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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.
There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what it is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity ...
Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of humor (a German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy. A humorist is adept at seeing the humor in a situation or aspect of life and relating it, usually through a story; the comedian generally concentrates on jokes designed to invoke instantaneous ...
One leading analysis of American humor, the 1931 book American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke, identified the character of the "Yankee" as that first American comic figure, the first widely accepted American character that the nation could find funny, make fun of and even export for the amusement of the world – a gangly traveler who told stories, played ...
David Bleich is an American literary theorist and academic. He is noted for developing the Bleich "heuristic", a reader-response approach to teaching literature. [1]He is also a proponent of reader-response criticism to literature, advocating subjective interpretations of literary texts.
Self-defeating humor is the style of humor characterized by the use of potentially detrimental humor towards the self in order to gain approval from others. Individuals high in this dimension engage in self-disparaging humor in which laughter is often at their own expense.