going up a roller coaster to speeding down the hill or the sudden
unexpected twist in a joke. Anything that reduces tension is fun for
your Id.
Most jokes rely on introducing an inconsistency to produce
the tension and then resolving the inconsistency to reduce the
tension. The hunter joke is funny because “let’s make sure he’s
really dead” could mean check to see if your friend is okay or let’s
kill him. “Let’s kill him” is the tweak on the nose because it’s
unexpectedly absurd.
Contemporary humor researchers call this “incongruency”
and “resolution.”^6 Incongruency and resolution are the important
elements in all types of humor. Sometimes the incongruity can be
resolved completely (called incongruity-resolution humor) but in
nonsense humor there is a surprising or incongruous twist and the
punchline either provides no resolution at all or might even pre-
sent a new or absurd incongruity. Like this joke, from Jack Handy:
“If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because
maybe you’ll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you
because, hey, free dummy.”^7
The distinction between various types of jokes and
humor depends, in part, on the type of inconsistency and the
way the inconsistency is resolved. It depends on how we
close the gap of the inconsistency. How does this link with
sensation-seeking? Psychological researchers back in the
1980s used sensation-seeking to predict the kinds of jokes that
sensation-seekers are likely to enjoy.^8 They created a humor test
consisting of 50 jokes and cartoons which were rated on scales
for funniness and aversiveness (how annoying or embarrassing
jokes were was also rated). The kind of humor was also rated
(incongruity-resolution, nonsense, or sex). A total of 448 subjects
were involved. People who scored high in boredom susceptibil-
ity and experience-seeking didn’t seem to like humor in which
the punchline was easy to predict. They were more drawn to
nonsense humor, which is obviously illogical. It involves non
sequiturs or bizarre juxtapositions that often come out of
nowhere.Themoreabsurdthejokeandthemoreunpredictable
it is, the more these types of sensation-seekers tended to like
the humor. Why? Sensation-seekers prefer this kind of humor
because they can’t see the punchline coming. Those who get
bored easily can predict what the joke is going to be, they finish
it in their head and move on. The tension never gets built up51 / The Everyday Life of a High Sensation-SeekerDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:13, subject to the Cambridge