(Auto-generated)Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
I realize that I've been very straightforward with this.
I haven't made a lot of jokes and I do do that and I do voices, but I didn't want to
jump into any of that while I'm doing the reading of the book because this is something
that I poured my life for 10 years and and is something that I feel is my responsibility
to get out there that this is probably the biggest thing I will ever do and I'm doing
it right now.
So I'm very straight to the point typically in these episodes and I just want you to know
that after we finish with the book, this podcast is going to keep going.
I'm going to keep coming back and talking to you about this, but different understandings
of stuff like this and I'll be taking questions the whole time and definitely will be answering
some of those questions.
It's the greatest thing in the world about talking to somebody else about a subject that
you're struggling to understand, which is still me.
I'm still learning this stuff.
This is a near bottomless pit of discovery.
So many aspects of our lives that it's there's no way I'm going to discover it all.
But when you're trying to figure something out and it's core, talking to somebody else
is your best course of action.
We've discovered that the brain acts much like an eyeball.
Say you walk into a room with your eyes closed and you open them just for a few seconds.
The eye doesn't take in everything all at once.
It darts around and the first thing it darts to are the things that have the biggest amount
of contrast, have the largest incongruity.
These are things that stand out and the brain does something very similar when it's puzzling
over something it doesn't understand.
It tends to like a moth to a flame just keep batting its head against that same light bulb.
The biggest contrast, the thing that's creating the most emotional turmoil.
It will flip to the other things, but mainly it's flitting to the other things looking
for support for this big glowing light bulb of emotion.
And when in conflict with something learned or something that you're trying to figure
out that means something to you, we have this heavy draw towards that which we have, that
which is making the most emotional conflict, that which stands out, that which is in contrast,
that which we don't understand.
And we keep beating our heads against that light bulb like moths and it makes for a pretty
crummy problem solving.
But when you have to explain it to somebody else, when you bring them up to speed, you
force your brain to reorganize the information in a way that you would never look at.
That's why programmers have the rubber ducky.
I did a episode of code help on it.
I forget what the terminology for it is, but basically it's where you take a rubber ducky
and you explain how it's supposed to work.
Coders and programmers, you said they'll go through line by line of the code and explain
to the ducky what this line is supposed to do.
All right, let's move on with the show.
I don't know if you guys ever noticed this, but when I welcome you wonderful people who
matter so very, very much back, that's the only people that I welcome.
That's because the only people that exist are the ones who matter so very, very much.
Haha, gotcha.
If that doesn't make sense, that likely means you haven't listened to all the other episodes,
which are absolutely vital to understanding the impact of what I'm revealing in the next
chapter.
So go back to the beginning, please, and I think you'll learn.
The chapter that I'm about to read to you, as you may have picked up there, it's the
last bit of prepping you for chapter 8 that I'm doing, and you need all the previous chapters
and preferably the preface to take on chapter 8's seconders.
You know what I'm talking about.
It's going to be go time.
So let's get covered on the very last of the setup before the payoff.
Chapter 7 Theories
Now, Mike was not the first to spend time meditating on why people laugh.
It's actually a question that countless big brains have stepped up to attempt to answer.
It's now believed to be the very first vocalized language human beings developed, its purpose
being a social gesture to gain others' trust.
It's the simplest sound that we make, merely a squeezing of the lungs in a rhythm, and
most people don't even modulate the pitch of the sound with their vocal cords.
It seems to be something that is at the core of us, and is frequently synonymous with being
happy.
No wonder it's drawn so much attention.
There's been many theories on why we laugh that span centuries and centuries of research
and observation, and yet it's still a question that most people pull back from instinctively.
I spent hours as a teenager sitting in a chair in our living room, posing one query after
another, exploring the nature of man, the universe, and philosophy by way of logic and
recalled observations, and I flinched back the moment the question, why is something
funny came into my mind.
It was too abstract, too nebulous, and honestly frightening in a very unique way.
