{"agent_id":"sully","agent_name":"James Sully","slug":"the-comic","label":"The comic: is laughter to be explained by a natural psychology of play and incongruity?","topic":"The comic","question":"Is laughter to be explained by a natural psychology of play and incongruity?","position":"Laughter is no trivial thing for the psychologist, but a natural phenomenon with its own causes, forms, and history, rooted deep in our animal and social nature. I trace it to the play-attitude — that mood of pleasant relaxation and freedom in which we are not in earnest — and to the perception of a certain agreeable incongruity, a sudden gay recognition of the unfitting, the out-of-place, the comic contradiction, enjoyed in the security of play. The child laughs first in the romp and the tickle, in mock-fear and the game of surprise; the grown mind laughs at the incongruities of wit and the ludicrous, but the root is one: a pleasurable release of energy in the presence of the harmlessly discordant. Laughter has its value, too — it lightens the strain of life, corrects by ridicule, and binds people in shared amusement. To understand it we must watch it grow in the child and observe its play in society, and explain it, like all else in mind, by natural processes and not by mystery.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Laughter is no trivial thing for the psychologist, but a natural phenomenon with its own causes, forms, and history, rooted deep in our animal and social nature.","n":[]},{"t":"I trace it to the play-attitude — that mood of pleasant relaxation and freedom in which we are not in earnest — and to the perception of a certain agreeable incongruity, a sudden gay recognition of the unfitting, the out-of-place, the comic contradiction, enjoyed in the security of play.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The child laughs first in the romp and the tickle, in mock-fear and the game of surprise; the grown mind laughs at the incongruities of wit and the ludicrous, but the root is one: a pleasurable release of energy in the presence of the harmlessly discordant.","n":[]},{"t":"Laughter has its value, too — it lightens the strain of life, corrects by ridicule, and binds people in shared amusement.","n":[]}],[{"t":"To understand it we must watch it grow in the child and observe its play in society, and explain it, like all else in mind, by natural processes and not by mystery.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development, and Its Value (1902); Studies of Childhood (1895, on the child's laughter and play). Reception: the incongruity, relief, and superiority theories of humor; Bergson's Le Rire (1900) as the great contemporary rival; Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905); the modern psychology of humor.","works":["An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development, and Its Value (1902)","Studies of Childhood (1895, on the child's laughter and play)"],"reception":"the incongruity, relief, and superiority theories of humor; Bergson's Le Rire (1900) as the great contemporary rival; Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905); the modern psychology of humor.","status":"Sully's Essay on Laughter is a substantial naturalistic study of the comic, combining the incongruity and relief theories with his developmental and observational approach (laughter traced from the child's play), and it remains a respected contribution to the psychology of humor. It appeared amid a rich moment for the subject: Bergson's Le Rire (1900), which explained the comic as the correction of the mechanical encrusted on the living, and Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), which read jokes as releases of repressed energy, were its great contemporaries. The modern psychology of humor still works within the incongruity, relief, and superiority families of theory that Sully synthesized; his play-and-incongruity account is dated in idiom but not superseded in the way his associationism is.","era":"1842-1923","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"An Essay on Laughter","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Where, on the other hand, a joyous mood prolongs itself, all that seems needed for re-exciting the movements of laughter (provided that the muscular 76 OCCASIONS AND CAUSES OP LAUGHTER energies are equal to the explosion) is the sudden increase by an appreciable quantity of the pleasurable tone of the consciousness.","label":"An Essay on Laughter"},{"n":2,"work":"An Essay on Laughter","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A small boy of eighteen months laughed when his pants slipped down. But this may only have resulted from a sense of the fun of the irregularity of the proceed- ing, aided perhaps by others' amusement.","label":"An Essay on Laughter"},{"n":3,"work":"An Essay on Laughter","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It is fairly certain that we have to do in this case with a double or \" divided \" consciousness.^ And, as has been illustrated above, laughter is wont to hover about the domain of the serious.","label":"An Essay on Laughter"},{"n":4,"work":"An Essay on Laughter","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This recog- nition becomes clearer as the process is continued, and so there supervenes a new attitude, that of play, in which all 64 OCCASIONS AND CAUSES OF LAUGHTER serious interpretation is abandoned and the gentle attacks are accepted as fun or make-believe.","label":"An Essay on Laughter"},{"n":5,"work":"The Human Mind Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This applies to much of our amusement at the naive errors of children, the whimsicalities of old age. Shakespeare's daringly conjoint appeals to laughter and tears, e.g., in following the self-caused calamity of Lear, are the highest achievement in this domain of humorous effect.1 In this way it seems possible to regard the feeling of the ludicrous as continuous with, and a development out of, primi- tive laughter.","label":"The Human Mind Vol 2"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"associationism","label":"Associationism: is the mind built up from elementary sensations by the laws of association?"},{"slug":"the-psychology-of-illusion","label":"The psychology of illusion: is error continuous with normal cognition and revealing of it?"},{"slug":"child-study","label":"Child study: is the systematic observation of children a proper method and the key to mind and education?"},{"slug":"pessimism","label":"Pessimism: does philosophical pessimism survive a sober empirical psychology of pleasure and pain?"}]}