I'm not sure how much it amuses anyone else, but I usually find humor mileage in slightly archaic/formal word choice/sentence structure being used to talk about something normal or mildly absurd. (e.g. using words like "whereupon" and "thereunto" in a sentence about candy).
Treating a mundane subject with unwarranted pomp and circumstance is pretty much a comedy staple.
Péter Esterházy's short novel "Tizenhét hattyúk" (Seventeen Swans) is sort of this taken to the extreme. It is about the bleak life and sexual adventures of a frequently abused orphaned young woman who is working as a janitor, and it is written entirely in 17th century ecclesiastical Hungarian, often resulting in hysterical laughs. It is doubtful, however, whether the anglophone public will gain access to it in the reasonable future.
Decompartmentalisation is funny (because it's slightly painful to the listener to have their compartments broken, and yet it's clever and informative). Decompartmentalising social conventions is a staple of standup.
Steve Martin's autobiography, Born Standing Up tells about how he learned to become funny. On the way, he spent some time as a serious philosophy student in college. Lewis Carroll's symbolic logic was a revelation to him in that it was a hilarious exercise in rigorous logic.
He starts to describe his early research into developing a new kind of comedy:
The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter. What if I could get real laughter, like the kind you have at home or with your friends, where your sides are aching.
That's a much stronger kind of laugh .... It worked. It helped me create something new.
He gives examples of things that never had been done before a live audience before, (some later would up being adapted into The Jerk). Later, he has a startling moment when it seems a brand-new show, Saturday Night Live has developed similar ideas and is already rocketing to fame on national television.
P.S. This review of the book describes Steve Martin as the "rationalist of the absurd," although they seem to mean mostly that he has always had a very serious and methodical approach to being wild and crazy.
Quasi-quote from Jim Davis, author of Garfield: "If I can't think of anything funny, I have one of the characters hit another."
Well, yeah, but that's Garfield.
Which reminds me of an observation I've made: Consider that almost anything you can do to Garfield makes it funnier. (See: the Garfield Randomizer, Garkov, Garfield Minus Garfield, Garfield As Garfield, Lasagna Cat, Realfield, Square Root Of Minus Garfield, etc.) This does not work on things that are merely unfunny. In the same way that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed unfunniness is not humour. This means that Garfield is not merely unfunny, but antifunny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherently_funny_word lacks a Phyllis Diller reference, though it may be covered by the Mencken quote.
I am a fan of Scott Adams's (writer of Dilbert) blog posts on humor. Here's his post on his humor formula. Excerpt:
The core of humor is what I call the 2-of-6 rule. In order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements:
Cute (as in kids and animals)
Naughty
Bizarre
Clever
Recognizable (You’ve been there)
Cruel
I invented this rule, but you can check for yourself that whenever something is funny it follows the rule. And when something isn’t, it doesn’t.
And here's his post on humor writing, with reference to this post. (These links are all to the Internet Wayback Machine because he's moved his blog and the original posts are now offline. You might find the HTML a little off, so if you don't see the content of the blog post, just scroll down a bit.)
I'm not sure the author of Garfield is the man you want to be taking comedy lessons from. I have never met a person where the subject of Garfield has come up and they have thought it funny.
I'm rather fond of Benign Violation Theory, as interpreted by Robin Hanson. Basically, funny things are those that benefit people you're sympathetic with (in particular, raising their social status) by violating existing social norms.
This suggests that humor is linked to a psychological adaptation for updating social norms for one's coalition's benefit. Laughing allows people to coordinate change of the norms (you don't take seriously a norm that is a joke). Humor as art works as superstimulus for this adaptation.
I'm rather fond of Benign Violation Theory, as interpreted by Robin Hanson. Basically, funny things are those that benefit people you're sympathetic with (in particular, raising their social status) by violating existing social norms.
I find this doubtful. I've attended a speech by Ann Coulter, and found some of her lines legitimately funny despite the fact that they were attacks on the status of groups I'm sympathetic to. This doesn't just fail to fit the model, it seems flat out contradictory of it.
The norms that are thus violated are also norms of your in-group, otherwise they wouldn't be considered norms.
I don't contest that, but they're being violated to lower the status of groups I'm sympathetic to, rather than raising it. It's not a benign violation.
