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Humor
Humour (also spelled humor) is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy. more...
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The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours controlled human health and emotion.
A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including, but not limited to geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education and context. For example, young children (of any background) particularly favour slapstick, while satire tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Lame humour is a type of joke or riddle that tries to connect rather distantly related terms together. An example would be \"a lame joke\", which \"does not have legs\".
Styles of humour
Verbal
- Black comedy
- Caustic humour
- Droll humour
- Deadpan
- Non-sequitur/Random humor
- Obscenity
- Parody
- Ridicule, such as the Darwin Awards
- Sarcasm
- Satire
- Self-irony
- Self-ridicule, such as Rodney Dangerfield's self-deprecating humour
- Wit, as in many one-liner jokes
Non Verbal
- Anti-humour
- Deadpan
- Form-versus-content humour
- Slapstick
- Surreal humour or absurdity
- Practical joke: luring someone into a humorous position or situation and then laughing at their expense
Specific techniques for evoking humour
Humor is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 tropes that can be used to make jokes.
Verbal
- Figure of speech
- Triple and paraprosdokian
- Enthymeme
- Syllepsis (zeugma)
- Hyperbole
- Understatement
- Inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in the language of delivery
- Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial and a concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
- Joke
- Adages, often in the form of paradox \"laws\" of nature, such as Murphy's law
- Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, viola jokes.
- Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally cruel scenarios
- Riddle
- Word play
- Acrosticdoublespeak, a form of satire characterised by the unsubtle encryption of an acrostically constructed humorous message
- Oxymoron
- Pun
Non Verbal
- Bathos
- Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
- Inflicting pain, such as kick in the groin
- Character Driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
- Clash of context humour, such \"fish out of water\"
- Comic sounds
- Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by Andy Kaufman
- Unintentional humor, that is, making people laugh without intending to (as with Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space)
- Faking stupidity
- Funny pictures: Photos or drawings/cartoons that are intentionally or unintentionally humorous.
- Sight gags
- Visual humour: Similar to the sight gag, but encompassing narrative in theatre or comics ,or on film or video.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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