2.4: Got IT?- Introducing Incongruity Theory

So far, you’ve read about some other attempts to explain the cognitive/mental processes behind the phenomenon of humor. Most texts will package the three main theories of humor comprehension in a sort of triumvirate that includes the superiority, release, and incongruity theories as the main contenders. These three theories have been, in modern research and historically, the main candidates attempting to explain what is necessary for us to find something funny. In this chapter we’ll cover the incongruity theory.

Incongruity Theory Explained

In the most general sense, the Incongruity Theory states that in order for something to be found funny or humorous, one needs to perceive a sort of incongruity. What’s an incongruity? Well that’s the big question and one that occupies and vexes many researchers (this author included). In the simplest and most general way of stating the idea, an incongruity is something that is unexpected, absurd, out of the ordinary, strange, or bizarre. Ok, that wasn’t simple. I would have gone on, but you can check out www.thesaurus.com if you want to find other synonyms for incongruity.

The Incongruity Theory (IT, hereafter) is the dominant theory used in modern research to explain humorous things. It’s not without its issues or critics. However, it is safe to say that IT is accepted by most researchers as the most accurate and likely true approach to explaining humor. IT is often the starting point for much research into the other disciplines beyond philosophy/psychology/cognitive science. For example, current neuroscience indicates that the areas that support higher-level conceptual thought, are involved in humor processing. That we see areas of the brain involved in higher level cognition and conceptual thought involved in humor behavior supports IT’s claim that humor is a conceptually based activity that involve incongruity processing.

Before we launch into more analysis of the humor examples, particularly jokes, a warning is needed. Analysis of any joke or bit of humor generally, if not nearly always, makes the jokes not funny. A quote from E.B. White is clear on this, in a humorous, IT 46 supporting way. “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” The incongruity is to be found in comparing the feeling one has at the end of the joke analysis to death. I hope that’s not the case below, but you’ll likely find the jokes less funny for the analysis.

It would do well to do a little more unpacking of terms like incongruity, absurdity, unexpected, and bizarre. But basically, the kernel of the idea is that you experience something that does not fit easily within the particular context. To use an example from the movie Friday, there’s a scene where we enter into a local bodega (a corner store) in a largely African American community and we are met with a sign that proudly proclaims that the store is “Black Owned.” As the camera pans down, an Asian man rises from below the counter. This juxtaposition of the Asian man coming from under the counter, which supports the idea that he’s the owner, with the sign that proclaims the establishment is black owned is perfect example of ideas or objects that are incongruous with one another. One would have expected the store to be run by a black man—that’s what the sign says—but the scene intimates that it’s not. This example also helps us to see the “unexpected” nature of the incongruous. The presentation of the sign primes us to think the store is owned, not by an Asian man, but a black person of color. Good comedy works to create expectations and them frustrate or play with them in such ways as to get the audience to find something funny or humorous. If you want to find humor, look for ways that things don’t seem to fit together. Perhaps you fancy some jumbo shrimp?

Bizarre or absurd as types of incongruity are a bit more difficult to describe as they are, well, bizarre, but they are definitely further refinements, or subsets of the incongruous. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the bizarre or absurd is with the following joke.

How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Purple fish!

This little joke is pretty good at being absurd. Who besides someone in a Monty Python sketch would use a fish to change a lightbulb?! The joke uses the idea of a surrealist (artists who tried to pair together ideas that were often extremely different) in order to get the listener to be prepared for absurdities. A good example of surrealist absurdity can be found in Salvador Dali’s painting, “The Persistence of Memory” in which we see 47 clock faces melting like a rubber pancake. Clocks don’t melt like that. At least not the clocks I know. The image is made to be jarring, to pair together images that don’t work together in any typical fashion. Returning to the above joke, the answer of purple fish is not relevant at all to the question. Did the punchline fail to add in the number of purple fish needed? Even if one is familiar with the “lightbulb” form of joke, this particular one works because the answer supplied is a non-answer. Just as the surrealists might have liked. Hopefully you followed that. Explaining the absurd is a bit…absurd. It’s difficult to try to make sense of nonsense.

Let’s continue using this approach of relying on jokes to clarify the IT; it’s a timehonored tradition in humor research. A fair warning is needed, as jokes are but a small slice of the humor pie. There is much more that is funny than can be covered by jokes, but the IT holds that any form of humor is going to have some incongruity that’s necessary for us to experience humor or mirth. But as a tool for explicating humor theories, jokes are compact, easily digestible, and thus make for useful examples.

One of simplest forms of humor in young children can be found when they actively do something contrary to expectation or norm. For instance, my children loved to take nursery rhymes that they knew well and then not say the expected words at some point. My son used to change the last word of the first line of the famous “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” rhyme. “Twinkle, twinkle little star how I wonder what you… rooster!” The substituted word would always change, but it was typically a noun of some sort and often an animal. He would giggle with sheer delight. For some, this sort of play with language shows that real incongruity-based humor has taken root.

