At the core of every humor event is a humor kernel – the thing that makes humor humor. According to Clash Theory, a humor kernel is present every time there is humor and not present every time there isn’t.
What is this mysterious thing?
Whatever it is that explains all humor must be present in its simplest forms. Among the simplest are jokes told by children. Let’s begin with one of these.
For the moment, set aside sophisticated humor conceptions (surreal, sarcasm, irony, meta-humor, anti-humor) and consider only the humor perspective of a young child. We’re looking for humor at its most rudimentary.
Q. What is a ghost’s favorite food?
Within jokes, the sensation of humor is generally concentrated at the delivery of the punchline. Here it is.
Q. What is a ghost’s favorite food?
A. Boo-toast.
As children know, a ghost makes the sound ‘boo’, and ‘toast’ is a type of food. Together they make boo-toast. This works as an answer to the question, and it’s also unreal nonsense – even a child would recognize that ‘boo-toast’ has just been made up. The question and answer clearly take the form of a joke. The answer is unexpected, incongruous and suddenly revealed. We appear to have all the necessary components for the creation of children’s humor. But it’s not funny.
Let’s try again:
Q. What is a ghost’s favorite food?
A. Boo-berries.
All of the elements here are identical to the previous joke, except that ‘boo-berries’ is recognizable as children’s humor while ‘boo-toast’ is not. What explains the difference? The difference is revealed with a single word – a word that’s not even mentioned. That word is ‘blueberries’. ‘Boo-berries’ counts as humor only because of the existence of the word ‘blueberries’. The spark of humor is some mental comparison between the nonsense of ‘boo-berries’ and the sense of ‘blueberries’, and with ‘boo-toast’ alone a similar kind of mental comparison does not occur.
This then is the secret. This is the single factor present in this example and in all humor examples, and not present in everything that isn’t humor. Humor is the clash between sense and nonsense. Making humor requires more than just nonsense. There must also be a contrasting ‘sense’ – a mental word or image or thought that lines up with the nonsense, as the word blueberries lines up with boo-berries. Humor does not happen without some kind of nonsense, some kind of sense, and some kind of mental comparison between them.
But words like ‘contrast’ and ‘comparison’ aren’t strong enough to explain the experience of humor. In every example of detected humor, a nonsense element and a sense element are attempting to occupy the same cognitive space. The resulting clash (boo-berries vs. blueberries) is vaguely similar to a computer’s divide-by-zero error. They don’t fit – there is a problem – it does not compute. The unsettling cerebral situation gets metaphorically kicked up to a higher level of processing where it can then be resolved, meaning subconsciously recognized as humor.
The ordinary terms sense and nonsense have broader meanings beyond humor. Clash Theory uses them more specifically to refer to the paired, clashing elements at the core of all humor.
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Why Funny Is Funny 