Monday, September 26, 2011

Science of Humor

By Christine Willes


Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Humor is the quality of the imagination which gives to ideas an incongruous or fantastic turn, and tends to excite laughter or mirth by ludicrous images or representations. The term Humour is originated from the humoral medicine of the Ancient Greeks which means, the balance of Fluids in the human body, known as humourous. People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to experience humour, i.e., to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and from that we can assume that they have a Sense of Humor.

Theophrastus and others developed a set of characters based on the humors. Those with too much blood were sanguine. Those with too much phlegm were phlegmatic. Those with too much yellow bile were choleric, and those with too much black bile were melancholic. The idea of human personality based on humors contributed to the character comedies of Menander and, later, Plautus. Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the break of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter.

Humor plays a significant part in the ways they relate to each other and can be seen to serve a variety of purposes in male peer group cultures beyond the obvious sharing of a joke. Like other social practices, humour is context-specific and inevitably shaped by dynamics of social class, gender and ethnicity. During Academic time also, Humour is the most apparent in studies which is highly focused on Adolescent males and young man. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy.

Variations are there for the acceptance of humor from people to people. An unexpected or sudden change in perspective may be involved in humors. Only when told first time jokes are mostly funny. Once the meaning is conveyed through a joke, people suddenly legitimate their impressions of symbols that have been mocked.

Definition of humor would be a sudden whim, but being so is not at all incorrect. Humor can put life's incompleteness into objectivity and also it can calm our winds of change. During our trials of our lives we need to get ourselves through trials and it could be achieved through humor. And for last, humor can be summarized as the ability to laugh at ourselves and to laugh with others.




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