Comedy and laughter are remarkably tricky to explain. As evidence of this, I’ll point to the fact that there are more than 13 different theories of humor (each described at the bottom of this post). If you examine them, I think you’ll agree that while each captures relevant aspects of humor, none satisfactorily describes humor in all its forms.
Part of what makes comedy so hard to describe is that it has such variety. While the boundaries between different types of humor are fuzzy, I think you can roughly divide them into six categories:
(I) CRITICAL, (II) INTELLIGENT, (III) UNEXPECTED, (IV) UNSEEMLY, (V) PHYSICAL, and (VI) CHILDLIKE
These can further be divided into subcategories, which I’ll call: (1) Self-deprecation, (2) Satire, (3) Group, (4) Sarcasm, (5) Repartee, (6) Nerd, (7) Wordplay, (8) Surreal, (9) Surprise, (10) Taboo, (11) Gross-out, (12) Humiliation, (13) Dark, (14) Revenge, (15) Slapstick, (16) Pun, and (17) Cute.
Below I’ve listed a bunch of example jokes from each of these 17 subcategories.
While no current theory of humor seems to be complete, and I certainly don’t have a unified theory to contribute, here’s a list I put together of basic principles that I think characterize many of the important aspects of humor:
(A) Communication: It’s an evolved form of social communication that exists in humans, as well as a few other primates (like chimps and bonobos), and possibly in some other animals too (though it’s harder to tell)
(B) Taboos: It can make it easier to talk about sensitive, forbidden, gross, and taboo subjects, and is often used specifically for that purpose
(C) Criticism: It often involves being critical of some person, group, or thing, and is also often used as a way to criticize powerful, threatening, or protected groups
(D) Protection: It socially safeguards us to a significant degree when we’re making criticisms, and so those making humorous critiques often can get away with saying more extreme criticism (and causing much less offense) than those making similar critiques non-humorously (hence why “I was only joking” is often used as a defense)
(E) Tension: It is sometimes used to reduce nervous tension between people when there is awkwardness (e.g., by making a joke about what an awkward situation it is, or by laughing in a friendly way when someone says something weird, as though you think they were making a joke, such as with nervous laughter)
(F) Status: It is often used as a means to raise or lower social status (e.g., to come across as likable, to signal intelligence/verbal ability/cleverness, to poke fun at or lower the status of specific people or groups)
(G) Play: It is often used to signal “play,” that is, what could be perceived as aggressiveness or danger is not actually a threat (e.g., a parent and child both laughing as the parent pretends to be a “monster” and chases their child around)
(H) Pleasure: It’s enjoyable for almost everyone, though people strongly disagree about which types of humor are pleasurable (e.g., some people love bathroom humor, some loathe it, some like edgy humor, some prefer it to be tame)
(I) Surprise: It usually involves something unexpected or unpredictable, and if a joke is too predictable, we may not find it funny at all
(J) Incongruity: It often involves contrasting two incongruous things with each other (e.g., two distinct meanings, or a contrast between tame and taboo or good and bad), and laughter is often the result of suddenly noticing the incongruity and resolving it towards the less immediately obvious or edgier meaning
(K) Sex: It is often used during flirtation, and many people find it sexually attractive when someone is funny, plus sex is often the subject of humor
(L) Problem: It often is about some kind of problem, danger, or bad thing
(M) Challenge: It is often a form of challenge or threat, but it’s a benign threat that the audience is supposed to know is not intended to be taken as actually threatening
(N) Subtlety: how funny something is depends on precise timing, wording, and tone of voice, as well as the setting and mood of the audience
(O) Exaggeration: It often involves exaggerating something real
With all these in mind, my best attempt to describe humor is to say that it’s:
“A pleasurable form of evolutionarily evolved social communication indicative of play (often affecting or relating to the social status and desirability of individuals and groups), that involves either surprise or the creation and then resolution of incongruity, and that is typically threatening, critical, danger related, challenging, subversive, disgusting, or taboo, but expressed in a manner that is intended to feel safe to both the originator and listener.”
—
Here’s my typology of types of humor with examples of each type:
— — (I) CRITICAL HUMOR — —
(1) Self-deprecation – critiquing oneself
“They all laughed when I said I’d become a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.” -Bob Monkhouse.
“My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.” -Jimmy Carter.
What’s worse than someone who isn’t funny telling you a bad joke?
Someone who isn’t funny is telling you a bad joke in a 2000-word Facebook post about being funny.
—
(2) Satire – critiquing society, institutions, trends
“Twenty years ago, we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Cash, no Hope, and no Jobs. Please don’t let Kevin Bacon die.” – Bill Murray.
