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Apart from a biological perspective, humanity observes and conceptualises humour in various contexts, including psychological, semantic, computer modelling, philosophical, sexological, sociological, cultural and others. Some even refer to humour as a mystical experience.
Humour is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Originally, the word humour (Latin: humor) was used as a term for the balance of fluids in the human body, which controls a person's health and emotions (The Four Humours, 2004).
Overall, humour is more determined than laughter. Laughter is the reaction itself, the process once something amusing already happened. It is an instrument to transform the feeling into the action, a mechanical process involving contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system.
Mikhail Lomonosov in Doctrine about three styles put satire above comedy. In satire, sarcasm, irony in addition to trying to cause laughter, there are also additional goals, such as to teach morality or to draw attention to an existing problem. In this classification comedy is considered to be the in the lowest of three styles, while other folklore genres such as ditties, anecdotes weren’t even included. These genres were considered to be too vulgar since they focus too much on a human body. Citing Knight:
“The humour of medieval carnival, according to Bakhtin, relied on the way that the body makes a mockery of the lofty purposes of the mind. Buttocks, thighs, coughs, splutters, farts, ‘the bodily lower stratum’ – all mock the spiritual solemnities of humourless bishops and other supposed guardians of morality.”
While humour is considered to be focused around proper wording and words in general, not only words can provoke laughter. Henri Bergson in the work Laughter decomposes this phenomenon and tries to define the comic. He claims that “the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple” (Bergson, 1921: 5). So to laugh, first, humans need to disable empathy and become more rational.
Bergson believes that the reason for the comic is the mechanical inelasticity of people in certain situations:
“Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it rather to gestures. …the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching” (Bergson, 1921: 143).
This proves that comedy works on many levels besides semantic: linguistic, behavioural, psychological. “The comic person is unconscious” (Bergson, 1921: 16). This point is crucial for Bergson, since it leads to the more precise outline of the comical: it is a “game that imitates life” on every level, including mechanic, which is considered to be too inferior for drama (Bergson, 1921: 69).
He analyses human face and body from the comical perspective, and observes it in a poetic passage:
“…our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. ... Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism. ... Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic” (Bergson, 1921: 29).
This leads him to the conclusion: “deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter” (Bergson, 1921: 34). And another one: “Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement” (Bergson, 1921: 69).
In human body soul is the power which is shaping matter. But non-humanic bodies (mechanisms) also have a certain final form, perhaps not as advanced and sleek as living bodies. Is humanisation the only way to bring life into matter? What is the soul for mechanical?