Why do humans laugh? How does our brain determine what’s funny and what’s not?
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Adding on top of what everyone else is saying about it being a social tool, there’s definitely something going on with our brain’s penchant for identifying patterns. We can’t help but to try to break everything down to a logical pattern we understand. Humor often follows the rule of ‘establish pattern’ and then ‘break pattern’, but in a way that the person can understand what happened and identify the pattern changed.
It’s not all that different when you’re playing peekaboo with a baby. You lock eye contact. More eye contact. Suddenly cover face! But then the eyes are back wowowow that was a twist.
Jokes are classically told in “3s” where you have setup in 2 parts, then the joke is a twist on the established pattern.
I think it’s a really similar reaction to why we like music. Music develops a pattern that we can lock on to, then puts some clever twists and turns in those patterns. This is why humor and music will never run out. As styles of music and humor become commonplace, they become part of that part 1/2 establishment of the norm, waiting for a new ‘twist’ to become the joke or the fresh sound
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