Creativity

The term creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something (such as a product, an artwork, a scientific theory, or a joke) that is regarded as both novel and valuable. Creativity and humor are closely related constructs, with humor usually being seen as a subset of creativity. Both involve some degree of unpredictability, novelty, incongruity, and surprise, and require playfulness, risk taking, and exploiting loose but meaningful associations between concepts. Within the context of humor research, the topic of creativity is mainly relevant to humor production, by which a person produces a novel joke, witticism, observation, or other creative product that is found funny by others. In this entry, several facets of the relation between creativity and humor are described. In the first ...