Laughing, a Psychology of Humor

Why are some things funny and some aren't? Why do we laugh at a joke at one time but not the other? What mechanisms lie behind humor and wit? If you have ever pondered these questions and want a detailed and exhaustive answer, then the book "Laughing: A Psychology of Humor" by Norman N. Holland is for you. Norman's enthralling style of writing and his attention to details while being able to build a broad picture makes the book well-worth reading. Without being excessively specialized and hard to read like many books of this kind get, he manages to grasp the topic very precisely and clearly. His language is not overly technical, nor cryptic, and his book is full of humorous remarks and quotations of famous philosophers and comics. The excerpt below gives a feel of the book: "The comic is hard to understand because it alone, among the arts, has a specific physical reflex associated with it -- laughter. We decide something funny or not by whether we feel like laughing at it, even though we may not laugh out loud. The impulse physically to laugh remains at test. And laughter we distrust." His book consists of two parts. First part deals with a wide range of existing theories about the comic. It devotes a separate chapter to every major aspect of laughter: stimuli, conditions, psychology, physiology and catharsis. This listing of topics might look a like it was taken from table of contents of a college psychology textbook. And the book might actually be used as an introduction to the course or a source of supporting information. But it is very much different from a conventional textbook. Instead of monotonously presenting the facts, book's tone is quite personal, and the reading of it feels more like listening to a person making an educated and at the same time entertaining conversation about the laughter, than like going over a psychoanalytic psychology course. The book does not present ideas in an obtrusive way, but rather the information flows along where the reader can pick out pieces of interest to him. The second part of the book reports on some real people laughing. It presents various real-life situations and explains why different persons find it funny or not funny. This section gives a chance to fully understand various theories on laughter and how they work in reality. The book drew my attention quickly after I started to read it. It presents most of the material in an understandable and entertaining way and poses questions and problems that make the reader think and engage in active reading rather than in passive absorbing of the text. Below, Norman presents a problem of measuring the effect of a joke experimentally: "To be sure, being doubled over argues more amusement than a thin smile. But does a two-second titter mean twice as much hilarity as a one-second guffaw? Does a loud haw-haw mean the person feels the joke is ten decibels funnier than someone who laughs a tiny hee-hee?" From the book it is evident that Norman Holland is a v