English Humour · Lesson 1
What Makes Things Funny? The Three Theories
Welcome to the English Humour course. I would make a joke here to prove my credentials, but I've been advised that opening with a joke before explaining what a joke is puts the cart before the horse. So: here is a horse. We'll get to the cart. 🦊
Vocabulary
🔀 Incongruity
Incongruity theory says humour occurs when something violates our expectations in a non-threatening way — the mismatch between what we expected and what actually happened.
🎯 Setup
The setup of a joke creates an expectation in the audience's mind — everything depends on this expectation being clearly established before the punchline violates it.
💥 Punchline
A great punchline violates the expectation created by the setup in a way that is surprising but, on reflection, oddly inevitable.
✅ Benign violation
Peter McGraw's benign violation theory: something is funny when it is simultaneously a violation of norms AND harmless — the same event with genuine threat stops being funny.
👑 Superiority theory
The superiority theory explains why we laugh at characters making mistakes — we feel briefly superior, which produces the pleasure of comedy.
😮💨 Relief theory
The relief theory explains dark humour — comedy releases tension built up around painful or taboo subjects, providing psychological relief.
✌️ The Rule of Three
The Rule of Three is the most reliable structure in English comedy: two items establish a pattern, and the third breaks it unexpectedly — 'brave, brilliant, and absolutely terrified of pigeons.'
📉 Bathos
Bathos is the abrupt, jarring transition from the serious to the trivial — building toward a momentous conclusion and then delivering something completely mundane instead.
⏱️ Comic timing
Comic timing is the precise moment at which the punchline is delivered — too early and the audience isn't ready; too late and the moment has passed.
The Banana on the Forehead
Peter McGraw, a professor who runs something called the Humor Research Lab, spent years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: why does a stranger tickling a baby usually read as alarming, while a parent doing the exact same thing produces delighted laughter? The physical act is identical. What changes is whether it registers as a threat. McGraw's answer is benign violation theory: something strikes us as funny only when two conditions are met at once. First, it has to violate some kind of norm — physical, social, linguistic, or moral. Second, that violation has to be perceived as harmless. Remove either half and the comedy collapses. A violation with no threat at all is simply normal, unremarkable. A violation that feels genuinely dangerous stops being funny and becomes alarming instead. This explains why the exact same joke can land perfectly with one audience and horrify another. A joke about a funeral might get a huge laugh among close friends of the person who died, who share enough context to know the violation is safe — and land as deeply unwelcome from a stranger at the funeral itself, where the same words carry real risk of causing harm. The words never change. What changes is whether the violation reads as benign.
The Three Theories of Humour: Your Analytical Framework
Here is what makes learning about humour theory genuinely useful rather than just academically interesting: once you understand that almost every English joke works by creating an expectation and then violating it in a non-threatening way, you have a framework for analysing any English humour you encounter. When you miss a joke — and you will, everyone does — you can ask: what expectation was being set up? What violated it? What cultural knowledge would I need to have seen the setup? This turns confusion into learning rather than just embarrassment. Which is, itself, a form of relief theory.
3 more lessons in English Humour
- • The Incongruity Theory in Action
- • Timing, Delivery and the Mechanics of the Funny Moment
- • The Science of Funny: Unit 1 Review
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