There are times when people laugh at jokes or at something they saw but as this happens there might also be other people around who do not find the humor in those jokes or in what they saw. To understand why this occurs I will be teaching a model. More specifically the Model of Individual Humor (Meyer, 2015). For this I will first explain what individual humor is. Then I will discuss the model of individual humor and in the end, I will provide an example of how people can interpret humor through this model.
To begin individual humor is about how each person individually sees humor. When humorous situations occur, people use affective and cognitive information to judge those situations (Meyer, 2015). This means that they use their feelings and the information they are familiar with to make a judgement that allows them to determine something as humorous or not. In addition to this Meyer (2015) mentions that humor can be explored by looking at what takes place in individuals minds when making the choice of what they will or will not find funny. Which simply means that people's minds have different perceptions that allow them to experience humor differently.
The model of individual humor itself involves several things. Meyer (2015) mentions that there is first an event, a phrase, or a broken life pattern which people can either see as funny or not. Then there is the intentionality of volition for which he mentions that people's ego involvement is what allows them to find humor or not. Meyer specifically mentions that people's ego involvement is based on who the source of the message is, what mood an individual is in, and the confidence that the individual has about the issue that occurred. For this he mentions that when people have a high ego involvement, they take the tragic mode but that if they have a low ego involvement then they take the comic mode. Meyer mentions that the tragic mode is when people do not find things funny because they are more concerned about the consequences of their actions and because they take things more seriously. However, he lastly mentions that the comic mode is when people take a playful approach through which they get pleasure from a pattern violation that lets them laugh.
An example of the model of individual humor is that I rarely clean around the house. When I do my parents point it out by making jokes and laughing. So, the event for them is that I grab a cleaning tool and the pattern violation is that they are not used to seeing me clean. When this happens, my parents have a low ego involvement because I am the source of the event. As for the mood, they are happy to see me clean. Then for the confidence they are confident that I will be cleaning which lastly leads them to take the comic path.
References
Meyer, J. C. (2015). Understanding Humor Through Communication: Why Be Funny, Anyway?. Lexington Books.
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