, the first major philosopher to write a book specifically on laughter was Henri Bergson.

In On Laughter (1900), Bergson begins by making three observations:

Laughter is a human preserve. ‘Many philosophers have defined man ‘a laughing animal’, but they could also have said a ‘laughable animal’—for if another animal can make us laugh, this is only insofar as it reminds us of man.’
More than that, laughter is a social activity. Even when we laugh alone, it is because we have conjured up a social context, a gathering of ghosts—‘for laughter implies a certain complicity with others, whether real or imaginary.’
Emotion is the enemy of laughter, inasmuch as laughter presupposes a certain distance, a certain indifference, even if it is only momentary—and, in fact, manufacturing this distance can be one of the purposes of humour.

Life, wrote Horace Walpole, is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.

These, then, are Bergson’s conditions for laughter: a human dimension, a social aspect, and a detached attitude.

But what is laughter, all laughter, actually about? It is, says Bergson, about a kind of mechanical rigidity, either in body or mind.

Nature is full of vital energy and never exactly repeats itself, but we human beings tend to fall short, to fall into patterns and habits, to ossify, to lose ourselves to ourselves—and laughter is how we point this out to one another, how we up our collective game.

For example, we may laugh at one who falls into a hole through absentmindedness, or at one who constantly repeats the same gesture or phrase. More subtly, we may laugh at a pun or a literal interpretation of a figure of speech; or at a misunderstanding that arises from a scene so formulaic that it is able to belong at the same time to two completely independent series of events.

I would add that we may also laugh at, or from, an unusual or unexpected lack of rigidity, as, for instance, when we break a habit or have an original idea—although this kind of divine laughter, as I call it, may only arise out of the contrast with our customary rigidity.

Ultimately, says Bergson, we are laughable to the extent that we are a machine or an object, to the extent that we lack self-awareness, that we are invisible to ourselves while being visible to everyone else.

Thus, the laughter of others usually draws attention to our unconscious processes, to our modes or patterns of self-deception, and to the gap, or gulf, between our fiction and the reality. This gap is narrowest in poets and artists, who have to transcend themselves if they are to be worthy of the name.

Zen masters teach that it is much easier to laugh at ourselves once we have transcended our ego. At the highest level, laughter is the sound of the shattering of the ego. It is a means of gaining (and revealing) perspective, of rising beyond ourselves and our lives, of achieving a kind of immortality, a kind of divinity.

Bergson has taken us further than Hobbes or Freud. Laughter is no longer merely an expression of superiority or a discharge of nervous energy: it has become a mechanism by which human beings police rigidity and preserve adaptability. Still, Bergson’s theory cannot explain all laughter, such as the laughter of a baby or a primate.

Evolutionary Theory

Another way to understand laughter is to look at it like a biologist or anthropologist might.

Laughter is evolutionarily much older than language, and we share its precursors with other animals. Primates in particular produce laughing sounds when playfighting, play-chasing, or tickling.

As with human children, it seems that their laughter functions as a signal that the danger is not for real—which may be why characters such as Batman’s Joker, who send a misleading signal, are so unsettling.

Perhaps, then, the basic evolutionary meaning of laughter is extraordinarily simple: this is only play, or the danger is not real.

Derivative Uses

Most laughter is not directed at jokes, but at creating and maintaining social bonds. Humour is a social lubricant, a signal of acceptance and belonging.

It is also a way of communicating, of making a point emphatically, or conveying a sensitive message without incurring the usual social costs.

On top of that, it can be turned into a weapon, a sublimed form of aggression, serving, like antlers or plumes, to pull rank or attract a mate.

The subtlety and ambiguity involved is in itself a form of play, and we know that laughter is associated with stress reduction and other health benefits.

If laughter began as a signal of play or safety, it has, in human beings, evolved a number of other functions, none of which are mutually incompatible. Humour is shaped by culture and education, and, if people laugh differently in Berlin or Tokyo, imagine how differently they must have laughed in Ancient Greece or Ancient India.

The same may be true of complex, elaborated emotions such as Schadenfreude and, indeed, romantic love, which build on primitive mechanisms, or ‘basic emotions’. Evolution lays the foundations; culture builds the house.

Why Can’t I Stop Laughing?

This may be where the search for a unified theory begins to go wrong. Superiority, relief, incongruity, social correction, play, and bonding need not be rival explanations. They operate at different levels and, in many cases, answer different questions.

The incongruity theory is principally cognitive; the relief theory is psychological and physiological; the superiority theory is interpersonal; the social corrective theory is social; the play or danger theory is evolutionary; and theories of bonding and aggression are functional. If someone slips on a banana skin, several of these theories could provide an account of the ensuing laughter.

But laughter often admits of several accounts, and, in fact, the more accounts it admits of, the harder we may laugh, as our mind flits from one account to another. Next time you laugh hysterically, pay attention to this flitting and its cascading effect.

When the teacher asks you to tell the class why you were laughing, you’d have to be a genius to explain it.