HUMOR

Few people go through life without ever laughing. Laughing is as much an aspect of living as walking and eating, except that while one eats every day, and (if physical able) one also walks every day, not many people laugh every day. But they are fortunate who do because laughter does add to our enjoyment. And it also, as someone observed, a buffer against the jolts of life.

The scientific study of laughter, known as, is no laughing matter. But just being told that our laughter is in some way associated with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is enough to make some people laugh. It is sometimes said that music is a universal language. But it takes on different forms in different cultures and has evolved over the ages. The music of the Sama Veda is  not the same as that of Tagore, just as Gregorian chants are very different from as song from My Fair Lady.  But the sounds and facial distortions provoked by laughter tend to cross cultural and national boundaries. Buddhist and Bahais, Muslims and Jews, Sikhs and Christians, Parsees and Hindus, Mayan Mexicans and the Maasais all undergo very similar muscular disfiguration when they laugh aloud. But within each groups there are many different ways in which individuals laugh. Some are hearty in their laughter, others are more subdues, some merely giggle while others burst into a roar.

Of the different things that can make us laugh, humor is one. Humor is something that makes us laugh or smile, although not everything that makes one laugh is necessarily humor. When we see an unpleasant fellow slip on a banana peel and fall to the ground smack on his bottom, we may be provoked to laughter, but that is not humor. When a politician running for a high office  makes an obvious gaffe in answer to a question, we may laugh, but that is not humor.

Jokes are intended to make one laugh. They could be in the form of an anecdote or as a question and answer.  Often they also have a punch-line to which a narration leads, and at which the listener or reader bursts into laughter. The success of a joke generally depends on how it is delivered, whether in speech or in writing. Whereas every good joke is funny in that it makes us laugh, a joke is not necessarily humor. Humor has an intellectual component, something that demands intelligence and appreciation that a joke need not have.

The three major sources of humor are words, situations, and concepts. Humor arises when words are misused or very cleverly used. Many human situations can give rise to humor, if seen or described by someone who has the ability to transform it in that way. Likewise, a great many concepts and institutions developed in human society can also be made the subject of humor.

Like art and music, humor is a work of creativity. Like art and music again, more people enjoy humor than create it. Indeed humor is a creation by the human mind. It is not there in the external world: it is the human mind that produces it.