Instagram: My life is a party
Snapchat: My life is a quirky TV show
Facebook: My life turned out great!
Twitter: We’re all going to die.
-Mikel Jollett
“Horror movies with jump scares are like if a comedian went into the audience and tickled everyone. ‘Technically, you laughed! I’m funny!” -Jeremy Kaplowitz.
“How to be a grown-up at work: replace ‘f*ck you’ with ‘ok, great’”
What do you call chimpanzees when they are capable of destroying the world? Humans.
—
(3) Group – nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, identity, etc.
“What is the scariest thing about a white person in prison? You know he did it.”
“According to hetero dating law, the girl shouldn’t pay for her meal, which, logically, means that if two girls go on a date together, nobody pays, and they get everything for free, but the catch is that they have to stand the whole time because no one can pull out a chair” -Leofitzisms.
“What do a clitoris, an anniversary, and a toilet have in common? Men usually miss them.”
How many times cooler are programmers than mathematicians? Trick question, you can’t divide by zero.
—
(4) Sarcasm – deadpan, contemptuous, mocking, ironic, faux serious
“My wife just stopped and said to me, ‘You weren’t even listening, were you?’ I thought, ‘That’s a pretty weird way to start a conversation.’”
“Apparently, I snore so loudly that it scares everyone in the car I’m driving.”
Teacher: “Can anyone tell me what ended in 1896?” Student: “1895.’”
When I tell a joke, I want people to take it seriously. That’s why I make sure nobody laughs.
— — (II) INTELLIGENT HUMOR — —
(5) Repartee – intellectual one-upmanship, comebacks
Nancy: “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee.” Churchill: “Nancy, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
An unknown singer: “You know, my dear, I insured my voice for fifty thousand dollars.” Hopkins: “That’s wonderful. And what did you do with the money?”
Oscar Wilde: “I wish I’d said that.” Whistler: “You will, Oscar, you will.”
—
(6) Nerd – knowledge, intelligence signaling, inside joke
“There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
“A cop pulls Heisenberg over and asks him, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ Heisenberg replies, ‘No, but I know where I am.’”
Who has sex infinitely many times in an hour? Two young fractals in love.
—
(7) Wordplay – clever double meanings, cleverness, quick thinking,
“Why is it a penny for your thoughts, but you have to put your two cents in? Somebody’s making a penny.” -Steven Wright.
“So two snare drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff… Ba Dum Tssss!”
“The King: tell a joke about me, Fool. The Fool: I’m sorry, sire, but the King is not a subject.”
“I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don’t know what he laced them with, but I can’t stop tripping.”
“I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.” – Steven Wright.
‘They’ say birds of a feather flock together, yet opposites attract. ‘They’ say absence makes the heart grow fonder, yet out of sight, out of mind. Have you ever considered whether…maybe…just maybe… ’they’ are morons?
It seems like a mighty strange coincidence that God created the first dog. Makes you wonder if Mom created herself.
— — (III) UNEXPECTED HUMOR — —
(8) Surreal – absurd, ridiculous, nonsensical, strange, wacky
“I called the wrong number today. I said ‘Hello, is Joey there?’ A woman answered, and she said, ‘Yes, he is.’ And I said, ‘Can I speak to him, please?’ She said, ‘No, he can’t talk right now, he’s only two months old.’ I said ‘Alright, I’ll wait.” -Steven Wright.
“How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A fish.”
“Anna: I wanna be a reverse tooth fairy where I rob people and then scatter human teeth on their bed.” “Bob: You mean a dentist?” “Carly: I don’t know what your dentist is doing to you, but I think you need to go to the police.”
When people call you names, you don’t take it to spleen. So why, when they call you names, do you take it to heart?
—
(9) Surprise – unusual, twist, expectations violated
“There is nothing like the sound of a child’s laughter to remind you that your apartment is haunted.” -Howard Mittelmark.
“Air horn sound. Second air horn sound. Me: ‘This isn’t deodorant.” -Stephen Molloy.
“‘Hey nerd, who brings a friggin book to a bar?’ My eyes narrow as I close my worn copy of Advanced Techniques for Winning Barroom Brawls.” -Ygrene.
“If you’re being chased by a police dog, try not to go through a tunnel, and then over a little see-saw, then jump through a hoop of fire. They’re trained for that.” – Milton Jones.
Different religions don’t agree about much, but they do agree that you should “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
Isn’t it kind of weird that wise people want us to have so many body parts? They keep telling us that many hands make light work, two heads are better than one, and we should be all ears.
