Complexity

It has been suggested that humor appreciation depends on the humorous material's complexity, or how difficult it is to comprehend. To evaluate this idea, it is important to define complexity. Physical science has provided a specific suggestion. Physics has employed entropy, the loss of usable energy, as an estimate of the disorder in a system. As a corollary to the second law of thermodynamics, that chaos is more probable than order and should increase, complexity is a dominant characteristic of any system. This physical definition has been translated into the more psychological measure of complexity used in information theory. Here, “information” refers to the number of decisions that need to be made to bring order into an uncertain system. The more events there are, and the lower their probability, the greater the information and complexity.

As a measure, information has generated considerable research relating how such complexity influences perception, memory, and even group behavior. As part of this research, complexity has been translated into a more subjective scale. For the objective measure, quantity is most critical. The subjective gives a greater role to relations among elements. Physical and mathematical measures of complexity are an important beginning. To truly understand complexity, however, subjective judgments are necessary.

Indeed “information” can measure the quality of the “good gestalt” based on decisions that must be made to generate a figure. Furthermore, aesthetic judgment can be predicted from the information in a stimulus. Scales of art appreciation have been generated from complexity measures.

Best known is the work of Daniel Berlyne (1972), who proposed the classic inverted “U” relating preference and complexity. Stimuli that are too simple are boring and not arousing, while extreme complexity can lead to confusion and aversion. Various theories of motivation and emotion have been built on this approach.

This relationship has also been generalized to humor appreciation with intermediate complexity of jokes and cartoons hypothesized as preferred to the obvious or incomprehensible. The humor results from a shift in arousal. Too easy and there is no need to shift, too hard and the shift cannot occur. Thus, intermediate complexity should be most effective in eliciting humor. This hypothesis is important in many theories of humor appreciation. The support for this assertion usually comes from work with children or artificial, not very funny, material.

For children, a typical finding depends on the reaction to a joke like the one about the person who wants a pizza cut into six pieces instead of eight. Eight pieces would be too much to eat. For a 4-year-old, who does not understand that physical transformations do not affect the overall quantity of an object, this makes perfect sense and is not funny. When the 6-year-old has recognized conservation of mass and realizes that six equals eight for one pizza, the mistake is humorous. Later on, when such [Page 165]conservation becomes familiar and trivial, the joke is not amusing.

An example of artificial stimuli based on varying information compares the humor ratings of lists of words with varying structural constraints. A random collection of words (trains hive elephants the simplify) is not funny. A meaningful sentence (trains carry passengers across the country) is usually not funny. A sequence of words selected on the probability that a word might follow a set of words or selected randomly to fit grammatical structure (accidents carry honey between the house) can create odd combinations and result in mild amusement. Information manipulation can create relevant incongruities.

...