The Serious Study of Comedy: What Humour Research Actually Knows
Philosophers, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and theatre historians have all tried to explain the joke. Here is what they've found, who to read, and where the field is going.
Comedy research, usually called humour studies, is the academic attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: why do we laugh? It is a genuinely interdisciplinary field, drawing on philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology and performance studies, with its own journals, conferences and long-running arguments. The short version of what it knows: humour depends on incongruity that we can enjoy safely, it is overwhelmingly social, and its effects depend heavily on who is laughing with whom. This guide covers the theories, the key researchers and books, the methods and where to find the work.
If you're a student or researcher looking for practical starting points (societies, archives, datasets, conferences), see our companion resource guide for comedy researchers.
The four big theories
Every introduction to humour studies starts with three classical theories and, increasingly, adds a fourth. They are not really rivals: each describes some jokes well and others badly.
- Superiority theory
- From Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes's "sudden glory": we laugh when we feel suddenly superior to someone else's failing. Good at explaining mockery, slapstick and teasing; bad at explaining puns.
- Relief theory
- Associated with Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905): laughter discharges nervous energy, especially energy spent suppressing taboo thoughts. Good at explaining sex and toilet jokes and nervous laughter; its physiology is outdated.
- Incongruity theory
- Developed by Kant, Schopenhauer and many since: humour arises from a mismatch between what we expect and what we get. The dominant theory for over a century. Its weakness is that plenty of incongruities (a stranger's death, a magic trick) aren't funny.
- Benign violation theory
- Proposed by Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren in Psychological Science (2010): humour occurs when something seems wrong and simultaneously okay. It explains why incongruity alone isn't enough, and why the same joke can be hilarious or offensive depending on psychological distance.
There are other influential models. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation (1964) described "bisociation", the collision of two normally unrelated frames of reference, and linked jokes to scientific discovery and art. Henri Bergson's Laughter (1900) saw comedy as society's punishment for mechanical rigidity in living people. Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett and Reginald Adams's Inside Jokes (2011) proposed that humour evolved as a reward for detecting errors in our own mental models. For a philosophical treatment of these debates, see our essay on comedy and philosophy.
What the field has found
Rather than list every discipline, here are the findings that have stood up best.
Laughter is mostly social, and mostly not about jokes
The neuroscientist Robert Provine spent years recording people laughing in public places. In Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000) he reported that most laughter follows ordinary, unfunny remarks ("I'll see you guys later") rather than jokes, that speakers laugh more than their listeners, and that we are far more likely to laugh with other people than alone. Sophie Scott at University College London has built on this, studying laughter as a social signal and showing that people can distinguish genuine from posed laughter.
Humour is a cognitive achievement
Linguists have modelled how jokes work with real precision. Victor Raskin's Semantic Script Theory of Humor (Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 1985) argued that a joke text is compatible with two overlapping, opposed "scripts", and the punchline triggers the switch. With Salvatore Attardo he expanded this into the General Theory of Verbal Humor (1991), which describes jokes along six "knowledge resources", from the script opposition down to the exact wording. It remains the most detailed model of how a joke is built.
Humour styles predict wellbeing; humour itself doesn't
Rod Martin's research, summarised in The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2007; second edition with Thomas Ford, 2018), found that early claims about humour as medicine were mostly overstated. What matters is how people use humour. His Humor Styles Questionnaire (with colleagues, 2003) separates affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating humour; the last is reliably linked to poorer mental health. Our page on comedy and mental health covers the research on comedians specifically.
Taste in humour tracks personality, a bit
Willibald Ruch at the University of Zurich developed instruments for measuring humour appreciation (including the 3 WD test, which sorts jokes into incongruity-resolution, nonsense and sexual humour) and showed links with personality traits such as openness and conservatism. Ruch and colleagues also introduced the study of gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at.
Comedy is a social and political practice
Anthropologist Mary Douglas argued in a 1968 essay (collected in Implicit Meanings, 1975) that a joke is only perceived as a joke when it mirrors a pattern in the social structure. Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World (written in the 1940s, published in Russian in 1965) introduced the "carnivalesque": temporary licensed inversions of order through laughter. Both remain foundational for anyone studying comedy and power. Rebecca Krefting's All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (2014) applied this kind of thinking to stand-up, coining the term "charged humor" for comedy that challenges social inequality.
How researchers study comedy
The methods depend entirely on the discipline. A good research project usually combines two or three.
- Experiments. Psychologists show participants jokes, cartoons or video and measure ratings, physiological responses or behaviour. McGraw's Humor Research Lab (HuRL) at the University of Colorado Boulder tests benign violation predictions this way. The limit: laboratory jokes are rarely as funny as the real thing.
