What do you call caps that won't fit even with more heads?
The fates of theories
First, a pressing issue in human intellectual history: why is it funny when a man slips on a banana peel and his trousers rip to reveal pink underpants decorated with cherubs? A brooding philosopher who looked like a disgruntled poodle, thought he had the answer.
According to him, all laughter is born from a sudden recognition of incongruity. Packed tight? Here's for the simple: we laugh when there's a mismatch between what we expect conceptually and what actually happens. Tighter? For the simpler: your brain expects a dignified scene, and instead, someone farts loudly in a cathedral. Really? Okay, let's take an example. “My girlfriend told me I should get in touch with my feminine side. So I crashed the car and ignored her all day.” Here we expect something progressive, reflective, perhaps even therapeutic. But instead, we’re thrown headfirst into stereotypes and juvenile absurdity. Our philosopher would gleefully clap his hands - probably once, slowly - and proclaim that the joke is funny because a rational concept was violently misapplied in a ridiculous way.
In this grand theory of incongruity, humor becomes a triumph of intellect over absurdity. The laugh, the philosopher insists, is the reward for recognizing that something doesn’t quite compute. It’s as if every chuckle is a tiny philosophical victory.
But not so fast.
Another philosopher entered to roll his eyes at people like the former. He pointed out something rather inconvenient: not all incongruity is funny. Sometimes, instead of laughter, we respond with horror, pity, or the intense desire to crawl into the floorboards. For example, picture a clown wandering cluelessly into a funeral and honking his nose. That’s certainly incongruous. But rather than laughing, most people would feel discomfort, secondhand embarrassment, or a strong urge to fire a tranquilizer dart at the clown.
He claimed that emotions like fear, disgust, pity, or moral outrage can override our impulse to laugh. In other words, context matters. Just because something is incongruous doesn’t mean it’s humorous. Someone slips on a banana peel in the middle of a war zone Do you laugh or call for a medic?
And then there’s the problem of laughter that has nothing to do with incongruity whatsoever. Consider tickling. No one, in the throes of ticklish hysteria, pauses to reflect on the absurd application of abstract categories. You’re just laughing because someone jammed their fingers into your ribs, and your body short-circuited. Our brooding philosopher's theory has absolutely nothing to say about this. Ticklish laughter is the sort of thing his hair would have disapproved of on principle.
Our latter philosopher made a further distinction between what he called sentimental laughter and animal laughter. Sentimental laughter involves recognizing folly, irony, or the charming quirks of human behavior. Animal laughter is what happens when someone gets hit in the groin with a football. It’s immediate, unreflective, and entirely devoid of metaphysics.
Our brooding philosopher, ever the purist, seemed to think all laughter was a result of high-minded conceptual misalignment. But explain that to someone doubled over from watching a dog sneeze and fall off a couch. That’s not conceptual contradiction. That’s just delightful chaos.
There’s also the phenomenon of intellectual laughter that doesn’t involve any incongruity. Imagine a group of stressed-out students in a classroom. The professor makes a dry, corny joke. The students laugh - not because the joke defied any expectation or subverted a concept - but because it’s a release of tension, a bonding moment, a shared breath of relief. The laughter isn’t from incongruity. It’s from the warmth of human connection or sheer desperation. And yet, it still counts.
Our brooding philosopher would be utterly baffled by this. His theory of humor is like someone trying to explain why people dance by analyzing the biomechanics of knees. Technically accurate, completely useless.
To sum up: he gave us a tidy little theory that works beautifully in some situations, particularly when someone makes a clever pun or wears a tutu in court. But he didn’t account for the full messiness of human laughter. He didn’t understand tickling. He didn’t understand grief. He didn’t understand why people laugh when someone says something awkward and then trips on the carpet. He gave us a system where humor was always cerebral and clean, when in fact, humor is often sweaty, stupid, and full of bodily noises.
So yes, he has made a noble attempt to understand humor. But like the ones before him, he mistook a corner for the whole palace. And the rest of us, standing in our pink heart boxers after slipping on life’s banana peels, are left to laugh for reasons that no theory can fully explain.