My Sense of Humo(u)r

I find things funny, pretty much in general.  Of course, I find many things funny only from a distance.  I would say the thing I find most funny is myself, I am in many ways a deeply silly person.

Why do people find things funny at all?  There a few theories well expressed here, but I think there is a common theme among these theories, humor happens when we have two quite different thoughts about the same thing.  Tickling causes many of us to laugh, and I think this is because we feel physically attacked (what is the physical difference between tickling and caressing?) and at the same time we know that the person tickling us isn't actually a threat.  Many jokes combine very serious issues (race, oppression, religion, parenting, social equality, politics) and at the same time a real quality of how silly these issues can be.  I think there is a difference between laughter and humour, I find things pretty much as funny alone as I do in company, but I laugh a hell of a lot more around other people than I do by myself.  Humor is a cognitive thing, laughter is a social thing.

That wasn't funny, and I'm not going to tell jokes here.  I am actually decent at telling jokes, I just never remember them.  Many people have a catalogue of jokes that they produce at moments to produce laughter.  I just don't remember jokes and I think that's because there are few things that are still funny after repeated exposure (Monty Python is an exception).

My sense of humor comes in three packages.  I find the lampooning of people very funny.  People taking themselves very seriously are inherently funny to me, and particularly if they are being incompetently serious.  Here's a great example.  The woman is really concerned about government but has no idea what she is saying.

I find saying really offensive things to (not at) people who know that I don't really believe whatever it is that was offensive.  I find songs about murder sung in a jaunty manner to be funny.

The final package is the most cruel and the most unusual.  When faced with a person saying something stupid or ignorant or awful I like to play a role.  I agree with them.  In fact I say something slightly more intensely stupid etc.  For as long as possible I try to move them further and further along this path until the other person finds themselves becoming uncomfortable with how far we have gone.  It is important to use the same internal "logic" as the other person.  Ideally the other person finds themselves trying to argue against me and therefore against there own position taken to its logical extreme.  If done well the other person has no idea what is going on, and my wife either stops me from getting beaten or doesn't give the game away.  Weirdly I don't like it when watching other people do this, I become embarrassed for the victim, unless the victim is "smart" enough to see what is going on.