The Importance of Not Being Earnest
The feeling behind laughter and humor
1st Edition
Published on 1. February 2007
XIII, 167 pages
978-90-272-9297-1 (ISBN)
Description
The thesis of this book is that neither laughter nor humor can be understood apart from the feeling that underlies them. This feeling is a mental state in which people exclude some situation from their knowledge of how the world really is, thereby inhibiting seriousness where seriousness would be counterproductive. Laughter is viewed as an expression of this feeling, and humor as a set of devices designed to trigger it because it is so pleasant and distracting. Beginning with phonetic analyses of laughter, the book examines ways in which the feeling behind the laughter is elicited by both humorous and nonhumorous situations. It discusses properties of this feeling that justify its inclusion in the repertoire of human emotions. Against this background it illustrates the creation of humor in several folklore genres and across several cultures. Finally, it reconciles this understanding with various already familiar ways of explaining humor and laughter.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
02/2007
John Benjamins Publishing Co
€104.94
Shipment within 10-15 days
Person
Content
- The Importance of Not Being Earnest
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- Preface
- Symbols used in transcribing laughter
- Introduction
- Studies of laughter
- The present data
- Seriousness and nonseriousness
- Pseudo-plausibility
- Fiction and nonfiction
- Nonseriousness as a safety valve
- Summary
- part oneHow we laugh
- The essential ingredients of laughter
- Varieties of laughter
- Laughing while speaking
- Beyond the vocal tract
- Smiling
- Internal changes
- The brain
- Humor and health
- part twoWhy we laugh
- The feeling of nonseriousness
- What is an emotion?
- Properties shared among different emotions
- The evolution of the feeling of nonseriousness
- Nonseriousness without humor
- Undesirable situations
- Profanity
- Uncertain choice of language
- Interrupting
- Self-deprecation
- Regret
- Embarrassment
- Criticism
- Things that are disgusting
- Things that are depressing
- Bereavement
- Abnormal situations
- Something anomalous
- Something surprising
- Anthropomorphizing
- Awkwardness
- Coincidence
- Unexpectedness
- Other nonhumorous causes of laughter
- Unplanned humor
- Building humor on humor
- Humor or not humor?
- Ridicule
- Opportunistic triggering of humor
- Planned humor in oral traditions
- Jokes
- The time course of a joke
- Eye movements
- The varying effectiveness of jokes
- Devices for joke enhancement
- Other forms of preplanned oral humor
- Riddles
- Knock knock jokes
- Limericks
- Planned humor in writing
- Film
- Artificially propagated nonseriousness
- Literary satire
- Humor in other cultures
- Navajo humor
- Chinese humor
- Iroquois humor
- Japanese humor
- part threePulling things together
- Recapitulation
- Reconciliation with other studies
- Plato
- Hobbes
- Ludovici
- Gruner
- Bergson
- Spencer
- Freud
- Schopenhauer
- Morreall
- Koestler
- Raskin and Attardo
- The pragmatics of laughter and humor
- Coda
- References
- Index
- The Consciousness & Emotion Book Series
