John Charles Simon
Laughter and Humor 101
Your Personal History Shines Through Your Sense of Humor
What you find (or fail to find) amusing depends a lot on your past experiences.
Posted January 27, 2023
Reviewed by Tyler Woods
KEY POINTS
If the "mutual vulnerability theory of laughter" is correct, it would explain why our personal history and knowledge impacts our laugh response.
How we understand our own and others’ objectives, and how various shortcomings might affect their attainment, depends heavily on experience.
This would explain why certain people “get” jokes that others do not.
To be able to recognize certain vulnerabilities requires special knowledge.
In prior posts, I discussed individual-level variables such as age and personality, and how the mutual vulnerability theory of laughter helps shed light on their influence on our laugh response.
Here, I’d like to report on another distinctive attribute that also affects what we will, and won’t, find amusin
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John Charles Simon
John Charles Simon
Laughter and Humor 101
Your Personal History Shines Through Your Sense of Humor
What you find (or fail to find) amusing depends a lot on your past experiences.
Posted January 27, 2023
Reviewed by Tyler Woods
KEY POINTS
If the "mutual vulnerability theory of laughter" is correct, it would explain why our personal history and knowledge impacts our laugh response.
How we understand our own and others’ objectives, and how various shortcomings might affect their attainment, depends heavily on experience.
This would explain why certain people “get” jokes that others do not. To be able to recognize certain vulnerabilities requires special knowledge.
In prior posts, I discussed individual-level variables such as age and personality, and how the mutual vulnerability theory of laughter helps shed light on their influence on our laugh response. Here, I’d like to report on another distinctive attribute that also affects what we will, and won’t, find amusing.
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Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels
Source: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels
How Knowledge and Personal Experience Shape our Laugh Response
We are each products not only of our genetic heritage, but also of various other factors such as family size, social structure, access to resources, and early moral lessons. Our personalities are shaped by a cornucopia of causes and consequences, many of which we functionally “inherit” from our parents, other family caregivers, and the social circumstances into which we are born.
There are, as well, various events that help shape us as individuals, ones that may change our outlook or understanding of the world, but nevertheless leave our core nature relatively unchanged. Emotional experiences, the advice of mentors, information we acquire by trial-and-error, and the outcomes of social alliances, both good and ill, will all affect how we see our current situation and work to overcome obstacles. They help shape our tendencies to form friendships, to be generous, tolerant, suspicious, emotionally distant, and so on. Our personal histories mold our sense of what is normal and what is not, what constitutes vulnerability, and what might be a deficiency by helping to define what is and is not important, and what does and does not lead to success, however it might be defined.
The information we have stored in our memories—our knowledge base—will invariably affect what we define as vulnerability, the key to understanding why we laugh.
Consider what is commonly referred to as an “inside joke.” Those on the “inside” have the prerequisite knowledge needed to “get” the humor, to recognize some vulnerability, some shift in status; those who are not privy to that knowledge won't get it. This accretion of information usually happens as individuals grow from children to adults and gain greater insight into the workings of their world. But it also occurs, in a more focused way, as they gain specific understanding through formal training.
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