Why Were They Laughing? By Kathleen N. Listman Humor was not my initial intention. Teaching the theory of concept attainment was. My classmates stared at me as I entered the room lugging a heavy wooden post with an ornate realtor’s sign dangling from it. I plopped into the nearest seat, still panting from exertion.
“Who wants to demonstrate their technique first?” The professor asked.
I raised my hand quickly. She often graded the first guinea pig to volunteer with a bit more kindness. Taking a deep breath, I drug my collection of paired objects in front of the ancient black board. “This one fits what I want,” I stated while flourishing a bright pink Nike with a bold silver swoosh. “And, this one doesn’t.” I lifted up a generic tennis shoe from Walmart. The sharper adults caught on the quickly, unlike the struggling high school students that I usually teach. After exhibiting a few more pairs I assumed my classmates, even the guy yawning in the back, understood the concept of status conferred by logos, so I started the test.
“Does this one fit?” I inquired holding a For Sale placard.
“What do you think about this one?” I hefted the high-class Ebby Halliday Realtor sign.
“It’s stolen.” The guy in the back murmured in a deep voice.
As snickers rolled through the class I imagined I stood in front of high school students again. I took another deep breath, paused, and then continued. A question arose in the back of my mind. Why exactly do we laugh? I am well aware that high school students laugh at anything. This serves a dual purpose of slowing down instruction and drawing attention to themselves at an age when the illusion exists that everyone notices them. However, this classroom contained adults, many exhausted after a full day of teaching. Thomas Hobbes described laughter as the response of one person trying to express superiority over another. For him humor was always at someone else’s expense—calling attention to other’s faults and foibles in a way that glorified oneself. In an ironic twist, Hobbes indicated that the people who laughed the most were the ones who felt the greatest sense of inferiority. He was not the first to express this superiority theory. Plato recorded a very similar explanation many centuries earlier. Two classic writers with the same idea—maybe the other teachers thought that laughing at me would make them look better. However, I wanted to believe better of them than that, so I searched for other ideas. In the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison and David Hartley recorded the theory that people responded to incongruities with laughter, such as the humor found in a pun. The gist of a pun is a word with two different meanings. One expressed a resemblance and the other an opposition, which creates a tension that results in the humor. Laughter signals the recognition of this unexpected reversal. Sigmund Freud had a different take. He focused on the repression of man’s sexual and aggressive drives required by civilized society. Laughter formed an acceptable and pleasurable release from energy bottled up by constant repression. For him, humor was a defense mechanism in which a person could express what they squelched inside in a tolerated manner. Freud’s explanation reminds me of the afternoon of my son’s field trip to the Science Museum. The vice 35
