Whatever your humor preferences, you will find some humor examples
funnier than others. This is true even between jokes of the same type, with the same subject matter and told in a similar manner. Why is this? What accounts for some sense/nonsense clashes being perceived as qualitatively better?

For now, the focus is on kernel quality. Overall humor quality additionally involves Context and Culture elements described elsewhere.

Clash Theory proposes that kernel quality is a measure of intensity, and specifically a combination of resonance strength and clash strength.

An image or a word or an idea resonates intellectually and emotionally to the degree you are familiar with it, how easy it is to process mentally, how important you feel it to be, how interested you are in it, and how fundamental it is to your way of thinking. ‘Observational humor’ is built from familiar daily experience. Those who say “it’s funny because it’s true” are describing humor that resonates.

The strength of humor’s clash is driven by the closeness of the two elements. The closeness is both static and dynamic.

Static closeness measures kernel element similarity. This follows from what the elements are. When the elements are words, they look similar and/or sound similar. If they’re images, how close are the images. If they’re abstract or complex however, measuring static closeness becomes a tricky business.

Dynamic closeness means closeness in time. If the two elements are grasped far apart in time, then the clash is dynamically weaker. Dynamic closeness is driven in part by the method used to bring the clash into existence. According to Clash Theory there are three main methods. The first is presenting nonsense alone and leaving the corresponding sense unstated. In the second method, an element is introduced in two contexts at the same time. With the third method, context is switched to make what had been an ordinary sense element suddenly appear to be nonsense. These methods are reviewed more deeply within Context as part of the humor context component named Setup.

For examples of resonance, see Resonance Strength

For examples of static and dynamic closeness, see Clash Strength

Go back to the second Kernel component Humor Notes

Continue to the fourth and final Kernel component Kernel Spectrum