Certainly children had laughed and giggled prior to language (laughter is evidenced before language after all and is thus a deeper part of our evolutionary history), but this active playing with language and expectations is a mature form of humor, even if it’s seen as immature to the more advanced humor connoisseurs we all find ourselves to be. There are a number of elements here that speak in support of IT. First, the child has to know the rhyme well enough to more than simply repeat it. They have to understand what the rhyme overall means. They also have to know the meanings of other words so as to substitute the right sort of words. If my son had substituted an adjective or conjunction it would have been odd. The noun work in a way other wordtypes likely wouldn’t. Children also have to realize that they are substituting and are 48 essentially playing around with the structure of the rhyme. This play then leads to a feeling of delight in the form of humor or mirth. The child will continue playing with that rhyme substituting words here and there both with others and by themselves. They never seem to tire of it. Even though the audience grows tired easily. If you’ve spent any time around children when they find something funny, they will quickly wear it out. But not for them.

How is this word play an incongruity? As I noted above, the child is playing around with the expectation of the well-known lyric and substituting their own words. Clearly, they understand about expectation and then are using the unexpected presence of the new word to create humor. This is textbook IT. But this also shows how deeply cognitive the act is. So far so good for IT.

Let’s look at a couple of jokes with varying levels of complexity.

Moving up the ladder of humorous complexity, let’s take a look at a couple of knock-knock jokes.

Knock-knock?

Who’s there?

Hoo.

Hoo who (hoo)?

What are you, an owl?

Perhaps this isn’t a great joke, but it is a sort typically seen in children. Where’s the incongruity? If you can figure it out, please skip the rest of this paragraph, but there may be more incongruities than you initially think. The incongruity, the playing with expectations as such, is that the second line of the joke is the listener and this query made assumes the next answer will be a name not a sound. The joke teller does not do as expected and supplies a clever homonym to ‘who’ in the sound hoo. The listener, in line four, not really knowing if the term spoken earlier is ‘who’ or ‘hoo’, but likely assumes the former, then follows along with the standard knock-knock joke format. The joke teller then delightfully admonishes the implied silliness of the listener to have been making owl noises rather than responding appropriately to the joke form. (I know, the White’s frog has now totally expired) If you count them up, there are a number of incongruities in play here. But whatever incongruity you focus on, the joke works on frustrating or playing around with expectations. Whether you find the sly response of the joker in setting up the listener to make a silly owl noise, or the taking advantage of the form of the knock-knock joke to force the listener into the silliness, incongruity is at work here through and through.

I would like to end with one of my favorite jokes from esteemed humor researcher Victor Raskin.

What is the difference between a parrot?

None.

The right side is exactly the same as the left, especially the left.

If you can make sense of this joke, you’re way better than I clever reader. The whole joke is layered with absurdities. It’s more a Zen koan or riddle than a joke. The initial question is nonsensical. You don’t ask about the difference between a single thing; comparison require two things. The question alone is utterly nonsensical. The response of “none” both increases and diminishes your perplexity. The answer is in a real sense spot on. It recognizes that you can’t find a difference between a thing and itself. Comparison, as noted, requires two things. But then the coda of the joke, in attempting to explain the answer muddies the conceptual space. The listener has to figure out how one side can be “exactly” like the other, and “especially” so at that. This joke would have found itself quite at home in some of Lewis Carroll’s works. The whole joke is just a chain absurdities, one seemingly more absurd than the next. There’s nothing more to get than the fact that it’s absurd. Personally, I find it delightful and love the example and find it more and more humorous each time I experience it. But within me finding it funnier with each exposure, opens an avenue of critique for IT. But before we move on to critiques, let’s explore some other facts about humor that support the notion that humor is a cognitive act that requires some form of perceived incongruity.

Think about what’s required for you to “get” a joke. You need to know something about it. If I told you a joke where Etruscans were the main actors, you might not find it funny.

How many Etruscans does it take to change a light bulb?

None, they were dead before electricity was invented.

High comedy this isn’t; it’s barely qualifies as a joke. But if you know nothing of the Etruscans you couldn’t possibly make sense of it. In order to get whatever may be going on in this poorly formed joke, you need to know that Etruscans were an ancient civilization in Italy that was conquered by the Romans early on in the Roman Empire’s history. Hence they were an ancient group and had never experienced a light bulb.

More on Incongruity

In order for any two people to share a joke, it’s important that they share a certain conceptual or knowledge base. If you’re not an English speaker knock-knock jokes will go over your head. You need to know English to get the jokes. The light bulb joke about the surrealists works because the audience knows a little something about what a surrealist is and then uses that knowledge to make sense of the absurd response. You can perform this sort of analysis on most any of the jokes or humor you’ve experienced. It’s also one of the reasons that humor doesn’t usually cross cultures. The Friday bit about black owned-might not work as effectively in say mainland China, or Tasmania. Humor typically requires more of a shared cultural and cognitive background than other forms of entertainment.

