To pp who are concerned or outraged or offended by the nature of this light hearted thread, please read the following extract from an article that highlights the value of humour:
“My first thought when I think about humour is it’s a great way for us to have evolved so we don’t have to hit each other with sticks,” says Scott Weems, a cognitive neuroscientist and author.
In his recent book, Ha! The science of when we laugh and why, Weems reviews a raft of academic studies, including those that have used scanning to show which parts of the brain respond when we encounter something funny. In the book, he posits a theory: essentially, that humour is a form of psychological processing, a coping mechanism that helps people to deal with complex and contradictory messages, a “response to conflict and confusion in our brain”.
This, in part, he says, is why we laugh in response to dark, confusing or tragic events that, on the face of it, shouldn’t be funny at all. Why, for example, would jokes circulate after 9/11 if we weren’t collectively grasping for ways to parse how unsettling and disruptive it was? Humour that is in bad taste or cruelly targeted at particular groups may generate conflict, but, for Weems, humour is our way of working through difficult subjects or feelings.
Over the years, researchers have built a substantial body of evidence that some types of comedy – including sophisticated satire, which is growing in popularity – perform a potent social function, from breaking taboos to holding those in power to account. Avner Ziv, who has written numerous books about humour, explores this theme extensively. As he writes in Personality and Sense of Humor, “comedy and satire possess a common denominator in that both try to change or reform society by means of humour. The two forms together constitute the best illustration there is of the social function of humour.”
www.bbc.com/future/article/20160829-how-laughter-makes-us-better-people