It seems impossible to imagine our world without humor. It’s the lifeblood of our interactions, a secret language woven into politics, art, and even education. We look for partners who can make us laugh, and in our darkest moments, a well-timed joke can feel like a shield. For many, laughter is a defense mechanism; we laugh to keep from crying. But what is this strange and powerful force? Why do we find things funny, and why does it feel more essential now than ever before?

The Ancient Suspicion of Laughter

It’s easy to assume that the great thinkers of the past had a poor sense of humor. The most influential ancient philosophers treated laughter not as a gift, but as a flaw. Plato, a chief critic, argued that laughter is a volatile emotion that shatters the rational self-control essential for a true philosopher. To laugh at another person, in his view, was to place yourself above them—an act of superiority. In Plato’s vision of an ideal state, comedy would need to be kept on a tight leash.

His student, Aristotle, shared this sentiment. He saw all humor as a form of mockery that expressed contempt for its subject. In his foundational work Poetics, he deliberately placed comedy on a lower rung than the noble art of tragedy. Later, the Stoic philosophers, who sought complete emotional self-mastery, also saw little value in it. As the philosopher Epictetus advised, one should not laugh often, nor at many things.

This distrust of humor carried into the Middle Ages. In many religious traditions, laughter was viewed as a sign of hostility or contempt, a gateway to intemperance and vice. But this view wasn't universal. Thomas Aquinas offered a more reasoned perspective, arguing that laughter serves a vital purpose. Just as physical fatigue is cured by rest, he proposed, mental fatigue is relieved by pleasure. To be relentlessly serious, to deny oneself pleasure, is to go against reason itself.

The Relief Valve Theory

By the 18th century, ideas similar to those of Aquinas evolved into a formal theory of humor: the relief theory. Its core idea is that laughter is a necessary mechanism for releasing pent-up nervous or emotional tension. Lord Shaftesbury was among the first to explore this in his "Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour," where he argued that laughter liberates the "animal spirits" within us. Later, the American philosopher John Dewey likened a burst of laughter to a sigh of relief following a period of intense strain.

Of course, Sigmund Freud had his own take. He believed that our most powerful suppressed feelings are hostility and sexual desire. Since we cannot express these impulses openly, they build up as psychic energy. Humor, according to Freud, provides a safe and acceptable outlet for this repressed energy. This is why so many jokes orbit themes of sex and hidden aggression—the energy finds a harmless release, bringing us a feeling of pleasure and relief.

Humor as a Social Construct

Is a landscape funny? Can a river tell a joke? The French philosopher Henri Bergson, in his pivotal essay "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic," argued that the comic does not exist outside of the distinctly human and social world. If we laugh at an animal, it's because we recognize something human-like in its actions or appearance. The most popular memes and clips of cats are funny precisely because the cats seem to be behaving like people. Humor, then, is a product of culture, not of nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche identified a long-standing tension in European culture between two opposing forces: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian, named for Apollo, the god of arts and reason, represents harmony, order, and beauty. But alongside it exists the Dionysian, a primal, chaotic, and sensual element named for Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. In ancient times, this element was celebrated in festivals of revelry. Yet, over centuries, this freer, more earthly aspect of life—and the humor that came with it—was often suppressed, deemed base or shameful.

The cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin explored this "culture of laughter" in his study of the satirist François Rabelais. He described a world of carnivals and festivals, temporary utopias where the rigid hierarchies and fears of everyday life were suspended. In the carnival, the jester could mock the king, and the sacred could be playfully profaned. This culture of laughter, Bakhtin argued, was not just a distraction; it was a vital tool that allowed people to mentally escape a world of inequality and injustice, even for a moment.

The Punchline and the Broken Pattern

Perhaps the most dominant explanation for humor today is the incongruity theory. First emerging in the 18th century and later developed by philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, this theory posits that laughter erupts when our expectations are violated. We perceive a situation, our mind anticipates a certain outcome, and then something completely different happens.

Aristotle himself touched on this when he advised orators that the key to making an audience laugh is to build an expectation and then shatter it at the last moment. This is the fundamental structure of modern stand-up comedy: the setup and the punchline. The setup creates a familiar scenario, and the punchline subverts it, creating a cognitive jolt that resolves into laughter.

Kant described this as "an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." He even offered a joke to illustrate it: An heir, complaining about the arrangements for a grand funeral, laments that the more money he gives the hired mourners to look sad, the merrier their faces become. For Kant, humor didn't offer the brain anything profound; it was simply a light, quick pleasure, a playful agitation of the mind.

Humor Now: Irony and Its Anxieties

So why is there so much humor today? We might look to the cultural dominance of postmodernism, with its deep-seated irony toward all grand narratives, traditions, and values. Where modernism was deeply serious, postmodernism is an endless game of quotation and jest. Even our most revered mythologies are not safe; superheroes and gods are reimagined with human flaws and absurdities.

This has given rise to new forms, like meta-irony, which deconstructs the very form of the joke itself. The humor arises not from a clever punchline but from a deliberate and complete absurdity that shatters our expectation that a joke should make logical sense at all.

At the same time, the ethics of humor have become a battleground. We are constantly debating the cancellation of comedians, not just for their personal actions, as was the case with Louis C.K., but for the content of their jokes. The conflict is clear: on one side, many argue that jokes reinforcing racial, gender, or other harmful stereotypes perpetuate real-world harm. On the other side, opponents decry what they see as a new totalitarianism where one can no longer joke freely. Supporters of "new ethics" counter that an insult doesn't stop being an insult just because it's labeled "a joke."

This brings us to a difficult question: Are there forbidden topics for humor? Or can anything be a target for laughter? Perhaps in wrestling with this question, we find the true, evolving nature of humor itself—a force that not only helps us cope with the world but also forces us to confront what we truly value within it.

References

• Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). This foundational text argues that laughter is a purely social and human phenomenon, intended to correct rigid or mechanical behavior in individuals. Bergson posits that the comic requires a "momentary anesthesia of the heart" and arises from observing human actions that resemble the inflexibility of a machine. It directly supports the article's discussion of humor as a product of culture rather than nature.
• Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). In this work, Freud applies psychoanalytic theory to humor, proposing that jokes serve as a way to release repressed sexual and hostile psychic energy in a socially acceptable manner. This release provides a sense of pleasure and relief. The book is the primary source for the "Relief Theory" of humor discussed in the article, explaining why taboo subjects are so often the focus of comedy.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (written in the 1930s, published 1965). Bakhtin introduces the concept of the "carnivalesque" and the culture of folk humor in medieval and Renaissance society. He describes carnival laughter as a force that temporarily dissolves social hierarchies and liberates people from the oppressive seriousness of official culture. This reference supports the section on "laughter culture" as a form of utopian escape and social critique. (Key concepts are developed throughout, especially in the Introduction and Chapter 1).