It was as if the answer to that question was hidden in a place that I dared not go.
Something within me recognized that.
Eventually, after I found the breaking laugh and began to see it for what it was, and why
it was, I plunged into these theories and then drew back and unfocused my eyes a bit
and started to see how they were all related, and I began to see why I had instinctively
recoiled.
But as I said, great minds have undertaken the task of determining what humor is, why
something is funny, and why we laugh.
Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, our first philosophers, were among the very first to
try their hands at the subject, though you may find that they held a very negative viewpoint
of why we laughed.
Plato preached that we should avoid laughing as it causes one to lose control of their
emotions.
He stated that someone that gives way to violent laughter provokes a violent response.
Plato also proposed that when we laugh at someone, it's usually at the absurdity of
the person, that we take a pleasure in how ridiculous someone else is, and that this
is an evil vice.
Aristotle agreed with him, referring to wit as educated insolence, the means between boorishness
and buffoonery.
These thinkers gave us superiority theory from this.
We laugh as a form of ridicule when we feel superior to someone else.
Most of the context for laughing in the Bible is pretty supportive of this school of thought.
Thomas Hobbes generally agreed with this way of thinking.
He stated that the idea that laughter is self-applauds can nevertheless be defended by pointing
out that even though someone else's joke occasions my laughter, what I'm laughing at, what produces
my joy, might be that I can see the point and thus appreciate my superiority.
In short, when I laugh, I'm both patting myself on the back and simultaneously being a jerk.
René Descartes came to a very similar conclusion in Passions of the Soul.
He wrote, and by the way, I'll put a little side note here, this voice, I'm going to do
this voice, I know that he was French and they lived in the Netherlands later, but I
can't do a French accent, so if it's okay, I'm going to do the voice that I hear in my
head when I read his words, specifically on this passage, I hear this voice.
Division or scorn is a sort of joy mingled with hatred, which proceeds from our perceiving
some small evil in a person who we consider to be deserving of it.
We have hatred for this evil, we have joy, and when that comes upon us unexpectedly,
the surprise of wonder is the cause of our bursting into laughter.
We notice that people with very obvious defects such as those who are lame, blind, van I,
hunchbacked, or who have received some public insult are specially given to mockery, for
desiring to see all others held in as low estimation as themselves, they are truly rejoiced
at the evils that befall them, and they hold them deserving of these.
Or put another way, we laugh when we see someone getting what we think they deserve.
So then Francis Hutchison came on the scene, and while he agreed with some of the things
said, he largely denounced superiority theory as the universal reason for laughter.
He pointed out that we often feel superior to animals and people, and we don't feel
the urge to laugh.
In stressful situations, people on the verge of crying start laughing, and that doesn't
really fit the model either.
So several thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, proposed that laughter was a release of pent-up
tension or nervous energy, eventually becoming known as relief theory.
They believe that emotions build up energy, that anger builds to striking out, fear builds
to fleeing or fighting, nervousness builds nervous energy, which in contrast doesn't
really build to doing anything but laugh.
Now Freud believed this to be the case, but thought that the two most pent-up energies
were hostility and sexual desire.
One of the other laughers proposed by Sigmund Freud was one in which we release the energy
that we psychically build up as we're preparing ourselves to pity the victim of a joke.
That we are given an out in the form of a punchline to laugh off that pity instead.
Around the same 18th century period, an opposing argument arose, incongruity theory.
This one stated that it's the surprise, the unexpected aha moment that garners a laugh
from us.
This theory states that humor is setting up one explanation.
This theory states that humor is setting up one expectation, only to find it turned on
its ear at the punchline.
This was the theory that Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, along with countless
philosophers were pushing for.
We laugh at that which we didn't expect and that which seems out of place.
Few quick examples for you.
I once shot an elephant in my pajamas.
Now he got in my pajamas, I'll never know.
The last thing I want to do is insult you, but it is on the list.
Sure, I'd love to help you out.
Now which way did you come in?
