What’s So Funny?
moments where we find something gut-busting and other moments where we do not
have any humorous reaction to that same thing.
All these situations seem to reinforce the role mental states play in whether
something is humorous. Adjusting BV theory to include receptivity, I claim,
completes the definition for humor, establishing necessary and sufficient conditions.
Thus, the standardized form of this revised theory is such:
(P1) Some norm is being violated.
(P2) This violation is benign to us.
(P3) We are in a mental state that allows us to both recognize and be receptive to a non-threatening violation.
(P4) This recognition and reception results in a feeling of amusement.
(C) Humor is the result of a perceived benign violation of norms given we are in such
a mental state to be receptive to the perception.
The most conspicuous argument I can conceive to counter my own is that
there are no necessary and sufficient condition s for humor at all. Morris Weitz’s
essay , “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” argues that art cannot be defined in this
way. Rather, art exists as an open concept; that is, it has “no necessary and
sufficient properties, only ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
crisscrossing,’ such that…they form a family with family resemblances and no
common trait.” 17 One could apply Weitz’s argument to humor to say that humor,
too, does not maintain any necessary nor sufficient conditions. Instead, it is
composed of a network of things that are funny in some capacity. As the network
grows, these capacities become increasingly dissimilar, as Weitz’s notion of things
N , N + 1, and N + n all belonging to the same concept exemplifies. 18 This seems
plausible based on the existence of vast types of humor which sometimes completely
oppose one another in kind.
17 Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” in Philosophy for the 21 st Century: A Comprehensive Reader, ed. Stephen M. Cahn (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 780. 18 Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” 780.
Volume VI (2023)
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