Plato said, though a bit indefinitely, that the pleasure we derive in laughing at the comic is an enjoyment of other people’s misfortune, due to a feeling of superiority or gratified vanity that we ourselves are not in like plight.
This is called the Derision theory, and as assimilated and expressed by Aristotle comes near to impinging on and coinciding with his own Disappointment theory.
Moreover, he attempted to combine the two.
For, he said, we always laugh at someone, but in the case, where laughter arises from a deceived expectation, our mistake makes us laugh at ourselves.
In fact, Plato held, in his vague and indefinite statements that there is a disappointment element, a satisfaction element, and sometimes a combination of the two in the make-up of the thing we are calling Humor.
All of which is not very enlightening, but it is to be remembered that those were the first fluttering flights of imagination that sought to pin down the whole matter; yet among the scores that have followed, diverging in many directions, we must admit few, if any, are much more succinct or satisfactory.
The Derision or Discomfiture Theory holds that all pleasure in laughing at a comic scene is an enjoyment of another’s discomfiture. Yet it must be only discomfiture, not grave misfortune or sorrow.
If a man’s hat blows off and he runs out into the street after it, we laugh; but if he is hit by a passing motor car, we do not laugh. If a fat man slips on a banana peel and lands in a mud puddle, we laugh; but if he breaks his leg we do not laugh.
It is the ridiculous discomfiture of another that makes a joke, not the serious accident, and though there are other types and other theories of the cause of humor, doubtless the majority of jokes are based on this principle.
From the Circus Clown to Charlie Chaplin, episodes of discomfiture make us laugh. Every newspaper cartoon or comic series hinges on the discomfiture of somebody. The fly on the bald head, the collar button under the bureau, the henpecked husband, all depend for their humor on the trifling misfortune that makes its victim ridiculous.