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Sigmund Freud transferred life's basic contradiction to the depths of the human psyche. There, he said, the conflict between the strong animal drives of the Id (nature) and the "civilizing" instructions of the Ego and Super-Ego (culture) bubbles up disguised in forbidden humor, such as jokes about sex and hostility. We laugh, Freud believed, at having successfully eluded the censor. We laugh, too, out of sheer relief because the enormous energy repressed in the Id is thus given vent.
Inappropriateness. From the works of these and other theorists, Philosopher Monro has distilled a list of ten occasions or circumstances that are likely to produce laughter: 1) any breach of the usual order of events (eating with chopsticks when one is accustomed to spoons); 2) any forbidden breach of the usual order (belching in public); 3) indecency; 4) importing into one situation what belongs in another (the drunk in church); 5) anything masquerading as something it is not (two men in a horse costume); 6) wordplay; 7) nonsense; 8) minor misfortunes (the man slipping on a banana skin); 9) any shortage of knowledge or skill (the paperhanger tangled up in his paper); 10) veiled insults (Wife: To you, marriage is just a word. Husband: It's more than a word, it's a sentence).
From his list, Monro selects a few principles that may apply to all forms of humor. One is freshness or surprise, an element so necessary to laughter that, as Milner points out, no joke seems as funny in the second telling. Equally important is inappropriateness: "the linking of disparates, the collision of different mental spheres, the obtrusion into one context of what belongs in another." Writes Monro: "We must realize how much of our thinking really is controlled by stereotypes and conventions."
In the end Monro, like most others before him, concludes that lists and theories can tell us scarcely more than what we laugh at and when, and then only imprecisely. They do not tell us why. For, like a joke, the human gift of laughter defies analysis. To track it to its source is to make it disappear.