Aristotle studied humor. Charles Darwin wrote about it. Sigmund Freud developed theories about jokes and laughter. Psychologists analyze humor and laughter in laboratories.
Despite all that effort, no single theory fully explains humor or why people laugh. That partly explains why AI has a finite sense of humor — funny can’t be coded.
Humor is simply too subjective.
As E.B. White once observed:
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.
For humor writers, that reality creates both good news and bad news.
The bad news is that there is no single formula for creating something funny.
The good news is that humor works in many ways.
There are dozens of theories about why people laugh, but two of the most common explanations are surprisingly simple:
We laugh out of surprise.
We laugh when we feel superior.
Surprise is one of the most widely accepted formulas for humor. A joke leads readers toward one conclusion and then suddenly shifts direction.
The unexpected twist produces laughter.
Superiority works differently. Humor often allows others to feel momentarily smarter, luckier, or more fortunate than the person in the joke.
For a moment, the reader feels superior.
Other theories suggest that people laugh when they release tension, when they recognize incongruity, or when they solve a small puzzle hidden inside the joke.
Each theory explains part of the mystery.
None explains all of it.
Ask any neuroscientist and they’ll tell you that humor may be the most complex activity of the human brain — and one of the least understood.
That uncertainty is something every humor writer eventually learns to live and work with.
Most humorists develop their techniques through trial and error. They discover what works, what doesn’t, and what consistently gets laughs.
Over time, every humor writer develops a personal theory of humor.
You may rely on surprise.
You may favor exaggeration.
You may prefer observational humor or satire.
Whatever the approach, the goal remains the same.
Understand why people laugh.
That understanding won’t solve the mystery of humor — but it will help you stay funnier than AI.
