What’s So Funny?
successful harmonization of elements. ” 22 By replacing “work of art” or “art” with the
word “humor” in this quote, one can see how “successful” humor would translate to
our understood notion of “good humor” in comparison, of course, to “bad humor.”
Intuitively, some might say the humor the sociopath experiences cannot be true
humor, but this is because they are supplanting descriptive humor with evaluative
humor; what they mean is that it cannot be good humor. The sociopath’s experience
of humor genuinely fulfills the required conditions, but it is recognized as
illegitimate because the conditions are not met for most other people. Rather than
being a false perception of humor, the sociopath’s perception is just bad humor, as it
does not meet the preferred criteria of matching the perception — the morally correct
one — that most people share.
In this paper, I compared two theories of humor: Hobbes’ Superiority Theory
and McGraw and Warren’s Benign Violation Theory. While I found BV Theory to be
much more descriptive of humor than the Superiority Theory, I found neither to
state the necessary and sufficient conditions for humor. I sought to determine what
condition(s) BV Theory was missing, and in doing so, added the relevance of mental
state to the conversation. I named this additional condition receptivity, which I
defined to be the ability or will of a person to determine or accept a situation to be a
benign violation. In considering counterarguments, I suggested how humor is not an
open concept and thus maintains necessary and sufficient conditions, defended my
condition of receptivity to be an objective condition, and distinguished descriptive
from evaluative humor. I hold that my revised version of Benign Violation Theory
maintains the necessary and sufficient conditions for humor, yet I humbly open it to
debate and discourse.
22 Weitz, 782.
Volume VI (2023)
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