My mind's made up, don't try to confuse me with the facts.
I'll tell you, bureaucrats cut red tape.
Lengthwise.
Listen, take my advice, I'm not using it.
And jokes like these were made to believe things are headed in one direction, quite
often by cleverly having the outcome be a different meaning of a familiar phrase that's
used in the setup of the joke.
It's our predictive nature that provides this platform for incongruent humor.
And for a long time, incongruity theory was the most current and accepted theory of humor.
Until McGraw and Warren hit the scene, these were the three main theories that the human
race had determined was the truth behind why we laugh.
Or at least the closest we've ever gotten to answering it.
Not one of these theories accounts for all the instances in which people laugh, especially
tickling and play fighting.
Then in 2014, a two-page theory published by Dr. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren changed
everything.
McGraw, who had previously spent a great deal of time focused on the study of emotions and
expectations, had uncovered the first universal theory on why we laugh.
Now the gist of the surprisingly short paper is that there must be a balance between benign
elements and violation elements for humor to occur.
So what does that mean?
Benign elements are things that are unchanging, comforting, normal, non-offensive, non-threatening,
predictable and safe.
Violation elements are a bit harder to describe.
It's something that's not right.
It's something unpredictable, something that threatens.
It's stuff that's not okay.
That element that makes a joke too far.
And there needs to be a bit of both in the balance.
But the balance of the mixture is set by the nature of the relationship between the listener
of the joke or viewer of the situation and the victim of the joke or lander of the prep
form.
If the two people are close, then benign will normally outweigh the violation significantly.
Something as simple as a very small stumble while walking with somebody you love dearly
can be funny enough to produce out loud laughter.
But the violation must be kept relatively light.
Inversely, a person you've never met has allowed a lot more violation.
I can't sell you hard enough the sheer brilliance of the theory, particularly when it comes
to the part regarding the relationships between humor and, well, relationships.
If you don't care about someone, we can laugh more easily at their pain, anguish,
and especially their embarrassment, even more so if that person is fictional.
For anyone that's ever been thoroughly humiliated, they know how crushing that can be.
It's a totally different kind of hurt.
One that takes you down from within.
But if we know or care about the victim, simply missing the straw in their drink while trying
to capture it with their mouth and making a derpy face can send a best friend into heaving
fits of laughter.
It's like the optimal zone of humor or area in which something garners the biggest laugh.
It's like it slides into different positions up and down a gradient scale of clean to dirty.
There are a lot to not at all.
Benign to violation.
The genuine laugh.
To the breaking laugh.
There we are.
Knocking at the door of chapter 8.
Breaking.
And that's it for me.
Thank you for coming to the reading.
And if you haven't figured it out yet, and you're hitting skip to next episode when I
start giving the links, you are missing out.
I always follow the links part, which I try to make quick each time, with a personal statement
to you.
So you can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help you can contact
the podcast will help mail at gmail.com.
And talk about this stuff, ask questions or hear what others think at r slash the laughing
matters on Reddit.
You can stay up to date with the show's Facebook page at facebook.com slash I can help and
of course, the laughing matters calm.
So until next episode, take note of when you laugh the genuine laugh.
Identify it when you laugh from loving without aim.
Notice how good it feels to genuine laughs versus any other kind of laughter.
Just know what it is when you're doing it.
Know why it's happening.
You do that.
You can call on it in the dark.
When things get dim.
When you're hurting or lonely.
When everything feels so confused that you keep losing sight of which way is up.
You can still be good to them.
Of course, you know how to love them.
If you've left the genuine laugh, then you've loved them all before.
And you know for a fact that you're capable of doing it.
Be good to them.
Be good for them.
And you're going to be green.
Be sweet.
By everybody.
It sounds like an awesome band name.
Preferably the Preface.
Dibs.
Y'all dibs.
That's mine.
Preferably the Preface.
You're at the doorstep of the breaking laugh.
We will see you for chapter 8.