Why does this support the IT? Because this obvious fact about humor shows how much, cognitively speaking, is required of us when we experience and enjoy humor. It’s not like a piece of music. Bach can please someone with no knowledge of classical music or instruments. A beautiful piece of sculpture or statuary can do the same. This isn’t to say that those forms of art are not complex, it’s just to highlight that humor is of a different sort of experience; one that requires knowledge, expectation, and belief to typically be experienced as such. IT needs cognition, belief, and expectation to work. Without it, IT isn’t much. Even our vernacular “Get it?” question, indicates that one has to understand the ideas involved to find humor.

Hopefully this tour has shown how and why IT is the leading candidate for explaining humor perception. It fits with current scientific approaches, it conforms and relates to our everyday experience of humor, and it’s also explanatory. This does not mean that IT is not without its problems. It surely has some and we will briefly cover those next.

What’s Ailing Incongruity?

“It’s philosophy Mike, everybody’s wrong.” Those words came to me from one of my dissertation advisors. Philosophers are a notoriously surly bunch—heck, even our patron saint, Socrates, did his best to show everyone was wrong—and that landed him a heaping glassful of hemlock juice, which isn’t too helpful if living is your goal. So, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that people have found issues with IT.

The main issue with IT is that not all incongruities we experience lead to humor. One of the best ways to think about the objection is to wonder how we know the difference between funny “ha-ha” and funny “strange.” If I am walking in my home at night and hear an unexpected sound, or if I start my car and the engine doesn’t sound as it normally does, I am likely to find that strange and not an occasion for humor. But if you recall the definition of IT, it simply states that incongruities will be found funny. Hence, one would predict that any experienced incongruity would produce humor. My off-sounding engine does not produce a laugh. Hence we’ve found a counter-example to the theory.

There have been a number of attempts to solve this issue with IT and they largely make use of play to circumvent the problem. Roughly the general idea is this. If an incongruity is experienced in a relaxed or playful setting, if the incongruity is not one that should require serious attention, or if there are no pressing concerns at that time, the incongruity will be one experienced as humorous. In general, all other things being equal, if there’s no reason to worry about the incongruity, then laugh. This explains why humor is found more in times of leisure and play than anywhere else. Another way to think about this playful or non-serious approach to incongruity is to think about the difference in a dead-pan performance versus a clown. Comedians who adopt a more dead-pan style of presentation can leave their audiences confused. Audiences aren’t sure if they’re supposed to laugh (here an indicator of humor) or not. The comedian isn’t giving enough clues to indicate that this is supposed to be funny. More traditional comedians with their exaggerated gesticulations or bombastic/exaggerated vocal inflections help the audience understand that what is going on is supposed to be funny and then allows us to experience the incongruity as funny. Here the audience is told that the incongruities on offer are objects of humor, not concern. IT is refined by adding the “play” qualification so as to help us know which incongruities are funny “ha-ha” rather than funny “strange.”

Another issue with IT comes from my continued delight at the parrot joke. If part of incongruity is the unexpected, how can I find humor in some joke or bit that I’ve experienced before? If you laugh at the same parts of movies that you’ve seen before, then that incongruity can’t be unexpected. You know it’s coming. At first the incongruity was unexpected, but now it can’t be. How do we explain the continued humor? Have a shot at working that one out.

One of the more serious objections is that incongruity has nothing to do with anything in humor. In fact, when you get a joke, so the objection goes, there is no incongruity at all. The joke makes sense, if in a different or atypical way. In order to get the joke you resolve the incongruity – it’s perfectly sensible. If the joke were truly nonsensical, the response wouldn’t be humor, it would be confusion. When people write jokes, or develop humor, they find ways to play with the concepts, but not so much as make the incongruities completely nonsensical. If there was no way to link the “incongruity” back to the set-up of the joke/humor, there would be no way to get it. There would be nothing to get: just an absurd idea hanging out. The concepts involved must be related in some way or else the audience will be confused. Confusion rarely leads to humor. This objection, if true, radically undermines IT.

The IT is still the best working theory out there that has general acceptance. There are problems with it, as there are with all theories. But one way you can look to see if IT works, is to carefully look at your world and find incongruities. Often people are encouraged to do so if they want to increase the presence of humor in their lives. This is a practical application of the theory. I encourage you to try it, if only to raise the amount of humor in your life.

Bibliography

Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. New York: Kluwer, 1984.

White, E. B. and Katherine White. A Subtreasury of American Humor. New York: Coward McCann, 1941.