Humor and Humorlessness

I don't spend much time around humorless people, because they usually scamper rapidly away from me. But I've recently found myself stuck with a couple such people (and them with me), observing something I'd noticed before: Humorlessness is something deeper. It stems from a profound cognitive shortcoming, and you can spot the issue even when humor's not involved.

For instance, people with a lousy sense of humor can't easily follow a line of thought when a minor chunk is missing or skewed. They don't fill gaps well. If you don't stick closely to a familiar conversational template, they get flustered. I'd bet, for instance, that humorless people would have more trouble than average with this sort of thing:

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When you throw a witticism into conversation, humorless people get momentarily baffled - the essential symptom of humorlessness. But it's not a matter of not getting the joke. The impasse arises before that point. They were thrown by the detour you'd taken to insert the humor ("Wait, what are you doing? Where are you going? Oh, you're joking. I see."). The humorless are stuck in a two-dimensional world of inflexible linearity and homogenous context, steadfastly unable to reframe. They're "square".

Reframing, by its nature, creates surprise, and surprising reframings are what humor is. "Humor", "surprise", "detour", "reframing"....all these terms point to the same phenomenon.

As I've frequently noted, most problems, at least in the First World, are not really problems. We build them out of thin air, nurture them with obsessive attention, and feel parental pride as they blossom. They’re like deranged art projects. If you analyze them with detachment, most sob stories inevitably boil down to "I thought X would happen, but Y happened, #FrownyFace." Rich World Problems are built from the raw material of surprise.

Humans viscerally fear surprise. We may find our status quo tedious and disappointing, but we'd defend it with our lives, because change and surprise are our deepest fears. Surprise is an unscheduled disruption of linearity and context. We prefer to stay "on track", no matter how crappy the track.

Aversion to surprise explains the widespread disconnection with our innate framing ability. We pretend we can't shift, electively freezing perspective. It's a terrible move, because frozen perspective is the root of depression, boredom, selfishness, and most other worldly tortures. 

And this creates an opportunity for those able to induce reframing to become messiahs.

The best comedians induce pleasurable bits of minor reframing. This is what makes them so highly valued by society (same for great actors, whose magnetism draws us into deep identification with their characters - the most common mode of passive reframing, accessible even for those with otherwise tightly frozen perspective). These are minor league Messiahs, plying an effective (though very limited) bag of reframing tricks.

When reframing shifts perspective, it changes mood, thaws frozenness, and dispels depression. And humor is a fundamental mode of reframing. We love comedy because it provides a safe, manageable dose of surprise; the thing we fear; the disruptor. Some of us seek out a stronger dose - "dangerous" comedy that "pushes the envelope". But it's all vaccination - titillating exposure to denatured wisps of The Worst Thing. It's a way to gingerly dip our toes back into our framing faculty.

Some of us, however, can't bear even that gentle reconnection.

People with a lousy sense of humor will have trouble passing a Turing test.

Those who obsessively joke all the time aren't creative, and aren't reframing. If that's where your attention constantly lives, you've simply created a new status quo for yourself, another unsurprising linearity. To be poetic about it, you're not breaking through if you live on the other side!

Many creative-seeming people are brutally non-creative. These are the ones who endlessly copy, and who repeat themselves. They're soulless simulacra posing as creative; two-dimensional beings faking a third dimension. They're the singers who became singers not because they want to sing but because they want to be singers.