One of my friends recently asked an interesting question: what is humor? Perhaps, she suggested, it is something like incongruency.
That was an intriguing suggestion because it’s one I’d considered before, and one that makes a lot of intuitive sense. A joke’s punchline is funny because it is unexpected: not entirely illogical, but just strange or surprising enough to evoke a laugh. Humor seems to occur when something almost fits, but not quite. And perhaps the definition explains why laughter and tears are, on the margins, interchangeable. Perhaps both involve a kind of incongruency.
But this simple definition has at least two problems, or rather it raised, for me, at least two questions.
First, we frequently laugh without any incongruency. Imagine laughing with your friends, siblings, or significant other: the most mundane and obvious statements can suddenly appear ridiculous, and an entire conversation can seem funny when, from the outside, it’s logical, predictable, and dull. You are laughing because you expect to laugh—not something that should happen if humor is incongruency. To some extent the same is true of a comedian, who is expected to produce incongruency. That might still be incongruency of a kind, but at the very least it ought to be more predictable, and therefore less congruent, and therefore less funny, than spontaneous joking.
Second, humor or laughter is not a logical response to incongruency. It ought to create puzzlement, confusion, or curiosity. At first glance, an inconsistency shouldn’t make you happy.
I think we can begin to answer both questions by observing that humor is really at least two different things. Humor can be used to mean “a thing that is humorous,” but also simply to denote the feeling of amusement. I think it’s probably accurate to call that feeling a kind of joy or happiness. That feeling can, in turn, produce an external manifestation, like laughter. In other words, something we call humor (maybe an incongruency) creates the kind of happy feeling we also call humor, which in turn causes laughter and the like.
Thus we return to the question of why incongruency sometimes seems to cause happiness. I think the answer lies in the relationship between curiosity and joy. Curiosity, like humor, involves a kind of happiness; it’s a generally positive feeling. We’re less curious about things we hate. Often, in fact, humor gives rise to curiosity, or accompanies it.
That’s desirable. A person who is curious about incongruency probably has an evolutionary advantage over someone who does not: he or she is more likely to solve the problem. And if humor causes curiosity, then people who approach strange oddities with humor are probably better problem-solvers than ones who don’t. It’s vaguely funny that the two stones keep making sparks when I whack them together. That’s a reason to keep trying, and to figure out why they do that. (If you don’t like the logic of evolutionary psychology, you can pretty easily transpose it some other mode of thinking about the human person. For example, a human is more excellent when curious about the right things; humor drives curiosity; therefore it is fitting that humans should be designed to respond to incongruency with humor.)
What about the first problem—humor, or laughter, that arises from the expected? That can likewise be explained by remembering that the feeling of humor is a kind of joy. Now joy can arise from all manner of things, not just incongruency. And laughter can arise from different kinds of joy—not just from humor proper. So some things other than incongruency can create a similar kind of joy, which then also gives rise to laughter.
That leaves a final point for exploration: could tragedy be a cousin of humor—or even the same thing—in the sense that both arise from incongruency?
Not exactly, I think. Tragedy is not always, or even frequently, unexpected. Sometimes tragedy consists precisely in certainty and inevitability. Sometimes we say that something is tragic because it was unexpected, like an untimely death in an accident, but it is not so much the unexpectedness that creates the tragedy as the death itself. It would be pretty tragic even if fully foreseeable.
But it is possible to think of cases in which the two coexist. Sometimes tragedy is ridiculous. You might imagine a case of star-crossed lovers—Tristan and Isolde, or Romeo and Juliet. These stories, though tragic, are also faintly ridiculous. They are ridiculous because their tragic nature hinges on such small and irritating contingencies—which might also be called incongruities. But I think they’re funny to the extent that they’re incongruent, suggesting that incongruency is indeed humorous; while a great deal more than the incongruency itself is necessary to create tragedy. Romeo and Juliet’s misunderstandings wouldn’t be tragic without the ensuing death. The same mixed nature applies to the grim humor of soldiers.
Still, to the extent that a tragedy is unexpected or incongruous, it’s probably best to view it humorously. Far better—far nobler, even—to laugh at death or suffering than merely to suffer it. It is a great blessing that tragedy can be funny—even when the tragedy itself remains.