What is the Psychology of a joke,

what is the Psychology of a joke,

Why the people laugh at jokes has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being

Emmanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgement (1790) states that "Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing." Here is Kant's 2-century old joke and his analysis,

An Englishman at an Indian's table in Surat saw a bottle of ale being opened, and all the beer, turned to froth, rushed out.

 And the Indian, by repeated exclamations, showed his great amazement. - Well, what's so amazing in that? asked the Englishman.

 Oh, but I'm not amazed at its coming out, replied the Indian, but how you managed to get it all in.

 That makes us laugh, and it gives us a hearty pleasure.
 This is not because, say, we think we are smarter than this ignorant man, nor are we laughing at anything else here that it is our liking and that we noticed through our understanding.

It is rather that we had a tense expectation that suddenly vanished...

Henri Bergson, in his book Le rire (Laughter, 1901), suggests that laughter evolved to make social life possible for human beings.


Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation (1964), analyses humor and compares it to other creative activities, such as literature and science.

Marvin Minsky in Society of Mind (1986).

Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the brain of a human being.

 In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain to learn nonsense.

 For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as much funny when you hear them repeatedly or twice from your friend of any other person.

contains some two hundred and sixty jokes.

 Written in Greek by Hierocles and Philagrius, it dates to the 3rd or 4th century AD, and contains some two   hundred and sixty  jokes.


 Considering humor from our own culture as recent as the nineteenth century is at times baffling to us today, the humor is surprisingly familiar.

 They had different stereotypes: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath were favorites.

 A lot of the jokes play on the idea of knowing who characters are.
A barber, a bald man and an absent minded professor eventually take a journey together.

 They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage.

 When it's the barber's turn, he gets bored, so amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor.

When the professor is woken up for his turn, he feels his head, and says "How stupid is that barber? He's woken up the bald man instead of me."


There is even a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch a man buys a slave, who dies shortly afterwards.

further,When he complains to the slave merchant, he is told "He didn't die when I owned him.

 Comic Jim Bowen has presented them to an amazing modern audience.
 "One or two of them are jokes I've seen in people's acts nowadays, slightly updated.

 They put in a motor car instead of a chariot - some of them are Tommy Cooperesque.

Part of human culture

Jokes have been a part of human culture since at least one thousand nine hundred BC. 

According to research conducted by Dr Paul McDonald of the University of Wolverhampton, a fart joke from ancient Sumer is currently believed to be the known as world's oldest joke.


 Britain's oldest joke, meanwhile, is a thousand-year-old double-entendre that can be found in the Codex Exoniensis.


A recent discovery of a document called Philogelos (The Laughter Lover) gives us an insight into ancient humour.

phone number

Man ;I want to call you but i forget your phone number

Other man; O dude ! why you not text massage 
you should message me !

first man ;

O yeah i just forget this