The New FPS: Killing Joy

As you can probably tell by reading anything on this site, I have no sense of humor. That is hardly unusual on the internet. One of the great things about a global network connecting people virtually instantaneously is that the work of humor researchers can be accessed and understood by people who would normally have no interest in their work.

One such case (and the actual reason for the lead-in) is The Humor Code. The question of what triggers the emotion of “Funny” is something that is not settled in the way that “Sadness”, “Anger”, or “Confusion” are. What the book does is posit a new and apparently reliable theory that it stems from a benign violation of a serious rule. Of course, therein lies a key point.

What is benign? As a person begins to understand a topic more and makes more connections to potentially catastrophic outcomes, things may be viewed as less benign than previously. While a husband getting hit with a frying pan might be funny to a child who has no conception of massive internal bleeding or the double-standards of domestic aggression, it is a lot less funny once a person has read through various court cases about serious injury or death from such domestic nightmares. Has the person who has faced such serious violations of a serious rule lost their sense of humor? Yes.

As we face the tragedy of life, much of the supposedly benign violations cease to be perceived as harmless in a broader context. The power of the optimism bias is less influential once the person knows more about a subject and has acquired experience in it. I suspect that, extreme optimism makes people perceive so much as benign that the many violations of those rules can be viewed as funny. To an equally optimistic but much more experienced person, the seriousness of the violations becomes more apparent and thus does not trigger humor as much as sorrow.