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A Theory of Amusement

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A Philosophy of Humour

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Abstract

In this chapter, I complete Theory of Amusement (ToA) from Chapter 2. In Section 1, I complete ToA by combining the Cognitive Component of Amusement (CCoA) from Chapter 4 with the Affective Component of Amusement (ACoA) from Chapter 5 and, in Section 2, I briefly outline some techniques for increasing amusement by increasing arousal. Finally, in Section 3, I summarise the key claims of this chapter and of this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the context of cognitive dissonance theory, a ‘cognition’ is an attitude, belief or behaviour.

  2. 2.

    Mental states with a positive valence are intrinsically attractive whereas mental states with a negative valence are intrinsically aversive. For example, happiness has a positive valence and sadness has a negative valence.

  3. 3.

    That the Liar Paradox is a potential counter-example to ToA might explain the striking resemblance of Bertrand Russell’s (2009) analogous paradox to Groucho Marx’s famous line ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member’.

  4. 4.

    An alief is an automatic belief-like attitude that is activated by features of one’s environment and can be in tension with one’s beliefs (Gendler 2008). For example, when standing on a glass balcony, one may believe that one is safe but alieve that one is in danger.

  5. 5.

    This list is by no means exhaustive and there are many other techniques for increasing amusement by increasing arousal.

  6. 6.

    Generally, increasing the degree of surprise serves to increase the corresponding degree of amusement. Alan Roberts (2017) outlines how the degree of surprise in puns can be represented through assigning probabilities.

  7. 7.

    Roughly, Bicchieri (2005) characterises social norms as based on people having the ‘empirical expectations’ that enough other people conform to the norm, and the ‘normative expectations’ that enough other people expect them to conform to the norm.

  8. 8.

    The ‘factor analysis’ approach was to have a large number of participants provide amusingness ratings on a large number of humour samples, then categorise these ratings so that humour samples that have correlated ratings fall into the same category, whereas humour samples that have uncorrelated ratings fall into different categories.

  9. 9.

    Earlier, though less representative, factor analyses have also identified sexual content as a factor (Eysenck 1942; Herzog and Larwin 1988).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Alan Roberts

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  1. Alan Roberts
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Correspondence to Alan Roberts .

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Roberts, A. (2019). A Theory of Amusement. In: A Philosophy of Humour. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14382-4_6

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