— — (IV) UNSEEMLY HUMOR — —
(10) Taboo – sexuality, sacrilege, anti-tradition, norm violation
“Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life” -Jimmy Carr.
“What is worse than ants in your pants? Uncles”
“How many Freudian psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two. One to screw in the lightbulb and one to hold the penis. Ladder! Hold the ladder.”
—
(11) Gross-out – bodily functions, disgusting, bathroom humor
“What’s the difference between a chickpea and a garbanzo bean? Nobody has ever paid to have a garbanzo bean on their face.”
“For Christmas last year, I got given Sudoku toilet paper. It’s useless. You can only fill it in with number ones and number twos.” -Bec Hill.
—
(12) Humiliation – status lowering, embarrassment
“At a state dinner, [George HW] Bush unexpectedly fainted, fell face-first into [Prime Minister] Miyazawa’s crotch, and then vommed all over the poor guy’s lap…Not only did Bush’s embarrassing attempt at bile-based diplomacy become comedic fodder in the US, but it also made headlines across Japan, too. For a while in the 1990s, young Japanese even had a whole new slang word for chundering: Bushusuru (ブッシュする), meaning ‘to do a bush’.”
—
(13) Dark – death, fear, nihilism, meaninglessness, futility, failure
“Give a man a match, and he’ll be warm for a few hours. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.” -Terry Pratchett.
“What’s Blonde and dead in a closet? The Hide and Seek Champion from 1995.”
“It’s sad that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as wild dogs.” -Jack Handey.
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” -Woody Allen.
“What do you get when you cross the Atlantic with the Titanic? About halfway.”
Feeling bad about the precarious state of civilization today? Don’t worry, it will all be over soon.
—
(14) Revenge – payback, karma
“A truck driver stopped at a truck stop and ordered a cheeseburger. As he was ready to eat, a motorcycle gang pulled up. One of the gang members insulted him and ate his cheeseburger. The truck driver walked out of the truck stop. A gang member said to the waitress, “He’s not much of a man, is he?” She said, “He’s not much of a driver either. He just backed his 18-wheeler over 6 motorcycles.”
“Billboard in a city:
Hi Steven, do I have your attention now?
I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfaithful, poorly endowed slimeball.
Everything’s caught on tape.
Your (soon-to-be-ex) Wife, Emily
p.s. I paid for this billboard from OUR joint bank account.”
— — (V) PHYSICAL HUMOR — —
(15) Slapstick -clumsiness, injury, mime, clowning, failure, unexpected calamity, stunts, funny faces
“There was the time in Austria when [President Gerald] Ford stepped off Air Force One, slipped on the wet stairs, and went tumbling headlong into the assembled dignitaries below, presumably while the waiting band played comedy sound effects in the background.”
“The most famous scene from Duck Soup is the mirror gag between Harpo and Groucho, but the best bit of slapstick is the fight between Marco, Chico, and the lemonade vendor that sees an innocent man bullied within an inch of his life. Hats are swapped, lemonade is squirted, hats are swapped again, legs are kicked, and hats are set on fire. In other words, it’s not a good day to be either a hat or a lemonade vendor in this particular corner of Freedonia.”
“Modern Times portrays Chaplin in his Tramp persona as a factory worker employed on an assembly line. There, he is subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a malfunctioning “feeding machine” and an accelerating assembly line where he screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery. He finally suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, getting stuck within a machine and throwing the factory into chaos. He is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery, the now-unemployed factory worker is mistakenly arrested as an instigator in a Communist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt.”
— — (VI) CHILDLIKE HUMOR — —
(16) Pun – multiple words with one sound
“Were you there when the TV repairman got married? The reception was excellent.”
“What do you call a veterinarian with laryngitis? A hoarse doctor.”
“eBay is so useless. I tried to look up lighters, and all they had were 13,749 matches.” -therap321
—
(17) Cute – misunderstanding, silly, helpless, confused, adorable
“Q: Can a kangaroo jump higher than the Empire State Building? A: Of course. The Empire State Building can’t jump.”
“’Your waffle iron isn’t working, dear!’ ‘Please just stay away from my laptop, grandma!!!’”
“I love you from my head tomatoes”
“What did the grape say when it was crushed? Nothing. It just let out a little wine.”
— — — — — — — — — —
THEORIES OF HUMOR
There are many theories of humor. For instance:
(1) Relief Theory – humor is a release of “psychological tension” or “nervous energy” that has been “wrongly mobilized by incorrect or false expectations” as a way to “overcome sociocultural inhibitions and reveal suppressed desires.”
