The lesson of laughter

In Kelley L. Ross's review of The Morality of Laughter, by F.H. Buckley, he notes something interesting. Kant has the same theory of laughter as my own initial conception of humour. I first thought about what humour was when I was a child, listening to jokes and wondering why the punchlines should make me laugh. What I came up with was that the punchline involved a surprise incongruity that struck the listener and made him laugh. When I was in high school, my drama teacher at the time proposed this exact same theory of humour. The joke began with the setup of an expectation in the listener, and the expectation was thwarted with the presentation of a surprise incongruity. Hence, humour shows that life is filled with incongruities.

Now I have read in Ross's review that Kant has an incongruity thesis of laughter as well. He does not elaborate on what it is, but the fact that the word "incongruity" was used led me strongly to suspect that it was my own thesis as well. I Googled the words "Kant laughter incongruity", and found an essay titled "Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity" by John Marmysz. This essay confirms that in Kant's Critique of Judgment, he indeed espouses a thesis of laughter the same as my own:

Kant claims that when we laugh at a jest, our understanding forms an expectation which it eventually finds mistaken, and as this expectation disappears into nothing, a "slackening" of the mind occurs which is transmitted to the bodily organs and experienced as laughter.

Ross's own thesis is that laughter protects us from the pain of life. This is why laughter is always at defects, whether that laughter is cruel, moral or affectionate. If the laughter is cruel, then the laughter could be at a person's physical deformity such as a hunched back, or at something physically unattractive about the person such as a big nose. If the laughter is moral, then the laughter would be at a moral defect, as is the case with social satire. If the laughter is affectionate, then the laughter might be good-natured laughter at a friend for some peculiarity, mannerism or faux pas, or the exaggeration of someone's mannerisms, as in a celebrity impersonation of John Wayne. John Wayne's mannerisms begin not as a defect, but as a mere deviation from the norm. But the humour in the impersonation of John Wayne comes from the exaggeration of those mannerisms to the point where they have become a defect (read: peculiarity). This thesis of laughter subsumes Kant's incongruity thesis, because Kantian incongruities can be seen as logical defects, or paradoxes, which explain the humourous incongruity of the punchline of a joke. Hence really, laughter teaches us always to look on the bright side of life.