About Humor

It is easy to understand why there is so much disagreement about humor. No pattern of human behavior is so full of paradoxes. A joke is “one man’s meat but another man’s poison. “or, as William Haziit  put it,” sport to one but death to another.” If you laugh without restrain, you are thought to be either mad or mentally health. A joke is trivial and nonsensical, yet it may express a profound truth. Understanding joke is  an intellectual achievement, yet reflective thought destroys humor.

We laugh for many reason,  some contradictory;  we may laugh in sympathy or in soon, from anxiety or relief, from anger to affection, from joy or frustration. In view of one way, humor is regarded as a trifling, destructive, and degrading force in morality, religion, and art. Seen differently, it is a liberating, socially constructive, and even ennobling art.

The difficulty was well expressed by W.C.Fields: “The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh, but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.”

source: Kumpulan Soal Ganesha Operation, UM UGM/2005/621, hlm. 794.