What I think it gets right:
-Humor can make it easier to talk about sensitive subjects and is often used for that purpose
-Humor can reduce nervous tension between people when there is awkwardness
(2) Social Status Theory – a social game to raise your own social status or the social status of your group, by signaling your own positive traits (e.g., intelligence or knowledge) or by lowering the status of other people or groups (e.g., by poking fun at them).
What I think it gets right:
-Humor is often used to put down other people or groups
-Humor is attractive socially and makes people seem likable and intelligent
(3) Play theory – a form of communication that we use to indicate or to acknowledge that “we’re just playing right now” in cases that otherwise might be interpreted as serious, aggressive, or dangerous. For instance, we can laugh when we act aggressively to show that it is just play aggression, and we can laugh when others act aggressively to show that we interpret their aggression as just play. Or if we trip and fall, we can laugh to show we are not actually hurt.
What I think it gets right:
-Humor is sometimes used to communicate that a potentially aggressive-seeming behavior is just play, and not intended aggressively, like someone laughing after they throw a snowball at a friend
-Humor is sometimes used to communicate that something has not been interpreted aggressively, for instance, when someone laughs good-naturedly after someone else says something that might be taken as an insult
-Humor is sometimes used to communicate that we don’t interpret something as a threat, for instance, if someone laughs at someone else who is attempting to punch them (indicating that the attack is feeble and not worth taking seriously)
(4) Superiority Theory – a joyful way to relish in our superiority over others as we point out their shortcomings.
What I think it gets right:
-People do find it enjoyable to make or hear humorous remarks about people and groups they dislike
-People do use humor as a way to critique others
(5) Incongruity-resolution Theory – what we experience when we find incongruity between a concept and the “real objects thought to be in some relation to the concept,” or “the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”
What I think it gets right:
-Humor often involves contrasting two incongruous things with each other
(6) Collision Theory – what results when a collision is engineered to occur between two different frames of reference
What I think it gets right:
-Humor often involves ways of looking at things that are different than the usual frame you’d apply by default
(7) Semantic Theory – a verbal or written joke is what occurs when there are two different opposing understandings of what was said that are bound together, and the audience then experiences a sudden realization, causing them to flip from one understanding to the other (e.g., via a punchline or by reinterpreting a word as a different one with a similar sound). The oppositional meanings could be normal vs. abnormal, good vs. bad, tame vs. obscene, etc.
What I think it gets right:
-Jokes often involve saying things with multiple (incongruous) interpretations, and people do often seem to laugh when the second meaning suddenly occurs to them
(8) Ontic-epistemic Theory – what happens when we’re forced to suddenly confront the fact that social reality (e.g., social identity or social standing), which we usually take to be as real as physical reality, does not actually match physical reality, or when different elements of social reality contradict each other.
What I think it gets right:
-Humor often challenges assumptions made by social norms or rules, or challenges existing power dynamics and social status
(9) Sexual Selection Theory – a way for humans to signal other survival-related traits (e.g., intelligence or detection of reasoning mistakes), that originally was sexually desirable for its survival value, but which eventually ended up in a runaway sexual selection spiral (like the tail of the peacock), where it is evolutionarily desirable merely because others find it desirable
What I think it gets right:
-Some people do seem to find it sexually attractive when people are humorous or make them laugh
-People, I think, seem to find humorous people intelligent
(10) Benign Violation Theory – humor occurs when simultaneously (1) something threatens one’s sense of how things “ought to be,” (2) the threat seems benign, and (3) both interpretations are perceived simultaneously.
What I think it gets right:
-Humor often does involve a threat of some form, whether it’s a criticism, injury, or insult
-Humor is specifically supposed not to be “taken seriously,” and hence, in that sense, when it is a threat, it is a benign one
-Humor does often involve seeing multiple interpretations of something simultaneously that are incongruous
-It can help explain why we laugh when we’re tickled
(11) Tragedy Theory – comedy = tragedy + time
What I think it gets right:
-Tragedies and problems do seem to become more of a target of humor as more time passes
(12) Bergson’s theory – situations are comic because they “give the impression that life is subject to rigidity, automatism, and mechanism…somebody is laughable when he or she gives the impression of being a thing or a machine.”
What I think it gets right:
-People do sometimes find it funny when people act stupidly or unthinkingly
(13) Defense mechanism theory – a way to talk about and explore ideas that are too unpleasant, terrible, or socially unacceptable to normally discuss.
What I think it gets right:
-Humor often grapples with unpleasant or socially unacceptable topics
This piece was first written on July 6, 2019, and first appeared on my website on February 12, 2026.
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