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Originally Posted by Trojan Man |
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For what it's worth, in the philosophy of humor, there are generally three explanations for why people laugh at things: the superiority theory, the relief theory, and the incongruity theory. Only one of those, the incongruity theory, relies heavily on intelligence, and even that one does not necessarily lean totally on intelligence in its account.
The superiority theory says that we laugh at things because we think we're better than the people we're laughing at in some way. An example would be the Three Stooges, at whom we laugh because they're such ... stooges.
The relief theory understands laughter as a kind of "release valve" for pent up physical sensations or emotions and argues that laugher is a particular somatic response to certain emotional states, making it more like a reflex than a conscious action.
The incongruity theory says that we laugh at jokes because they force a certain cognitive shift in interpretation that we find pleasurable. An example would be the Michael Scott joke, where a saying of a non-sexual nature all of the sudden becomes sexual in nature when someone adds "That's what she said" to the end of a sentence. The shift in interpretive framework elicits a laugh. This is the theory that most relies on intelligence, but as you can see, one doesn't always have to be intelligent to make or get such jokes.
A good overview of these theories is here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/#IncThe
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I know we've gone completely off topic from the purpose of the forum, but thank you for the link, excellent read, and from a very respectable source.