Theories of humor and their levels

Abstract

There are three major families of theories of humor: humor as release, humor as aggression, and humor as incongruity. They are reviewed along with neurolinguistic approaches, evolutionary theories of humor and a few mixed and partial theories that have been presented. An argument is made for the complementarity of the theories, which described different but not incompatible aspects of the phenomenon. Finally, an approach to evaluating competing theories is presented and bisociation theory is compared to modern linguistic approaches.