The Hurley Model of Humor

"that the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly …that the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly" - Thomas Hobbes Human Nature

Superiority theories of humor vary somewhat, but all revolve around the premise that feelings of superiority over others give rise to humor. This is perhaps most easily recognizable in the concept of schadenfreude. The theory can be traced back to Aristotle and Plato and their discussions of comedy, but was most popularized by Thomas Hobbes in his work Human Nature. Closely linked to superiority theory is its reverse Inferiority Theory, presented by Robert Solomon, which can account for things like self-deprecating humor. However, it is obvious that not all forms of humor involve a superiority factor, e.g. non-sequitor and absurdist humor (I find Monty Python quite hilarious).

"In everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing" - Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgment

Made famous by Kant and later refined by Arthur Schopenhauer, Incongruity Theory too can be traced back to antiquity. In Rhetoric, Aristotle mentions that the best way to amuse an audience is to deliver something "that gives a twist". In essence, Incongruity Theory is the idea that humor is derived misplaced expectations or a reaction to perceived incongruity. Incongruity theory has been said to be too broad to be useful and can conflate the object of humor with the response.

In order to fully investigate humor, we must understand the evolutionary reasoning behind it. Other processes of cognition are understood on an evolutionary level, why shouldn't humor be?

• We find things painful because they would be damaging to our existence and we need to avoid them
• We find people sexy as a result of libido and the drive for mating
• Cuteness makes sense to encourage nurturing of offspring.
• Sweetness (taste) encourages us to seek out high energy foods (at least in the past, modern diets have co-opted this one somewhat)
• So what is the basis behind finding things funny?

A brains job is to produce future from massive amounts of stimulus, it does this in an unorganized, somewhat anarchic, parallel manner; many ideas are competing all at once and approximations, simplifications and assumptions are continuously occurring. Over time, mistaken assumptions can creep in, too many of these could threaten the "data integrity" of the minds perception. Therefore, the mind requires some kind of garbage collection or debugging mechanism, this is a costly process, so it makes sense that it would have been incentives in some manner, just as the previous examples have all evolved incentives. The Hurley model suggests that the perception of humor is evolution's way of bribing the brain to complete this costly cleanup task.

Niko Tinbergen demonstrated the ability to construct super-normal stimuli, stimuli which elicit stronger reactions than would occur naturally with his studies of Herring Gulls. Herring Gull chicks demonstrate food begging behavior by pecking at a red spot on the beaks of their parents, which encourages the parents to regurgitate food for them. Tinbergen showed that a cleverly colored knitting needle could elicit a stronger pecking response in the chicks than the response to an accurate model of a parent gull's head. The same idea explains many humans' love of junk food. Junk food exists as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt sugar and fats. In the same manner, humor is the result of both unwitting cultural evolution and "intelligent design" of jokes by comedians to produce super normal stimuli of the humor response which evolved as a incentive for the mental "debugging" task.

Humor itself is not an intrinsic property, instead it is a Lockean second order quality like the color red. It depends on the particular disposition of the observer, their particular mental state and set of assumptions. This partly explains the specificity of humor to particular cultures, and the fact that jokes cannot have their key facts explicitly laid out beforehand. If you are told beforehand that the bar in the following example refers to a metal bar in the way of someones path the following joke no longer works: "A man walks into a bar (beat) ouch." It only works on the cultural assumption that you are setting up an entirely different type of joke.

Daniel Dennett has presented the model in the following formal manner:

(proto-) (first person) humor occurs when

1. an active element in a mental space that has
2. covertly entered that space (for one reason or another), and is
3. taken to be true (i.e. epistemically commited) within that space,
4. is diagnosed to be false in that space - simply in the sense that it is the loser in an epistemic reconcilliation process
5. and (trivially) the discovery is not accompanied by any (strong) negative emotional valence.

When combined with his idea of the Intentional Stance (the disposition to interpret other beings as having minds and intentions) we can see how other forms of humor arise. Where proto-humor is the appreciation of our own mental bugs. The intentional stance allows for us to appreciate the mental bugs of others explaining other sorts of humor such as superiority and ingroup/outgroup effects. Thus, the Hurley model can be seen as a more unifying theory that is evolutionarily based and allows some insight into cognitive processes.