My Name is Thomas Martin and I am a senior. I decided it would a course on Rhetoric and Humor would be fun therfore I decided to enroll. What I am finding interesting about the course so far has been the discussion of the actual theories involved in understanding humor. What is funny? The answer depends on so many factors: culture, context, experience, language, intelligence, sex, race, etc. I am hoping to learn more about how these factors influence our understanding of humor.
When reading about different humor theories, Cicero stated something thast I have always noticed in what I consider to be funny, but I have never actually heard someone comment on this point. Cicero states that "the most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said: here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh. But if something ambiguous is thrown in too, the effect of the joke is heightened." The simple joke, " a man walked into a bar and said 'ouch' is an example of the audience's expectation being wrong. As opposed to hearing a story about what happened to the man at the bar, the drinking tavern, the bar's context is then changed to refer to a metallic object, thus the man is hurt. By reversing the audience's expectation, the joke is funny, at least to me.
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