Why Do You Laugh at Things You Shouldn't? Here Goes the New Facts


Brighton Sykes
Core Spirit member since Jan 18, 2023
3m read
·Jan 24, 2023

Laughing is a humorous attitude that genuinely expresses our happiness. However, it becomes so ambiguous when one laughs under a situation we are not supposed to.

Accidental murder would be incompatible, assert superiority, and release tension but it has never been a chucklesome in the reality ideology.

The description in meticulous detail, why the comedians’ jokes — why talk of our friend who fell accidentally on the sidewalk?— can make us laugh.

Think of someone explaining a lesson about moral violations: ridiculous but aggressive actions For instance, one feeding on their dead dog as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it.

While reading Haidt’s paper, Warren, a psychologist student thought the scripts were merely funny. Concurrently, McGraw, a behavioral psychologist was giving a talk on moral violations and an audience member propounded a question: If moral violations are supposed to evoke disgust, why do we laugh at such moments?

For sure the psychologist lacked anything like a convincing answer. He also couldn’t stop thinking about it. McGraw brought the puzzle to Warren and the pair quickly began exploring why we laugh at things that are morally wrong. It may surprise you but it is not that psychologists are meant to know everything.

McGraw and Warren consulted another theory, by linguist Thomas Veatch, to solve the puzzle. The joke that emboldened Veatch’s target of thinking: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead. Veatch claimed that humor occurs when someone perceives a situation that is a violation of a subjective moral principle while simultaneously realizing that the situation is normal.

The Benign Violation Theory

McGraw and Warren concluded, The violation? The dead monkey. The normal? Any dead creature can tumble from a tree, as gravity impacts. The major issue with Veatch’s proposition: The term “normal” doesn’t apply to some situations we find funny — absurd, peculiar humor. On several efforts to fine-tune Veatch’s theory, McGraw and Warren devised their own: They called it the Benign Violation Theory.

“We aren’t trying to create our own theory on humor, not at all ,” McGraw said. McGraw is a raucous motormouthed presenter with a boyish vitality, fortunate qualities to have considering the pellucid interviews and talks he’s given on humor.

“There’s plenty of models out there to choose from,” he said. “We were struggling finding one that was good enough to answer the question [of what makes things funny], plus all these other questions that were popping into our nuts.”
**

Settings that form that funny attitude**

These two psychologists, co-authored a paper that explained their affirmations. For us to find things funny, some specific things are considered: A situation - ranging from anything like your friend slipping over a banana peeling or someone stuttering their words, a violation of society’s etiquette - the benign situation and both happen simultaneously.

One of the studies published in their paper asked participants at the University of Colorado whether certain statements made them laugh. “Before he passed away, Keith’s father told his son to cremate his body. Then he told Keith to do whatever he wished with the remains. Keith decided to snort his dead father’s ashes.” Was the passage found both wrong and funny.

The violation in this scenario is clearly the snorting of the ashes. The benign part is that the snorting was technically okay since Keith’s dad said he could do whatever he wanted with the ashes.

Conclusive precaution

Through thorough studying of humor, Warren tells that his sense of humor has consistently turned darker and become basically disturbing. In one study, for example, he asked participants to watch drug awareness because he bounced-off them. The audience did not agree. So like anything in the humanity aspect – too much of use of humor is disaster.

Leave your comments / questions



Be the first to post a message!