Humor Content Versus Structure

A distinction is made between the content and structure of humor not only in psychology but also in other fields, such as folklore and linguistics. As a technical distinction in psychology, content versus structure has an illustrious ancestry going as far back as Sigmund Freud's seminal research on the psychology of jokes. This entry discusses the way distinctions have been made between humor content and humor structure in psychology, while also noting some of the ways the terms have been used more generally.

Freud distinguished between joke “work,” or the formal properties of jokes, and “tendency,” or how jokes express aggression or hostility. Freud's work on the techniques of jokes constitutes the first chapter of his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud's procedure consists of analyzing several jokes with the use of mechanisms of “reduction” (a form of paraphrase) and in grouping the jokes into categories according to the humorous techniques that are used in them. The outcomes of the analysis are 20 different categories, which are not mutually exclusive. Freud's 20 different mechanisms operate inside both verbal and referential humor. They can be reduced to two major mechanisms: condensation and displacement. Condensation occurs when more than one meaning exists within a word (sign). Displacement is “a change in the way of considering [something]” according to Freud (Freud, 1905, p. 74). Freud's conclusions and methodology have been the object of much debate, summarized by Salvatore Attardo in Linguistic Theories of Humor. The other distinction between jokes, according to Freud, is between “innocent” or “abstract” versus “tendentious.” The latter is familiar to humor researchers under the label of “aggression.” A joke is innocent when it does not have access to the sources of pleasure that a tendentious joke does, and hence all the pleasure it provides is thanks to its technique. A joke is tendentious if it is cynical, skeptical, obscene, or shows hostility toward a target.

Other psychologists have taken up the distinction, using different names. For example, Richard Niles Sears used the terms thematic and schematic. Hans Jürgen Eysenck used orectic (content) and cognitive (structure). Eysenck believed that, while the two aspects could be separated theoretically, both needed to be considered. Eysenck sees the orectic aspect of humor as accounted for by the superiority theory. However, Eysenck's conclusions are mostly concerned with the cognitive aspect of humor (his materials include jokes and visual humor). Eysenck's description of the factors of the cognitive aspect of humor includes incongruity, resolution (called integration), surprise (suddenness), psychic distance, and insight, defined as “a change in the meaning of the elements of the humor experience” (Eysenck, 1942, p. 306). The most comprehensive treatment of the distinction between humor content and structure is to be found in Willibald Ruch's work. Ruch starts out by listing Freud, Eysenck, and other sources that have used the distinction. Ruch discusses two factors that are both responsible for humor appreciation: one, content and the other, structure. Under structure, Ruch finds two main categories, “incongruity-resolution” and “nonsense” (the latter essentially lacking the resolution phase). A third factor, based on content (sex), emerged but was found to be independent of the other two (i.e., can be combined with structure). Other content matters would be such traditional subjects as aggression, scatology, ethnicity, and others. As Ruch notes, so far, content-based categories have not fared too well, in the sense that there is little correlation between appreciation and the more traditional categories (with the significant exception of sexual humor). Overall, Ruch's conclusion is that humor appreciation depends mostly on structural categories. In fact, Ruch notes that the structural factors that account for humor's appreciation are present in other forms of arts (literature, visual arts, music).

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