The Frog Test: A Tool for Measuring Humor Theories' Validity and Humor Preferences

For over a century multiple theoretical accounts proposed different sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing humorous from non-humorous stimuli. The theories ranged from Freud’s (1960/1905) expression of forbidden thoughts, superiority theories (e.g., Gruner, 2000), and benign violations (McGraw and Warren, 2010) to incongruity resolution (Suls, 1972), error detection (Hurley et al., 2011), and even purely neural accounts (Biederman and Vessel, 2006; Amir et al., 2015). Proponents of the different theoretical accounts often show a high degree of conviction, suggesting introspection might not be the best tool for judging the validity of humor theories. Other than introspection, two methods have been employed to test humor theories: content analysis and experimental approach. These methods have yielded much valuable insight, however they are imperfect. Content analyses examine a corpus of humorous stimuli in an attempt to determine whether the conditions for humor proposed by a theory are present in all corpus stimuli (e.g., Hurley et al., 2011). Unfortunately, the conditions proposed by many of the humor theories are too vague or abstract to allow a rigorous content analysis. Experimental approaches manipulate aspects of the joke and measure perceived funniness or its correlates (e.g., laughter, neural activity). Unfortunately, due to the complex, interdependent relationship between the elements of a joke, attempts to manipulate one element of a joke can result in a different joke on multiple levels. I would like to propose a third approach which, while likely not resolving the dispute, might yield distinct insights: “the frog test.” An oft-cited metaphor, paraphrased from E. B. White (White and White, 1941, p. xvii)1 proclaims: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” I would like to suggest, stretching themetaphor, that if the surgeon is competent the frog might survive. That is to say, if a theory explains with some accuracy why a particular joke is funny, such explanation might not reduce the perceived funniness of the joke to the same extent an entirely invalid theoretical explanationmight. That is because an invalid account would presumably distract its receivers’ attention away from the elements of the joke they found humorous in the first place. Taking E. B. White’s humorous metaphor as an example, the reason for its humorousness could be (among many other accounts):