- Questionnaires. Standard measures such as the Humor Styles Questionnaire and the O-LIFE (used in the 2014 study of comedians' personality traits) allow comparison across groups.
- Linguistic and discourse analysis. Close analysis of joke texts, conversation transcripts or stand-up recordings, often using the GTVH framework or conversation analysis.
- Ethnography and interviews. Researchers spend time on comedy circuits, at open mics and in writers' rooms. Oliver Double's Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (2005) combines this with his own experience as a former stand-up.
- Historical and archival work. Reconstructing comedy that survives only in scripts, reviews, programmes and recordings. Our alt comedy timeline draws on this kind of history.
- Computational methods. Natural language processing researchers build humour-detection and generation models using shared datasets and competitions (SemEval has run several humour tasks), and large corpora such as The New Yorker's cartoon caption contest entries. Our piece on AI and comedy looks at the practical results.
- Neuroimaging. fMRI and PET studies look at what happens in the brain during joke comprehension and laughter, including evidence that social laughter releases endogenous opioids.
Journals and organisations
| Journal | Publisher / home | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research | De Gruyter; journal of the International Society for Humor Studies (since 1988) | The field's flagship, all disciplines |
| European Journal of Humour Research | Open access | Interdisciplinary, strong on linguistics and translation |
| Comedy Studies | Taylor & Francis (founded 2010) | Stand-up, performance, comedy as an art form |
| Studies in American Humor | American Humor Studies Association | Literary and cultural history of American humour |
| Israeli Journal of Humor Research | Open access | Interdisciplinary |
The International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) is the main scholarly body and holds an annual conference that moves between countries. The Australasian Humour Studies Network and the American Humor Studies Association are active regional and literary counterparts. In the UK, the Centre for Comedy Studies Research at Brunel University London focuses on comedy in society and the media. Full details and how to get involved are on our research resources page.
Comedy studies: the performance side
A distinct strand of the field studies comedy as an art form rather than humour as a phenomenon. It asks how stand-up works as a live medium, how sitcom developed, how comic personas are constructed. Key texts include Oliver Double's Getting the Joke, John Limon's Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (2000), Andrew Stott's Comedy in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series, and Sophie Quirk's Why Stand-Up Matters (2015), which looks at how comedians manipulate audiences. On the history side, Kliph Nesteroff's The Comedians (2015) is the best single history of American stand-up and is built on interviews and archive research.
This is the strand closest to what we do at AltComedy. For alternative comedy specifically, the academic literature is thinner than you'd expect; much of the best writing comes from critics and comedians, which is why we keep a list of essential alt comedy books.
Open questions
The field still argues about a great deal. Some of the live questions as of 2026:
- Is there one theory of humour? Many researchers now think "humour" covers several different phenomena that no single theory will explain.
- What is laughter for? Evolutionary accounts point to play signals in apes and to social bonding; how humour connects to those older functions is unresolved.
- Can machines be funny? Large language models can produce competent jokes and explain cartoons; whether they understand humour, and what that would mean, is debated. The 2023 paper "Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep?" by Jack Hessel and colleagues, which tested models on the New Yorker caption contest, is a good entry point.
- Does humour transfer across cultures? Cross-cultural work suggests the mechanisms are universal but the targets and taboos are not. See our piece on cultural comedy differences.
- What are the ethics of humour? Philosophers and psychologists are increasingly working together on when jokes harm. Our comedy ethics guide sets out the arguments.
Where to start reading
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's free entry on Philosophy of Humor, written by John Morreall, is the best online overview of the theories.
Frequently asked questions
What is humour research called?
Usually humor studies (or humour studies in British spelling). Comedy studies is sometimes used for the arts and performance side, focusing on stand-up, sitcom and comic theatre, while humor research also covers psychology, linguistics and neuroscience.
What are the main theories of humour?
Superiority theory (we laugh at others' failings), relief theory (laughter releases pent-up nervous energy), incongruity theory (we laugh at a mismatch between expectation and reality), and the more recent benign violation theory (something is funny when it seems wrong but safe at the same time).
What journals publish humour research?
The main ones are HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research (De Gruyter, since 1988, the journal of the International Society for Humor Studies), the open-access European Journal of Humour Research, Comedy Studies (Taylor & Francis), Studies in American Humor and the Israeli Journal of Humor Research.
Who are the leading humour researchers?
Influential figures include Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo (linguistics), Rod Martin and Willibald Ruch (psychology), Peter McGraw (benign violation theory), Sophie Scott (neuroscience of laughter), John Morreall and Noël Carroll (philosophy), and Oliver Double and Sharon Lockyer (stand-up and comedy studies in the UK).