(I read the Hanson piece when published, I didn't just now re-read it)
I don't find that convincing as it is insufficiently general: there are so many examples of humor that are difficult to fit into the model.
How does this fit? "If you see a fork in the road, take it."
Does the humor in that piggyback on the social adaption, and how do you know which had precedence?
I definately think there are rules that might define the bounds of socially precarious humor, but that's a specialization.
A theory I've heard that handles this more general class of observations is that laughter specifically marks simply "relief from potentially scary tension" (which covers a very wide class of surprises).
A snap in the forest plus a fluttering of birds... people freeze and look for tigers feeling scared... someone sees that it is a child playing a trick... laughs... everyone relaxes.
Humour is pain. Laughter is a reaction to pain. All jokes are pain, preferably someone else's. It's dead babies all the way down. I have thought long and hard for counterexamples.
These are badges/buttons:
"Circular reasoning works because circular reasoning fails because...." [arranged in an infinity sign]
I will not yell at Edmund Pevensie, "Who died and made you king?"
It bugs me when I can't remember the entomology of a word
Come to the Dark Side, we have cookies
Coffee-based lifeform
B-flat, D-flat, and F walked into a bar. The bartender said, "We don't serve minors." So D-flat left, and B-flat and F had an open fifth between them.
Perky zombie! It's a lovely day for BRAINS!
Contains almost 100% recycled organic biomass
Contains 100% recycled stellar debris
I make milk. What's your superpower?
I was into cryonics before it was cool
I'm not pompous, I'm pedantic. There's a difference. Let me explain it to you....
Red (written in blue) is the new blue (written in red).
Humor is partly about pain and partly about silliness. I'm not saying the list above is completely pain-free, but the pain element is pretty attenuated on the whole and I would say absent in some of them.
Also, do you have a theory about why only some pain is funny?
Does anyone know whether puns are considered painful in other cultures?
specially if it includes an insult about an acceptable target.
Sounds like you're referencing Hanson, who references benign violation theory. Who is the target of insult in the Garfield quote? The characters, the author, or his readership? Which would be acceptable? I suppose the case to make is that he's insulting his readership and the quote is intended for non-readers.
The Computer Theory of Humor looks interesting. The details in that entry are a bit unclear, but it appears to characterize our humorous response as being a bit of a kludgey and excessive hack to remove our focus from the incorrect interpretations we were forming prior to the punchline about pink elephants.
I think I came up with "acceptable target" on my own--at least it felt like I was doing original work while contemplating the highest voted quotes.
My general theory of humor is that it requires benign surprise-- there are many sorts of humor that don't involve insults.
Both benignity and surprise are highly contextual.
Davis was talking about actual hitting in his comic-- it's about a cat with a considerable will to power.
Also, Hanson's theory needs to be elaborated to include self-deprecating humor, though maybe counter-signaling is enough to do the job.
If you read the Hanson piece prior to this, I'd be surprised if it didn't factor into your ability to spot that particular feature about acceptable targets. I suspect most of my original ideas are that way. Not that I'm complaining you didn't reference him. Just idle chat.
I agree about benign surprise.
There's also the old essay on humor by Bergson about how humor derives from depicting people as behaving like simple automatons. The Garfield characters would be shifting into that mode of mechanical operation. This would be like a character that is drinking coffee and reading his paper: the coffee is replaced with hot sauce, and the character just keeps on drinking.
I'm gonna followup on that computer theory later. I find it interesting to speculate that we have a humorous response whenever we have some inference about something that is about to reach conscious level of perception, and then it suddenly gets reversed in an important way and the brain has to speed it up so that it catches up and overtakes the other one. In that process, there are side-effects.
Reading the recent list of rationality quotes arranged by karma underlines the popularity of funniness, and being funny should probably be included in the pursuit of awesomeness.
My best guesses about characteristics of humor: If there's a word which makes the line funny, put it at the end. Phyllis Diller recommends that the word should end with a hard consonant (t or k).
If you can make a surprising statement extremely concise, there's a reasonable chance it will be funny especially if it includes an insult about an acceptable target.
Quasi-quote from Jim Davis, author of Garfield: "If I can't think of anything funny, I have one of the characters hit another." Any other principles of humor and/or methods for cultivating the ability to be funny?
ETA: The most recent thing that struck me as very funny-- how does it fit into the theories?