Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Humour (Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks , which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours ( Latin : humor , "body fluid"), controlled human health and emotion.
The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications ...
Wit is a form of intelligent humour—the ability to say or write things that are clever and typically funny. [1] Someone witty is a person who is skilled at making clever and funny remarks. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Forms of wit include the quip , repartee , and wisecrack .
British humour carries a strong element of satire aimed at the absurdity of everyday life. Common themes include sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek, banter, insults, self-deprecation, taboo subjects, puns, innuendo, wit, and the British class system. [1] These are often accompanied by a deadpan delivery which is present throughout the British sense of ...
Both the concept and the etymology of the word, while being of uncertain origin, appear to stem from the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. [4] The 10th-century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia Suda traces the word's earliest roots to the notion of grinning (Ancient Greek: σαίρω, romanized: sairō) in the face of danger, or curling one's lips back at evil.
The humour derived gets its appeal from the ridiculousness and unlikeliness of the situation. The genre has roots in Surrealism in the arts. [23] Edward Lear, Aged 73 and a Half and His Cat Foss, Aged 16, an 1885 lithograph by Edward Lear. Surreal humour is the effect of illogic and absurdity being used for humorous effect.
Deadpan, dry humour, or dry-wit humour [1] is the deliberate display of emotional neutrality or no emotion, commonly as a form of comedic delivery to contrast with the ridiculousness or absurdity of the subject matter.
The idea that humor can be predicted by a word's entropy corresponds to the work of 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. [12] [14] According to Westbury, "One reason puns are funny is that they violate our expectation that a word has one meaning". [11]