Dana Hedberg wrote:
>
> QueeneMUSE@aol.com wrote:
>
> > It's often a "surprise mechanism" that triggers laughter, not only cruelty
> > and oddities.
>
> One of the things that has received a lot of recent attention has been
> the primary factors responsible for eliciting a laugh, or feeling of
> mirth, when perceiving a specific situation. And the "surprise
> mechanism" you mention above seems to be one of the major contributors.
> People have a certain expectation, or schema, with which they use to
> heuristically predict how a situation should go ("garden pathing" is a
> very simplistic example of this). When this schema is violated in a
> novel way, this can lead to laughter and our perception that something
> humorous just happened.
As a standup comic myself, I know this well. Example- I'm on stage, wearing
a t-shirt with "ALASKA", a bear, a whale, a mountain range...
"Ya like my t-shirt? Alaska... I've never been there, I got this from my
buddy Dave the Graverobber."
[This gets them going a bit]
"Actually, his wife's ex-husband died and I got this shirt, a pair of
shoes, ten boxes of Marlboros and an oxygen tank!"
[Ah, the sweet sound of laughter]
Surprise is why you don't laugh as hard (or sometimes even at all) the
second time you hear a gag.
-- Doug Jones Rocket Plumber, XCOR Aerospace http://www.xcor-aerospace.com
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